What’s new for designers, April 2015

April 13, 2015

In this month's edition of what’s new for designers and developers, we’ve included lots of new apps for design teams, new design tools, lots of web apps, learning resources, productivity resources, new frameworks, new mobile apps, and much more. And as always, we’ve also included some awesome new free fonts!

Almost everything on the list this month is free, with a few high-value paid apps and tools also included. They’re sure to be useful to designers and developers, from beginners to experts.

If we’ve missed something that you think should have been on the list, let us know in the comments. And if you know of a new app or resource that should be featured next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman to be considered!

Pexels Videos

Pexels Videos offers up completely free stock videos (released under the CC0 license) that you can use in any of your projects. You can browse by category or just see what’s new.

Genius Beta

Genius Beta is a project to annotate the internet. It lets you add context, commentary, and even images directly on top of any web page with your browser.

You’ve Got Gmail

Feeling nostalgic for the olden days of the Internet and the iconic “you’ve got mail” notification? You’ve Got Gmail is a Chrome extension that plays AOL’s old “you’ve got mail” sound whenever you get a new Gmail message.

Something Good to Read

Something Good to Read gives you a realtime reading list from your Twitter stream. It learns what you like to read, and then gives you a list of articles without any clutter.

Cuckuu

Cuckuu lets you turn your schedule and alarms into a social game. You can use words, pictures, and videos to make your cuckuus more appealing, and you get points when you shut off a cuckuu faster.

Gramforacause

Gramforacause connects Instagram photographers with non-profits and causes to help spread change.

Women Who Startup Podcast

The Women Who Startup Podcast celebrates, connects, and empowers women founders, women who code, women entrepreneurs, and women in tech. It’s co-hosted by Lizelle van Vuuren, the Founder and CEO of Effectively and Women Who Startup, and G. Krista Morgan, Co-founder and CEO of P2Binvestor.

Everlist

Everlist is a collaboration platform for product teams that helps you define your roadmap, assign tasks, and track hours. Just create cards for upcoming product changes, break cards down into tasks, and you’re on your way.

Adobe Comp CC

Adobe Comp CC lets you create layouts using your iPad with natural drawing gestures. You can pull in assets like vector images and text styles, and use fonts from Typekit, and even instantly send your comps to Photoshop, InDesign, or Illustrator.

Wheelhouse

Wheelhouse is a collection of productized services from freelancers for your web projects. They do things like set up a Shopify store, optimize your website’s UX, and more, for flat rates.

The User Is Drunk

The User Is Drunk is a new UX testing service that does exactly what it says: For $500 per site, you’ll get a drunk tester reviewing your website, and an outline of where the website needed help, plus a screencast.

Niice

Niice is an inspiration and moodboard app that’s now available for iOS. You can save searches, swipe for inspiration, and sync your moodboards to your Niice account.

Tentative

Tentative is a new podcast about digital product design, hosted by Reda Lemeden and Kyle Fiedler. In their inaugural episode, they discuss Microsoft’s Project Spartan, Vivaldi, and the React.js conference.

Stripe Connect

Stripe Connect is a new offering from Stripe for marketplaces and platforms who need to get their users paid. If offers multi-party payments, full control, and it’s completely scalable up to billions of dollars per year in payments.

Square Cash

Square Cash now lets you use “$Cashtags” to get paid by anyone. Just give someone (or everyone, you can share it publicly) your $Cashtag and let them pay you

to[icon]

to[icon] is a series of icons released under Creative Commons Attribution license, so you can use them on personal and commercial projects. One particularly awesome icon set they offer is called “Fandom”, which incorporates images from a variety of movies and tv shows.

Napkin

Napkin makes it easy to design quick mockups right on your phone, much like you would on a napkin. It offers layer controls, resizable and editable elements, and a variety of editing controls.

Screenshot Builder

Screenshot Builder lets you create gorgeous images for your iOS App Store pages quickly and easily. It will export your screenshots to every resolution Apple requires and offers multiple layouts choices.

Responsive Report 2014

Responsive Report 2014, from Gridset, shows the state of the responsive web in 2014. It includes information about audience, challenges, emotional undercurrents, trends, and resources.

Ugly Email

Ugly Email is a Gmail extension that lets you see if email is being tracked before you open them. It indicates a tracked email with an “evil eye” icon, making it quick and easy to see which emails are being tracked.

Wires

Wires makes it easy to record your app ideas on the go, visually, with templates and buttons you’re already accustomed to. Sign up for early access.

BrightCaller

BrightCaller will call you every morning to motivate you and hold you accountable for reaching your personal goals. You get a dedicated caller, and you can use it to track your goals, receive weekly reports, and manage your calendar.

Hackr.io

Hackr.io lets you discover and share the best tutorials and courses for learning to program a huge variety of languages.

Brick by Brick

Brick by Brick is a free guide for building communities. It includes information on audience, seeding, engagement, email, promotion, moderation, recycling, value, and voice.

Code4Startup

Code4Startup lets you learn to code by creating real life projects. You’ll learn things like Rails, HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, and more, by cloning apps and websites already out there.

The News 2

The News 2 brings together the latest news from Designer News, Product Hunt, and Hacker News, all in one place.

Skit

Skit is a pure JavaScript frontend for building web clients. It works with zero configuration, includes automatic static resource bundling, and features nearly 100% shared server and client-side code.

RocketClub

RocketClub lets you discover cool new startups, sign up to help promote startups and give feedback, and then when the startup is sold or goes public, you can share in the profits.

User Engagement Calculator

This User Engagement Calculator lets you figure out how much engaged users are worth to your business. Just answer a few questions about your users and get a dollar figure.

#Launch

#Launch is a community of like-minded makers, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs that was founded in 2006 and has recently re-launched. It started out as a secret community of 20 members that spawned 5 Y-Combinator founders, a Thiel Fellow, and dozens of startups, but now you can join.

UXTree

UXTree offers video courses for designers that help you build better products. Some courses are free, and some are paid.

Twitter: Through their eyes

Twitter: Through their eyes lets you see the Twitter feeds of famous startup investors and entrepreneurs, so you can see what they see on Twitter.

Messenger

Facebook Messenger finally has a dedicated web app. The UI is similar to the mobile apps, and allows you to keep Facebook’s messages function open on your computer without loading Facebook itself, great for when you want to keep a conversation going without all the temptations of the rest of the site.