5 brilliant tools for web design and development

If you've had a quiet time of it these last 12 months, then well done you, because the rest of us were sweating just to keep up with the base rate of change online. HTML5 has reached critical mass, responsive development continued to barrel along at full tilt, then there's audio APIs and WebGL…

Thankfully, the degree of change correlates positively to the problem-solving efforts of the developers and designers everywhere, dug into their respective specialities.

Foundation 3

Price: Free

Responsive design seems to have gone from zero to about a thousand miles an hour in no time flat. And things are still changing fast enough that small development shops are hard-pushed to stay up to date, let alone conduct their own R&D. That's where Foundation 3 comes in.

Developed by ZURB, an agency with the resources and experience available to throw at the responsive problem, Foundation 3 can act as a blueprint for your own projects, a rapid prototyping tool or even as an object lesson in how to address some of the web's must current issues.

Dreamweaver CS6

Price: From £344.32

Fluid layouts, CSS3 transitions and enhanced PhoneGap support lead the charge in the latest update to Adobe's web design all-rounder. There's no denying that Dreamweaver CS6 hits the ground running.

The problem which Dreamweaver has always had is the difficulty of balancing it's across the board functionality with the need to keep out of the user's way. CS6 actually manages this pretty well.

Cloud9 IDE

Price: Free/$12 per month Premium

This year the browser-based IDE finally came of age with a number of promising projects offering fully-featured apps which make collaborating from anywhere on even large-scale projects. Among these, Cloud9 has the edge.

The code editor is very usable. Code completion, smart drag and drop document trees, FTP integration and all that, but it's the connectivity which makes Cloud9: If a team are hacking the same file, each user is identified by their own coloured cursor. A chat module closes the feedback loop.

Sencha Touch 2

Price: Free

There's no denying that the mobile/touch device has changed web development for good. It's a broader, more heterogenous world out there and everyone wants a piece of the action. Sencha Touch 2 aims to put that dream within reach of HTML5 developers.

An improved API, stronger docs and training materials as well as firmed-up native integration with many leading devices all make Sencha Touch 2 a serious contender for the mobile development framework of choice. There is a learning curve but, since Sencha aims to be an end-to-end package, at least there's only one slope to climb.

Brackets

Price: Free

You'd think by now that the concept of the code editor would be pretty mature. There's so many out there and they're all so similar it's easy to imagine that the final blueprint has been found. Brackets shows that even at this level there's plenty of possibilities left to explore.

The central goal for Brackets seems to be a removal of all the repetitive little tasks we fold into the development process. Browser reloading, editing an element's CSS, function searching. Full credit to those involved because, even at beta stage, Brackets is refreshingly good to use. Check out their YouTube channel.