The July edition of what’s new for web designers and developers includes new web apps, JavaScript resources, iOS 7 development tools, responsive design tools and frameworks, icons, e-commerce solutions, image apps, 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.

Froont

Froont lets you design websites right in your browser, using a simple drag and drop interface. This lets you see your site exactly as your visitors will.

jQuery CollagePlus

jQuery CollagePlus is a jQuery plugin that arranges your images to fit exactly inside a container. You have control over padding between images, the target row height, and CSS borders, and the plugin handles the rest.

Thincons

Thincons is a $7 set of icons inspired by iOS7. There are 77 icons in all, and you can get a sampling of them in exchange for a Tweet if you don’t want to pay for the full set.

gridr buildrrr

gridr buildrrr is an easy-to-use grid creator with just enough options. Specify the number of columns, the column width and margins, and any draggable boxes you want to include, and let gridr buildrrr do the rest.

Tabulous.js

Tabulous.js is a jQuery tabs module that offers a number of transition options, including scaling, sliding, and more. Implementation is quick and easy, with full documentation.

Opa Framework for JavaScript

The Opa Framework for JavaScript makes it simple to simultaneously write frontend and backend code in the same language, in the same module. It’s fully compatible with all standard JS libraries, includes database automation, and has HTML5 native support among other features.

Golden Ratio Typography Calculator

The Golden Ratio Typography Calculator is a simple tool for creating better typography. Just enter your font size and content width, as well as an optional CPL (characters per line), and get a number of typographic recommendations.

Gumroad

Gumroad makes it simple to sell any digital (or physical) goods online. Just upload your files, style your sales page, and get selling. Gumroad handles your payment processing, and charges just 5% per transaction.

Notism

Notism is a fast, simple, effective way for teams to collaborate on visual content. It includes tools for sketching and commenting, allows you to create interactive prototypes, and even has project management capabilities.

Style Guide Boilerplate

This Style Guide Boilerplate is geared toward designers and developers who want to roll their own frameworks to handle common components they use between projects.

AOL Reader

Need an alternative to Google reader? Check out AOL Reader. You can sign in with your AOL, Facebook, Google, or Twitter account to request access to the beta version. The app’s layout is customizable, and it offers the ability to import your RSS subscriptions in standard OPML format.

Webfonts Corner

Webfonts Corner is a showcase of web fonts in use on sites around the web. It’s a fantastic place to go for typographic inspiration.

Square Market

Square Market is a new ecommerce solution from Square. It costs nothing extra over the regular cost of Square payment processing, and the storefronts provided are modern and well-designed.

Gridism

Gridism is a responsive grid system that’s simple and easy to use. It stacks grid units on mobile device screens, and scales up to 978 or 1140px (your choice).

iOS 7 GUI PSD

This iOS 8 GUI PSD from Teehan+Lax includes GUI elements found in the beta 1 release of iOS 7. The PSD is well-organized, labeled, and layered, with editable shape layers, great for mocking up apps.

Automaton

Automaton is a task automation tool written in JavaScript. Just set up an autofile describing what you need done, and even have one autofile use another autofile for even more complex tasks.

File-type icon set

Building a web app? Then this free, open source file-type icon set from Teambox might be just what you need. It includes icons for a ton of different file types, including TXT, RTF, WAV, MP3, XLS, CSS, HTML, DOC, PDF, AVI, SQL, and many more.

Later.js

Later.js lets you define complex schedules and quickly calculate future or past schedule occurrences. It works client-side or with Node.js.

Clipping Magic

Clipping Magic makes it simple to remove the background from your images. Just mark the foreground and background of an image and Clipping Magic’s algorithm takes care of the rest.

The Secret Handshake

The Secret Handshake is an educational resource for young and student designers looking for inside tips on how to break into the industry. There are sections on resumes, the application process, and creating a portfolio.

Macaw

Macaw gives you the flexibility of an image editor, but writes semantic HTML and succinct CSS, so you can draw your code rather than write it. It’s not available yet, but you can sign up to be notified when it is.

Topcoat

Topcoat is a CSS framework for building clean and fast web apps. It includes a number of useful components, is themeable, and includes a PSD with all of the components in the code base.

AlloyUI

AlloyUI is a framework built on YUI3 and Bootstrap for creating highly scalabel web apps. It’s fully documented and includes tutorials for getting started.

Tactile Design Kit

This Tactile Design Kit can greatly improve conversations with your clients about how they want their website designed by providing an interactive, physical brainstorming tool. You can download it as a PDF, EPS, or AI file.

DevDocs

DevDocs is an API documentation reader with a consistent, organized interface. You can look through documentation for HTML, CSS, DOM, JavaScript, jQuery and more, all from a single place.

Core Circus ($84)

Core Circus is a layered type family of eight 2D typefaces that can be combined for 3D effects.

Shelley (free)

Shelley is a free decorative novelty font reminiscent of vintage signage.

Anarchy (free)

Anarchy is a distressed display font that’s free for personal use. A commercial license is available for $15.

Monstrinhos ($12)

Monstrinhos is a dingbats font made up entirely of monster characters and related images. It’s a fun, wacky font with lots of possibilities.

Haext (free)

Haext is a rustic, neo-Gothic, Art Nouveau-inspired typeface that has definite runic and craftsman influences.

High Tide (free)

High Tide is a geometric display typeface with a very modern, unique look.

Klinic Slab (name your own price)

Klinic Slab is a slab serif typeface that comes in four weights (with italics for each). It’s a workhorse font that’s very functional while also having a distinct personality.

Cellos Script (free)

Cellos Script is a formal script font that’s free for personal use. There’s a commercial license available for $59.

Alianza ($133)

Alianza is a complex typographic system that includes three complementary styles: slab, script, and italic, with nine weights in each. There are also three sets of ornamental fonts included.

Quirky Nots (free)

Quirky Nots is a free handdrawn display font with a clumsy but whimsical feel.

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

eBook: SEO in Practice – only $5.95!

If you discover a source of information that search engines don’t already cover, filling the gap is not always straightforward.

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

User interfaces made for movies http://depot.ly/mR0It

Anežka makes some beautifully traditional illustrations http://depot.ly/mR2nk

How to Use Visual Hierarchy and Website Layout to Emphasize Your Message http://depot.ly/mR2ia

Eye-candy design studio: PalauGea http://depot.ly/mR27B

“Game of Thrones” characters crash the 80′s fashion http://depot.ly/mR0YK

If Kerouac wrote JavaScript (and Dr Johnson wrote CoffeeScript) http://depot.ly/mR0Do  *A very cool article by @angustweets

Make a guess: these are the 10 typefaces every design studio should own http://depot.ly/mR0xS

The editors of @alistapart have created a Summer Reading Issue full of Responsive, UX, Design & more! http://depot.ly/mQZLz

Let’s laugh http://thecodinglove.com

The Almanac is “Complete” http://depot.ly/mPBk0

Design Dilemma: Negotiating Logo Copyright Issues http://depot.ly/mPBd6

20 Helpful Video WordPress Themes http://depot.ly/mPB8j

Adobe launches ‘Anywhere for Video’ service http://depot.ly/mPybn  via @CreativeBloq

Haunting Black and White Portraits of Homeless People by Lee Jeffries http://depot.ly/mME5T

Beautifully crafted paper artworks and graphic design by Happy Centro http://depot.ly/mMDM6

VideoElephant Wants To Be The iStockphoto Of Pre-Packaged Professional Video Content http://depot.ly/mMEnt

Awesome illustrative object series by Kevin Leung http://depot.ly/mMDBm  via @LLGDfeed

Inspiring Interview with David Pache of Helvetic Brands http://depot.ly/mKo3Q

FYI Monday: Stunning Gig & Movie Posters by Ken Taylor http://depot.ly/mKnYH

20 top freelancing tips – interview by @CraigGrannell via @netmag – http://depot.ly/mKnDG

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

Magical Photo Restoration App for Windows and Mac – only $9.97!

Memory management is a fairly crucial part to building JavaScript web applications, and just because the language has a garbage collector it doesn’t absolve you from all duties.

Take your classic controller (or view in Backbone land). In its constructor it may bind to some model events, perhaps re-rendering itself when a record changes. You’ll need to clean up these events listeners at some stage, especially if you’re constantly instantiating and removing the controller.

Backbone and Spine have a ‘remove’ method which, behind the scenes, will remove the controller from the DOM via jQuery. Backbone will even cleanup any event handlers using it’s Event.fn.listenTo feature. However, calling this manually whenever we want to remove a controller is a bit onerous, and means we can’t use features like jQuery.fn.html() to remove controllers. We somehow need to detect when the controller’s element is removed from the DOM.

It turns out that jQuery already has a form of this event listener cleanup, $.cleanData(). Whenever an element is removed from DOM, such as by replacing its parent’s HTML, it’s passed through this function to strip jQuery’s event handlers.

We can tap into this existing feature to fire our own remove event whenever a element is removed from the DOM. We can then listen to this event in our controller and do any cleaning up required.

Rather than override $.cleanData(), we can just define our own special event:

jQuery.event.special.remove = {
      remove: function(e) { 
        if (e.handler) e.handler(); 
      }
    };
    

Here we’ve defined an event named remove which, when processed by $.cleanData(), will be triggered.

The last step is to bind to this event in our controller:

var Controller = function () {
      this.$el = $('<div />');
      this.$el.on('remove', this.release);
    };
    
    Controller.prototype.release = function () {
      // Cleanup data
      // this.model.off('change', this.render);
    };
    

That’s all there is to it! Now whenever the controller’s element is removed from the DOM, release will invoked and our event listeners cleaned up.

This is an article in the ongoing series about Monocle.

Big Dreams Meet Big Opportunity.

Daly City doesn�t get as hot as Baltimore, says Perry Ogwuche, a rising senior majoring in computer science and mathematics. This is the first time he has been to California, but he�s not there on vacation. Ogwuche and Randi Williams �16, computer engineering, are spending their summer hard at work as members of the second class of CODE2040 fellows.

CODE2040 is a fellowship program designed to help black and Latino students advance their careers as technology professionals. �Just taking CS [computer science] classes is not enough to build a career in Silicon Valley, New York and some of these other tech hubs,� says Amy Schapiro, manager of program operations at CODE2040. �The industry is looking for people that show a lot of initiative and passion for their work.�

The program focuses on black and Latino talent because there is a visible lack of proportional representation and diversity in technology companies. This is important, Schapiro says, because having a team with different perspectives can mean the difference between success and failure in developing solutions to complex problems.

As two of 18 CODE2040 fellows, Ogwuche and Williams put UMBC in a class with MIT, Carnegie Mellon and Stanford as the only universities to have more than one student receive this prestigious fellowship.

CODE2040 fellows work full-time in internships with some of the hottest startups in the San Francisco Bay Area and participate in special programming to promote their career development. Students visit companies such as LinkedIn and Google, and the program provides a speaker series, mentorship from industry professionals, and executive coaching on a group and individual basis. �What they get out of those resources by the end of the summer is a comprehensive view of the opportunities in the tech industry,� Schapiro notes.

“I wake up daily with a heart of gratitude toward the founders of the program,� says Ogwuche. �We’ve had the opportunity to meet so many inspiring leaders in the tech space, from high tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist Ben Horowitz to the founders of Dropbox and Piazza. I can�t imagine expanding my professional network on my own in such a short period of time.”

�It�s pretty cool,� says Williams. �We got to talk to the founder of DropBox. We get to have one-on-one conversations [with technology professionals] and they give us advice on things like how to start a business. It�s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.�

The internship is the most time-intensive component of the program. Ogwuche is working at Redbeacon, a technology firm that connects home-service professionals with job requests from homeowners. Ogwuche is a software engineer and spends his days writing code. �It�s definitely a learning experience,� he says, �I face some challenging problems, but I have a lot of resources and a lot of help.�

Williams is interning with Jawbone, a wearable device and audio technology company known for its noise-eliminating Bluetooth headsets. She is working in web development and maintaining the company�s server. In the process, she�s developing important skills, including learning to code in CSS, HTML and Python. But she says that what she likes most about the program is how it emphasizes giving back. Fellows participate in community service projects around the Bay Area and alumni continue to stay involved with the program as mentors.

What�s next? Williams, a Meyerhoff scholar and Center for Women In Technology (CWIT) affiliate, dreams of having her own company someday. Ogwuche�s plans are more immediate. He shares, �I�m looking forward to coming back and being an ambassador on campus for the CODE2040 program.�

UMBC students interested in applying for the CODE2040 fellowship in 2014 should visit the CODE2040 website.

(7/12/13)