Twitter open sourced a really useful web front-ent toolkit, it’s called Bootstrap

Timing sometimes can be a strange thing, it can be nice when it works in your favour.

Just as I’ve started creating my own web UI toolkit, I get the news that Twitter open sourced their toolkit called Bootstrap. The timing couldn’t be any better for me, for the following reasons:

  • A few months ago I had come to the conclusion that 960 Grid System was a great choice for structuring web pages in a scalable manner
  • I’ve checked out lots of resources for creating nice looking page style elements, via Mashable, and I have yet to find the one “killer toolkit”. So, I’ve been reluctantly looking to make my own – with my non-existing front-end design skills, that was going to be exciting
  • Two of the projects that I am working on at the moment have now got embryonic style elements, it was time to dress them up a bit
So you can imagine the smile on my face as I went through Twitter’s blog this morning. Technical folks can’t design UI, and that’s good news for everybody. The trouble is though, technical people are often allowed to make UI design decisions, often for the lack of a better alternative (or awareness). With a toolkit like Twitter’s Bootstrap, I think those of us who can’t afford their own front-end design teams would hugely benefit by simply adopting it. The worse effect that this have may be to help reduce the amount of frankly “offending site designs” that hit the web regularly.

5 comments

  1. Hey Isaka,

    I too have been experimenting with some front-end technologies in recent months (in my naive Java-dev way). Still pretty useless with CSS, but have come across 960.gs. Bootstrap looks like it might be worth investigating!

    What I would recommend you check out is http://angularjs.org/. It has single-handedly made it possible for me to write interfaces using Javascript (and made me want to learn Javascript!!). Its sweet spot is when you have a UI that consumes JSON against a RESTful API. Try it – you won’t look back I guarantee!

    Hope all is well!

  2. Hey Danny that’s a nice tip, thanks for sharing. I will check out angularjs, I wasn’t aware of it. I will post back here what I learn from it.

    Things are pretty good here, thanks. And I hope the same for you too?

  3. Hey There. I found your blog site using msn. This is an extremely well written article. I’ll make sure to bookmark it and return to read more of your useful info. Thanks for the post. I will certainly return. Alpert

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