PUBLIC MARKS with tags tools & web

Front-end development is a tricky beast. It’s not difficult to learn, but it’s quite difficult to master. There are just too many things that need to be considered; too many tweaks that might be necessary here and there; too many details to make everything just right. Luckily, developers and designers out there keep releasing useful tools and resources for all of us to learn, improve our skills and just get better at what we do. Such tools are valuable and helpful because they save our time, automate mundane tasks and hence help us focus on more important things.

Once a novel idea that seemed limited to Flickr, the web-based API is now everywhere you turn — Twitter, Foursquare, Google Maps and thousands of other sites offer up their data in the form of an API. APIs mean that third-party developers can build their own tools and mashups, which in turn helps to fuel the popularity of the web service. It’s hard to imagine where sites like Flickr and Twitter would be today without APIs. In fact, these days some web services don’t even bother launching websites to go with their APIs — the API is the service. The SimpleGeo API, for example, doesn’t really have a corresponding website, it’s just an API that can be used anywhere, including inside mobile apps.

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Having a video on your website can vastly improve your conversion rate. Whether the goal is for users to sign up for your web application or simply to get users to contact you via a web form, a video improves the likelihood of this happening. You need only go to the home page of any new Internet-based startup, and you’ll see an embedded video with a very large call to action beckoning you to play its two- or three-minute video introduction. Videos that demonstrate web applications or web-based services are often called screencasts because they usually capture events on the company’s website. These screencasts can sum up in just two minutes what might otherwise take up many pages to explain, so they make for powerful additions to websites. Is it easy to make a screencast? How much does it cost, and what tools are required? Let’s answer these questions.