Thanks @ Milan Košir for sharing your experience with Visual Inspector!! ‘
(Read the original article here.)
Years ago I’ve been using Wordpress for building my websites, and I’ve been spoiled with tools like YellowPencil, CSS Hero and similar. I left Wordpress because my sites were hacked again and again, despite all security plugins I found at that time. Btw, I’m not a security expert by no means, so I don’t blame Wp. However, I switched my sites to JAM stack, super fast and super secure and I have no desire to fight against bots and hackers anytime again.
But, since then, I’ve been looking for simple way to visually inspect and change my sites in a similar, friendly way as I did on Wordpress. But there was no such tool, so I should have done a lot of gymnastics with chrome developer tools, which is great, but not exactly what I was looking for.
The tool is one of those simple, “the right tool for the right job”, swiss army knife tools, which has every master in his workshop. You don’t borrow it, because you need it now and then during all working day. It’s always there on the wall (chrome extension) and you pick it almost without looking where is it.
A whole interface in floating window (chrome extension), which can be dragged to the desired position. It allows you to inspect and change any visual property in a click.
If Visual Inspector would give me the possibility to visually change my page, compare changes and fine-tune styles, I would be a happy camper already. But Visual Inspector doesn’t stop here. We live in 2018, so collaboration and microservices are a must. Visual Inspector gives you possibility not only to quickly craft styles but also to save changes, compare them, communicate them with colleges and clients. For a designers this is a heaven, so they don’t need to make screenshots and copy them to email, back and forth million times a day, you know what I mean… Not only inspect and edit page but save assets, fonts, colors from any webpage. It’s like a pocket personal assistant for saving any web resource designer could imagine.
Team behind Visual Inspector is very active and open for suggestions, so development didn’t stop at all. Exporting to Sketch, Saving design changes in local system or on-cloud, Download CSS for changes, these are just a few planned features, which we can expect in the next releases. I look forward to see furder development of this tinny and valuable tool.
Well, yes, it’s free like a love, beer and the like. If you want to have additional capabilities like collaboration, you can get it while it’s hot for early bird price of $49 (lifetime access). Otherwise, you can install it from Chrome Web Store for free.
Some tools are so cool, that first thing you think: how it is possible that nobody made this before. Suddenly you become aware of how much time you spent for such simple tasks. Visual Inspector is also a great proof, that there is always space for new and better tools. Life is an adventure. Happy designing!
