Other useful tools

We've almost come to the end of this chapter, but before we move onto starting to develop the Less code, we should take a look at a few tools that you might find useful once you've spent some time developing CSS with Less:

• Adobe Kuler: You can find this tool at this is not immediately associated with Less, you might find this useful when choosing a color scheme for your site. Kuler has some useful tools that help you choose a suitable color palette from which we can take and use the color values within our Less styles.
• Live.js: If you spend any amount of time editing styles, you will have to manually refresh the pages after each change; this can get tedious if you are making lots of changes! Fortunately, we can get around this with the use of the Live.js script. This tool is developed by Martin Kool and is available at http://www.livejs.com. It automatically forces a refresh to the page being worked on so that we can see changes as soon as they are applied.
• CSS3 Please: You can find this tool at site that allows you to edit any listed CSS3 rule with your own values; it automatically applies the same rule changes to each of the vendor prefixes for that rule so that you have an updated rule that will work in each of the major browsers. This is particularly helpful when you start creating your own mixins, as we will see in the next chapter.
• SpritePad: You can find this tool at the "easiest way to create your sprites", SpritePad is an excellent tool for creating image sprites online, which automatically generates the appropriate CSS for each image. We can then use this to create mixins—this is particularly useful if we're creating a site with a lot of small images that feature regularly throughout the site.
• Prefixr: You can find this tool at useful nonetheless. We can develop a site for a particular browser (such as Firefox), and then use Prefixr to add other vendor prefix equivalents for any CSS3 rule that still requires them.
• WinLess Online: You can find this tool at in this chapter, we touched on using WinLess as a Less compiler; this also has an online version for those who do not use Windows as their platform. Although some of the configuration options are not present (such as minifying the compiled code), it is a useful tool nonetheless.
• Less2CSS: You can find this tool at http://www.less2css.org. This site performs the same function as WinLess Online but has a few more options, such as adding the media queries required for working with source maps. This developer also recommends that you use this site to verify your code in the event that you come across any issue where you need assistance.

This is a selection of the tools I've used for developing with Less; there are likely to be others that will be as useful as the ones listed here. Please feel free to use these. If you have suggestions for others in a future edition of this book, then they are welcome!