The January edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, jQuery plugins and JavaScript resources, web development tools, responsive design resources, collaboration tools, coding resources, and some really great new fonts.

Many of the resources below are free or very low cost, and are sure to be useful to a lot of designers and developers out there.

As always, if we’ve missed something you think should have been included, please let us know in the comments. And if you have an app or other resource you’d like to see included next month, tweet it to @cameron_chapman for consideration.

Duo

Duo is a web browser that lets you view both mobile and desktop versions of responsive websites you’re designing. It’s available as a bookmarklet, or as a standalone Mac program.

TimeTracker

TimeTracker is a software-integrated time tracking app that offers automatic time capture, real-time analytics, and more. The free Basic account works with Adobe CS/CC, while paid accounts offer up additional software integration.

Coment.me

Coment.me makes it incredibly easy to comment or otherwise provide feedback on any URL. Just enter the website address, specify the width you’d like the page returned, and then comment, draw, or do whatever else you’d like before sharing the results.

Adaptive Backgrounds

Adaptive Backgrounds is a jQuery plugin for extracting colors from an image and applying those colors to the parent element. It’s an easy way to make your background match your images.

Layrs Control

Layrs Control is a free Photoshop extension to improve your workflow. You can edit layer names, remove unused effects, delete empty layers, and more.

Typing.io

Typing.io is a typing practice web app specifically for programmers, which will help you with mastering all those funky characters that appear in code but don’t show up in many other places.

A Pocket Guide to Master Every Day’s Typographic Adventures

This Pocket Guide to Master Every Day’s Typographic Adventures offers up excellent guidance for all sorts of typographic questions you may face on a daily basis, from how to mix typefaces to choosing font size and line height and much more.

Passweird

Passweird is a complex password generator that creates “utterly repulsive” passwords that no one would want to steal.

Unison.js

Unison.js is a small plugin (well under 1kb) that lets you declare named breakpoints in a single place and sync them automatically across both your JavaScript and markup files.

Origami

Origami is a Quartz Composer toolkit for design prototyping. It makes it easy to create interactive prototypes, without the need for any programming.

Myth

Myth is a preprocessor, like a CSS polyfill. It lets you write pure CSS without worrying about things like slow spec approval or slow browser support.

Social Kit

Social Kit is a Photoshop plugin for creating cover images, profile pictures, ad banners and more for your favorite social platforms, including Facebook, Google, Twitter, and YouTube.

Typecsset

Typecsset is a Sass library for setting type on the web, with an automatic, pixel-perfect, baseline grid that’s easy to use.

Readymag

Readymag is a simple web publishing tool for any kind of digital storytelling, from presentations to rich media magazines and microsites. It’s cross-browser compatible and doesn’t require any coding skills.

Writer Pro

Writer Pro is a professional writing suite that includes note-taking, writing, and editing tools. It’s under $20 for either OS X or iOS.

Planetary.js

Planetary.js lets you create fully customizable, interactive globes for the web. It includes tools for displaying animated “pings” anywhere on the map, along with mouse drag and zoom support.

Magnifier.js

Magnifier.js is a JavaScript library for creating a magnifying glass effect on your images. It includes zoom functionality using the mouse wheel, as well as the ability to display the magnified image within the lens or externally in a wrapper, among other features.

Color Thief

Color Thief is a script for grabbing the color palette from any image using JavaScript and the Canvas tag.

Picjumbo

Picjumbo is a collection of totally free stock photos that you can use for your personal or commercial works. There are a variety of categories to choose some, with more photos added every day.

The Best Freelance Tools of 2013

The Best Freelance Tools of 2013 is a curated collection of tools from the past year that are certain to be incredibly useful for designers and other freelancers. It includes tools for finding clients, dealing with money, remote communication, and more.

Dillinger

Dillinger is a cloud-enabled HTML5 Markdown editor that’s based on Ace Editor, Bootstrap, Marked, node.js, and more.

Pinegrow Web Designer

Pinegrow is an app for Windows and Mac that makes it fast and easy to mockup and design web pages with (or without) Bootstrap, multi-page editing, and Less.

Makeappicon

Makeappicon generates all the icon sizes you need for iOS and Android with just one click.

Black Tie

Black Tie offers a collection of free Bootstrap themes that are actually good-looking. There are themes for app landing pages, contact pages, and much more.

Really Simple HTML Email Template

This Really Simple HTML Email Template is an easy to use template for creating your own HTML emails. It can be used, modified, and copied as you wish.

Asfalto (free)

Asfalto is a free distressed display font designed by Fernando Forero. It comes in all caps, yet remains readable even at smaller sizes.

Hallo Sans (free)

Hallo Sans is a stylized sans serif typeface that comes in light, regular, and black weights.

Barokah (free)

Barokah is a free uppercase and lowercase display handwriting font that’s perfect for things like comic books. It comes in regular and bold weights.

Odin Rounded (free)

Odin Rounded is a free experimental font with a clean, linear look. It comes in three weights: regular, bold, and light, with support for opentype features.

Purbacala ($12)

Purbacala is an ornate, decorative typeface with a handdrawn look. It comes in inline, regular, and bold styles.

Love Hearts ($20)

Love Hearts is a set of calligraphic ornaments and frames, including patterns and seamless borders, all in OTF format.

Rodian Serif ($10)

Rodian Serif is a modern rounded font in six styles, revisited by Jan-Christian Bruun. It comes in light, regular, and bold weights, as well as three matching stencil weights.

Hadron ($10)

Hadron is a display typeface with two variants: a standard clean and clear sans serif, and an alternative with more pictographic letterforms.

Gluten ($16.48)

Gluten is an experimental font family with irregular shadows that portray craftsmanship, and high contrast between thick and thin strokes in the letterforms.

The Serif Hand ($25)

The Serif Hand is a handwritten serif typeface that is generic, highly readable, and well-balanced, so it’s versatile for any kind of design.

Know of a new app or resource that should have been included but wasn’t? Let us know in the comments!

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Every week we tweet a lot of interesting stuff highlighting great content that we find on the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of our tweets is simply to follow us on Twitter, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the best tweets that we sent out this past week.

Note that this is only a very small selection of the links that we tweeted about, so don’t miss out.

To keep up to date with all the cool links, simply follow us @DesignerDepot

Make, Do. http://depot.ly/ssrKX  *An inspiring article on achieving greatness by @brilliantcrank

Awesome interview with Invisible Creature on The @greatdiscontent – http://depot.ly/ssso2

Cool! RT @chadengle: Kickstarter’s Team page is awesome http://www.kickstarter.com/team  (drag right)

unroll.me/  helps clean up your inbox

Get started with logo design: 10-step guide http://www.creativebloq.com/logo-design/get-started-7112864 … via @BrushLovers

Bruce Springsteen, Woody Allen, and the long tradition of hating your own work http://depot.ly/sqdjt

Reinventing the wheel: A brief history of the circle as a visual metaphor for organizing information http://depot.ly/sqd38  *Interesting…

Sebastián Pino, the guy with a moustache http://depot.ly/sqcYd

Insights into responsive design and development http://depot.ly/snZ2C

XYplorer, the Alternative File Browser for Windows, is free once again http://depot.ly/snYOv

Brilliant visual identity by Bjorn Rune Lie for Soho based venue, Jackson + Rye: http://depot.ly/snVRV

Creative interview with illustrator Tuesday Bassen http://depot.ly/snSJL  via @designworklife

Why Netflix walked away from personalization http://depot.ly/sljyI

Must read: 50 Problems In 50 Days: The Power Of Not Knowing http://depot.ly/slhIc  via @smashingmag

On using white backgrounds http://depot.ly/slhh8

Tom Eckersley aka “Master of the Poster” http://depot.ly/slaOl

How Gmail Improved Security & Email Analytics by Caching Images http://depot.ly/siZdd

Want more? No problem! Keep track of all our tweets by following us @DesignerDepot

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Computer Science and Electrical Engineering
University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Ph.D. Dissertation Defense

Multi-Modal Saliency Fusion for Illustrative Image Enhancement

Christopher J. Morris

10:30-12:30, Wednesday, 15 January 2013, ITE 365 & 352

Digitally manipulated or augmented images are increasingly prevalent. Multisensor systems produce augmented images that integrate data into a single context. Mixed-reality images are generated from insertion of computer generated objects into a natural scene. Digital processing for application-specific tasks (e.g., compression or network transmission) can create images distorted with processing artifacts. Digital image augmentation can lead to the inclusion of artifacts that influence the perception of the image.

Visual cues (e.g., depth or size cues) may no longer be perceptually consistent in an augmented image. A feature deemed important in its local context may no longer be in the broader integrated context. Inserted synthetic objects may not possess the appropriate visual cues for proper perception of the overall scene. Finer cues that distinguish critical features may be lost in compressed images. Enhancing augmented images to add or restore visual cues can improve the image’s perceptibility.

This dissertation presents a framework for illustrating images to enhance critical features. The enhancements improve the perception and comprehension of the augmented image. The framework uses a linear combination of image (2D), surface topology (3D), and task based saliency measures to identify the critical features in the image. The use of multi-modal saliency allows the visualization designer to adjust the definition of critical features based on the attributes of the scene and the task at hand. Upon identification, the features are enhanced using a non-photorealistic rendering (NPR) deferred illustration technique. The enhancements, inspired by an analysis of artists’ techniques, bolster the features’ perceptual cues.

To measure the amount of similar salient features between the enhanced image and the original image, the framework describes the Saliency Similarity Metric (SSM). The SSM is feedback with which to make informed decisions to tune the visualization. The benefits of illustrative enhancement are analyzed using objective and subjective evaluations. Using conventional metrics, illustrative enhancements improve the perceptual image quality of images distorted by noise or compression artifacts. User survey results reveal that enhancements must be carefully applied for perceptual improvement. The framework can be effectively utilized in mobile rendering, augmented reality, and sensor fusion applications.

Committee: Drs. Penny Rheingans (chair), Dan Bailey, Jian Chen, Thomas Jackman (Desert Research Institute), Anupam Joshi and Marc Olano