New projects are released all the time that get us excited about the industry we work in. Each month we bring you a list of the very best free resources for the month ahead.

This month’s huge new list of diverse elements for designers and developers includes some fantastic freebies for mobile, web and print work; it includes cool scripts, awesome fonts, great ideas, and must-see experiments.

Whether you’re a designer, developer, or enthusiast we’re sure you’ll find something here to kick-start April with a bang!

Atom.io

Highly customizable text editor.

Campton

A modern and neutral type family.

jQuery TableNav

A jQuery plugin to navigate cells with arrow keys.

Bushwick

Lightweight theme for personal blogs.

Type-finder

An online tool to find an appropriate and reputable typeface for all your projects.

Shadowpainter

A tool to make animations using box-shadows.

Durandal

An SPA framework to create all kinds of apps.

RRSSB

A package of highly responsive social buttons.

Farray

An all caps font with strong characters for display.

iOS7 icons

A pack of 100 icons iOS app style icons.

Tiff

Web tool that helps you spot the differences between 2 Google fonts.

Glyphr Studio

HTML5 based font editor.

Lupercalia

Simple customized theme for WordPress.

jQuery.checkradios

Lightweight plugin to create checkboxes and radio buttons with no images.

Simple stack effects

Simple stack effects for inspiration and tutorial.

Disclaimer

A monospace display font in 2 styles.

isInViewport.js

Light plugin that detects if an element is within the viewport.

Sheetrock

jQuery plugin to retrieve and display data from Google spreadsheets.

Onetone

Simple onepage theme aimed at creatives and businesses.

Codemagic.gr

A web tool to create code experiments.

Plunker

An online community to create and collaborate in development projects.

YourBrowser.Is

A web tool that gives you a very complete report about your browser.

Novito Nova

A nice all caps font with Latin and Cyrillic character support.

Glitchy 404 Page

An original 404 template with a static screen background.

Flat preloaders

A set of colorful flat preloaders in various formats.

Radial menu

Nicely animated CSS radial menu.

Clear Sans

Modern and versatile font with good legibility.

Metalsmith.io

Pluggable static site generator.

MVCSS

Sass based CSS architecture to create maintainable application styles.

HTML5 banner

An animated interactive banner made in HTML5 and CSS3.

Csspinner

CSS loading animations with very little effort required.

ScrollMagic

A very complete jQuery plugin for cool scrolling animations.

F7

A powerful HTML framework for iOS 7.

Identity mockup

A realistic 3D mockup to show off your branding with style.

Fruithealth

A 2 column WordPress theme for health and nutrition sites.

Tabbar menu

An iOS7-like menu with nice animations.

Govpress

WordPress theme for government sites.

Linia

Modern theme for blogs.

Rotation & background experiment

An amazing experiment using only CSS and JS.

RegExr

Write and test regular expressions.

Vibration API

API for web pages to allow mobile devices vibrate.

Luzern

A modern sans serif typeface in 2 styles.

Movie app UI

A responsive interface best suited to showcase movies and similar.

Embed

A PHP service to embed any webpage or service.

Clip path carousel

Using clip-path to transition between carousel items.

Pikabu

A framework for flyout canvas panels.

Fait Main 1

Vintage handwriting font for headlines and badges.

McKinley

One column theme for bloggers.

Stickynavbar.js

A plugin to stick your navigation bars to the top of the browser.

Vintage badges

100 fully editable badges with a colorful retro style.

Learn from Usability Masters with Everyday UX – only $9!

Developers and designers are now building apps for Google’s smart watch platform.

The designers of the forthcoming Moto 360 hope they’ve passed a fashion test. In contrast to the often bulky and boxy smart watches released to date (see “Smart Watches Need a Makeover, and a Shrink Ray”), their device is sleek and perfectly round, evoking the style of a classic analog wristwatch.

It’s Tuesday, which means that the Treehouse Show is back! In episode 83 of The Treehouse Show, Nick and Jason (@jseifer) talk about a sweet new icon set, web shims for backporting functionality to previous browsers, and jQuery coding standards. They also bring out the usual bad puns and poor jokes.

This Week’s Links

• Iconic

• First Time User Experiences

• Webshim

• Wirefy

• jQuery Coding Standards and Best Practices

• Random User Generator | FREE Photoshop Extension

• ScrollMagic – Demo

• The Gamepad API ✩ Mozilla Hacks – the Web developer blog

The post Web Icons | Webshims | jQuery Coding Standards | The Treehouse Show Episode 83 appeared first on Treehouse Blog.

Through our PROMISE AGEP collaborations with the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), and the Student Platform for Engineering Education Development (World SPEED), you are being invited to apply for  MIT’s “Education DesignShop”  the sponsored by MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. The program is slated to employ “design thinking” and “user-centered design” to address three distinct topics:

1) Curriculum Re-Design for STE(A)M – Science, Technology, Engineering, (Arts), and Mathematics

2) Motivational Structures In & Out of the Classroom

3) Resources and Support Structures for Retention & Diversity

Slots are limited. This program is free. The leader of the program has asked that we encourage you to apply. They learned about PROMISE at the 2013 WEEF Conference in Cartagena, Colombia, and through meetings of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies.

This is a unique opportunity to “think outside of the box” and have some, new, and different experiences. Please apply:

http://edudesignshop.mit.edu/apply.html.

_________________________________

Related: 

About WEEF 2014: http://weef2014.org/

Through our PROMISE AGEP collaborations with the World Engineering Education Forum (WEEF), and the Student Platform for Engineering Education Development (World SPEED), you are being invited to apply for  MIT’s “Education DesignShop”  the sponsored by MIT’s Office of Digital Learning. The program is slated to employ “design thinking” and “user-centered design” to address three distinct topics:

1) Curriculum Re-Design for STE(A)M – Science, Technology, Engineering, (Arts), and Mathematics

2) Motivational Structures In & Out of the Classroom

3) Resources and Support Structures for Retention & Diversity

Slots are limited. This program is free. The leader of the program has asked that we encourage you to apply. They learned about PROMISE at the 2013 WEEF Conference in Cartagena, Colombia, and through meetings of the International Federation of Engineering Education Societies.

This is a unique opportunity to “think outside of the box” and have some, new, and different experiences. Please apply:

http://edudesignshop.mit.edu/apply.html.

_________________________________

Related: 

About WEEF 2014: http://weef2014.org/

What’s more fun than photo-bombing?

How about learning to build a mobile app that displays your favorite forays into photography mischievousness?

Not into photo-bombing? How about cute puppy photos? Family vacation shots? Your vast collection of selfies?

If so, guest teacher Sam Soffes has a course for you: Learn to build an iOS photo browsing app from scratch. You’ll discover invaluable skills that’ll help you in all your mobile development and design work.

If you’re interested in building this app or learning more about collection views and control transitions, sign up for a Treehouse account today. We’ll teach you from start to finish.

Check out the course preview.

Sam spoke with Treehouse this week about the course and the skills students will use. He also has insights on the benefits of collaborating on iOS apps, whether you should write pure code or use Interface Builder, and other important strategies to consider when you’re building your own photo-browsing app.

Treehouse: What are some of the important top-level skills students will learn while taking this course?

Sam: You’ll learn about collection views and using physics, and you’ll control transitions and networking. All that is important stuff, especially networking and collection views. Those are key. Almost every mobile app is connected to the Internet some way or another. Learning how to do that and understanding how it works is important.

Can you address why you didn’t use Apple’s Interface Builder and why it’s all code?

I wrote a post on the Treehouse blog a while ago on why I don’t use Interface Builder. And there are a bunch more reasons than I listed in my post. I think it’s important to understand how everything works and not just being told to click checkboxes here and there. Understand how it works by seeing the code. I thought it was important to show the other side of how to do it. It comes down to preference. This is how I prefer to work so that’s how I decided to teach the course if I were to build it for real on my own. Hopefully, it’s useful to watch that.

Someone said, “Oh, should I redo everything I’ve done in code now?” No, there’s no sense in redoing for the sake of redoing it unless you want to redo it for the sake of learning. It was more to show another approach of how to do things.

Does your approach make students better at learning mobile app development?

I think so. Almost everyone I’ve worked in my career has done it without Interface Builder and storyboards. This is a pretty common pattern. Most people prefer to not use it. It’s easier to work with a team without using storyboards or Interface Builder because code is easier to collaborate on than a crazy file from Apple.

Seeing how more real-world applications are built is important. That was my goal all along: Make something that is as close to a real-world application as possible and make something useful.

One of the ideas behind the course is this: “Let’s make this app together.” When is collaboration a good thing when developing an app, and when should you strike out on your own?

It depends on what you’re making. The key to working with someone else is having a good way to separate what everyone is working on: “This person is going to do all the networking stuff. And this person is going to do all the visual stuff.”

Having a clear understanding of responsibilities and separation makes things work a lot more smoothly than having everyone dive in and fight over the fun tasks. Split it up in a way that makes sense. That has worked well for me in the past.

What are the benefits to working on your own on mobile apps?

If you have an idea, you can just try it instead of worrying, “Will this slow anyone down because I am going to try some crazy stuff and I may break something?” It’s nice to have that freedom sometimes.

But if you’re working with someone else, one of the biggest benefits is it keeps you motivated. If you’re just working on some app by yourself on the weekends, it’s easy to get distracted or lose interest. Learning how to work well with someone else on mobile apps is an important skill to have, especially if you want to take your Treehouse skills and get a job. Learning how to work with a team is essential.

We’ve all heard the cliché: There’s an app for that. But there can’t be an app for everything — just yet. What are some offbeat or practical uses for which you’ve thought: “There should be an app for this!” or something that has sparked your imagination?

Recently, coming up with something that is good at scoring board games is something I’ve been thinking about. It’s kind of an obscure thing. Surely there is something for that, but I haven’t found anything that I was like, “This is awesome.” I was trying to think of a calculator that is more abstract for counting and not necessarily for doing actual math.

I think it’s interesting to think about something you’re doing that is tedious — like trying to count things on a board game or figuring out what kind of food you can eat on a particular diet. If it’s something you have to think about for a while, maybe you can make something to make [the process] better.

That’s usually my thought-process around any product that I want to work on: What’s something I’m struggling with and how can I make something to solve that?

The post Q&A With Sam Soffes: Learning How to Make an iPhone Photo-Browsing App appeared first on Treehouse Blog.