Best CSS Tools for Rapid Development

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) plays pivotal role in developing and designing web applications. CSS helps developers to edit or alter websites easily to achieve desired results, though generating CSS code from scratch is a bit tedious task and demands a lot of endeavors. The good thing is, the Internet is full of some great CSS tools which make it easy for developers to generate CSS codes. These CSS tools are also useful for novice developers which help them to easily learn and understand the functionality of CSS.

In this article we have collected 15 Best CSS Tools for quick development that assist and simplify the work of developers and designers. With the following tools you can generate CSS menus, animated images, text animation, CSS form codes, layers and many more. Hope you find the list handy. Enjoy !

1. PCSS

PCSS is a PHP-driven CSS Preprocessor, which aids developer to write CSS code quickly by defining variables, class nesting, default unit and server-side browser specifics. PCSS do server-side processing using PHP 5, so it requires this version to be available on the server where the website is running.
 
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2. CSS Compressor

CSS Compressor compresses your CSS to increase loading speed and save on bandwidth as well. You can Choose from three levels of compression, depending on how legible you want the compressed CSS to be versus degree of compression.
 
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3. Sencha Animator

Sencha Animator is a desktop application which helps users to create CSS3 animations fro touch screen mobile devices and webkit browsers. Sencha Animator lets you create animated text, images, design buttons with gradients and embed analytics.
 
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4. CSS Form Code Generator

CSS Form Code maker creates nice looking layouts for forms. It also helps you to crate colorful table less layout for forms. This ‘code maker’ generates CSS layout code to ‘spice up’ those forms as well.
 
[zilla_button url=”http://www.maketemplate.com/form/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
 

5. Layer Styles

Layer Style is a HTML5 app for creating CSS3 in a intuitive way. It has Colorpicker which can pick any color of the element you’re working on, it facilitates users with Drag and Drop images on to the page to use them as background or to pick their colors.
 
[zilla_button url=”http://www.layerstyles.org/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
 

6. CSSMate – Online CSS Editor

CSS Mate is an online CSS editor that enables users to generate CSS code for text, background, layouts, borders etc.
 
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7. Gallery CSS : Pure CSS Content Slider

Gallery CSS is a content slider that is built with HTML-CSS and without any JavaScript. It is an ultra lightweight solution (less than1kb gzipped) and comes with an acceptable browser compatibility (IE9+). There is support for auto-play; items can be browsed with the ready-to-use bullet-navigation or by simply linking to any slide.
 
[zilla_button url=”http://benschwarz.github.io/gallery-css/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
 

8. PrefixMyCSS

PrefixMyCss lets you prefix your CSS3 code easily. Users have to paste CSS code in to the window to prefix , all
vendor prefixes are added to your code, users can safely replace their old code.
 
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9. Sky CSS Tool

Sky CSS Tool allows you to create CSS classes almost without using manuscript code. Users would need JavaScript compatible browser for the proper functioning.
 
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10. CSS Menu Maker

CSS Menu Maker is pretty useful tool which helps users to create custom CSS drop down menu easily. CSS Menu Maker provides webmaster with tools to create custom, cross browser compatible css menus also it provides source code for all CSS Menus and facilities users to download and tweak the code.
 
[zilla_button url=”http://cssmenumaker.com/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
 

11. The Web Font Combinator

This tool has been built to allow previewing of font combinations in a fast, browser-based manner. There have been numerous printed books through the years that allowed a designer to put a headline font next to a body font, and this is an attempt to recreate that for the web.
 
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12. Spritemapper : CSS Spritemap Generator

Spritemapper is an application that merges multiple images into one and generates CSS positioning for the corresponding slices. This tools helps developers to optimize available space and the loading time. . You don’t have to write any extra syntax to make Spritemapper work. Just define the directories of images you want spritemapped and use the CSS background declaration as usual.
 
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13. BluePen Editor

bluePen Editor is a PHP-powered CSS editor that can be installed to any static or dynamic website and makes live CSS editing possible. It has features like color-picker, file manager, ruler, color comparison and more. The editor keeps track of the changes made and auto-backups them in case you prefer to revert the styles.
 
[zilla_button url=”http://bluepeneditor.com/” style=”black” size=”medium” type=”square” target=”_blank”] Source [/zilla_button]
 

14. Skeleton

Skeleton is a small collection of CSS files that can help you rapidly develop sites that look beautiful at any size, be it a 17″ laptop screen or an iPhone. Skeleton is built on three core principles: responsive grid down to mobile, fast to start and style agnostic.
 
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15. Roole

Roole is a language that compiles to CSS. It drew many inspirations from other CSS preprocessing languages like Sass, LESS and Stylus. The most unique feature of Roole is that it has vendor prefixing built-in, so the language stays dead simple yet being able to prefix some extremely complex rules transparently. Since Roole is also a superset of CSS, you can use it directly as a CSS prefixer. Roole is implemented in JavaScript, so it can be run both on the server side (via node.js) or in a browser (run unit tests to check if Roole works in your browser).
 
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