Aaron Conran has published a new preview of Ext JS Designer which includes the new features:

Duplicating Components

Transforming Components

Undo/Redo

Configuration Searching

Auto Updating

Screenshots

It is a great time for new tools popping out with Atlas coming along nicely too…. and a couple more being hacked on. Open Web Tools FTW!

Our Webmonkey friends have featured Opacity, a vector image manipulation tool that has a couple of features that are interesting for Web developers wanting to do HTML5-y things:

To use the new source code feature in Opacity, simply design your vector-based graphic or animation sequence and, once you’re happy with it, head to the Inspector menu [...]

FireCrystal is a Firefox extension that helps designers and programmers alike figure out how interactive behaviors on the web work. FireCrystal allows users to record and rewind their interactions with web pages while showing the relevant code.

Conrad Chu, Design Director at Ask.com, thought he needed an image compression tool better suited for designers and front-end developers (compared to smush.it) and scratched the itch with pungpng.

punypng is serious about image compression — it handles 8-bit PNGs, 24-bit PNGs, JPEGs, GIFs and animated GIFs. It also leverages dirty transparency techniques to further [...]

Kangax stumbled upon a blog post by Remy Sharp on detecting global variable leaks. He took that work and updated it a little to filter out Prototype, Script.aculo.us, Google and Mozilla globals.
If you want to add sets it is easy to do so… go fork away. The bookmarklet itself is here.
Of course:

It’s worth mentioning that [...]

Chris Vanrensburg has created a curve explorer that gives you a nice visualization of curve functions which are used for animations (easing and the like).

Chris has more:

I looked at the work of Robert Penner, since it seems to have become the gold standard for motion curves. Nice stuff, and it inspired me. I wanted to [...]

Over at the Mozilla Labs blog, we just launched an “Open Web Tools Directory”. Running Ajaxian for the past few years, we’ve discussed a legion of developer tools of all shapes and sizes, but there are so many we’ve quickly lost track of all that’s available.
With the Tools Directory, we hope to provide a central [...]

Paul Baukaus linked to jsescape, a little form that shows escaping and unescaping across a number of encodings.

Andrea Giammarchi had his own post on encodings in a different way…. as he talked about
en-code which you can check out in action here on the page that lets you do simple encodings, especially for source code, in [...]

Over the years we are have mentioned many Firefox, and Firebug plugins to aid us Web developers. Wouldn’t it be nice to subscribe to a bundle of these tools? The Firefox Add On team has now given us that ability with Add On Collections:

Today, we’re excited to introduce a new feature to our website that [...]

Test Drive the latest Thusnelda theora encoder with in-browser Video Encoder Firefogg.
Firefogg is an open source extension written by xiph hacker Jan Gerber that lets web developers request ogg video from their users. Since Firefogg is a Firefox extension it allows users to stay up to date with the latest and greatest theora [...]