Open Source Resources for Web Application Developers

Remote Preview allows you to preview any URL on large number of mobile devices simultaneously. Just enter a URL, hit Enter, and new URL gets automatically loaded on each device. It works on platforms like Android, Blackberry, iOS, Maemo, Meego, Symbian, Windows Phone and WebOS. It was built for the Helsinki Device Lab for fast site previewing.

Remote Preview works by making an ajax call every 1100ms to check if the url in the ‘url.txt’ file is changed. If it is, the script will then change the src attribute of the iframe and load a new page into it. If there’s no changes, the script will just keep polling the url.txt until something changes. Remote Preview allows very fast previewing of different URL’s to check for possible layout problems, which can then be debugged using various other tools depending on the platform where they occur.

Requirements: jQuery Framework
Demo: http://viljamis.com/blog/2012/remote-preview/
License: License Free

Apaxy is a customisable theme built to enhance the experience of browsing web directories. It uses the mod_autoindex Apache module—and some CSS—to override the default style of a directory listing. It is similar to h5ai.

Apaxy may be basic, but it gives you a great deal of creative freedom when styling your directory. You can make it pop with Javascript or jQuery. You can also add welcome messages, download instructions or copyright notices. Best of all, you can add custom mime type icons.

Requirements: Apache
Demo: http://adamwhitcroft.com/apaxy/
License: License Free

Heyoffline.js is warns your users when their network goes down. In order to make sure they don’t lose anything. Heyoffline.js is framework-agnostic. No need for jQuery. It’s written in CoffeeScript, and compiled into JavaScript. Heyoffline.js is released under an MIT License, so do with it what you will.

Requirements: JavaScript Framework
Demo: http://oskarkrawczyk.github.com/heyoffline.js/
License: MIT License

CSSrefresh is a small, unobstructive javascript file that monitors the CSS-files included in your webpage. As soon as you save a CSS-file, the changes are directly implemented, without having to refresh your browser.

When you’re coding a website, nothing can be more frustrating than having to switch from the texteditor to the browser over and over again, just for small changes to occur. With CSSrefresh installed, all the included stylesheets are automatically refreshed directly after you save them. Using CSSrefresh is easy. You can either include the javascript-file in your webpage, or use the bookmarklet.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://cssrefresh.frebsite.nl/
License: MIT, GPL License

PayPal alone blocks access from over 60 countries, and many credit card companies have similar restrictions. Some are blocked for political reasons, some because of higher fraud rates, and some for other financial reasons. Due to this reason, WordPress has recently accept Bitcoin as one of the payment methods.

Bitcoin is a digital currency that enables instant payments over the internet. Unlike credit cards and PayPal, Bitcoin has no central authority and no way to lock entire countries out of the network. Merchants who accept Bitcoin payments can do business with anyone. Bitcoin is open-source. Nobody owns it; the most popular client is maintained by a community of open-source developers.

Bitcoin verifies transactions with the same state-of-the-art encryption that is used in military and government applications. Using the Bitcoin network is free, except for a voluntary fee you can use to speed up transaction processing.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://www.weusecoins.com/
License: MIT License

Edge Inspect is an application for web developers and designers who are working on mobile web projects. Edge Inspect enables you to work more efficiently by providing synchronous browsing, remote inspection and the ability to take screenshots of your mobile web content from connected devices.

Web developers and designers struggling with how to preview mobile web content. Edge Inspect enables you to work faster and more efficiently by streamlining the preview and inspection of websites for mobile devices. It also allows you to easily pair multiple smartphones and tablets with your computer and customize designs for different form-factors in real time.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://html.adobe.com/edge/inspect/
License: License Free

Nitro is the best way to organize with it’s speed, simplicity and power. With innovative features such as smart lists and magic sort, you can keep your life organized and focus on what needs doing. It’s also totally free.

Nitro can sync with Dropbox or Ubuntu One. You can easily access your tasks from any computer and you’ll never get a conflicted copy. Nitro also creates a todo.txt file so you can see or embed your tasks in plain text. Nitro is available for a variety of platforms, includes Mac, Chrome, and Linux. Nitro is free open source software under the BSD License. You can get it on Github.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://nitrotasks.com/
License: BSD License

Uptime is a simple remote monitoring utility using Node.js and MongoDB. You can monitor thousands of websites at the same time. You can tweak frequency of monitoring on a per-check basis, up to the millisecond. You will receive instant web alerts on every page when a check goes down.

You can monitor availability, responsiveness, average response time , and total uptime/downtime. You can get details about failed checks, Group checks by tags and get reports by tag. There is complete API for integration with third-party monitoring services. And it’s easy to install with zero administration.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://fzaninotto.github.com/uptime/
License: License Free

TinyPNG uses smart lossy compression techniques to reduce the file size of your PNG files. By selectively decreasing the number of colours in the image, fewer bytes are required to store the data. The effect is nearly invisible but it makes a very large difference in file size!

PNG is useful on the web because it’s the only widely supported format that can store partially transparent images. The format uses compression, but the resulting files can still be large. Use TinyPNG to shrink images for your website. It will use less bandwidth and load faster.

Requirements: -
Download Link: http://tinypng.org/
License: License Free