WWW… Wednesday! 5 Free and Useful Micro-Apps

by Margaret Penney | July 26, 2017

More and more micro applications are emerging to help designers and developers perform a variety of specialized and creative web design functions. Some speed up the site creation process, while others help you make informed choices about color, layout, and typography in your web design. In this article we look at some useful micro-apps that are free!

ColorDrop

ColorDrop is a refined collection of palettes curated by Tristan White. The app helps to take the guesswork out of coming up with color combinations that will work really well in web and mobile apps.

The interface makes the app simple to use as well, just scroll and click a palette, the HEX and RGB values will appear on the right-hand side.

Visual Center

Visual Center is a nifty tool that will find the visual center of an image. If you’re someone who does a lot of web production and cropping of images for placement online this is actually very useful and could be a big time-saver. It’s key that web images are cropped well. Visual Center makes this easier for people who may not have a natural eye for centering content or who aren’t experienced with cropping images.

Jpeg.io

Another useful tool for web production is Jpeg.io. Jpeg.io is a web-based tool that will convert any image format to a super optimized JPEG. Considering most website images are JPEGs this is quite useful. It’s also helpful for any blogger or web publisher on the go, who does not have access to the Adobe suite, for instance. It makes web-based publishing of both text and image content much easier.

Jpeg.io uses Kraken.io’s proprietary JPEG optimization algorithms, which are more effective than what one can find with other apps.

Random Keygen

Picking a very secure password can be difficult. Random Keygen provides a way to come up with great passwords simply and easily. At the site you can choose from memorable passwords, strong passwords, “fort knox” passwords plus a selection of keygens too. Seriously, you will never be at a loss for finding a password again. Now, if you could only remember them!

Site Auditor

If you’re starting the process of optimizing your site for search engines then Site Auditor is a great place to start to get an overview of what your site’s SEO status is and how to make some key fixes to improve your website.

One drawback of the app is that you have to login with a Google account. However, once you are logged in it provides a fairly streamlined analysis of issues with your website and breaks them down into categories, like: Need Attention, Warning and Critical. Fixing all the errors the app identifies is supposed to increase your site’s optimization score and improve the user experience and subsequent search engine rankings.

Margaret Penney is the Managing Editor of Notes on Design. Margaret is a teacher, designer, writer and new media artist and founder of Hello Creative Co.

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