Front-end technologies continue to evolve at a rapid pace and the use of pre-compilers, like Sass, Coffeescript and template languages like Markdown, Slim and Haml are commonplace. But running these typically requires specialist knowledge and use of the command line, which can be confusing and daunting for designers.

Hammer is a native Mac OSX GUI for building websites. Hammer’s own unique syntax enables features such as HTML includes, clever paths, variables, auto-reload, placeholders and many more.

With a single click, you can publish your website to Hammer Cloud service to share with your team or clients. We use Hammer for rapid prototyping of our web applications and for building our marketing websites and landing pages. Available for download from the Mac App Store.

The benefits of static hosting are many, including improved security, fast page load times and reduced maintenance cost. Additionally, teams do not need specialist knowledge of server-side technologies or operating systems. But until now, working with static hosting like Amazon S3 has been a real struggle.

Forge takes away the pain with a simple interface, drag and drop deployments, or auto sync with Dropbox or Github. Forge serves sites with lightning fast CDN and our own special turbo.js library. It’s inexpensive and requires no maintenance or server knowledge.

At Nuwe, we use Forge daily for hosting our static sites, thin client apps built with react.js and the Nuwe API, as well as our landing pages. Forge takes away the pain of managing webforms, providing a full form hosting service with just a few characters of code.

Running websites and applications locally requires turning your computer into a web server. That can be difficult and configuration is time consuming, often requiring use and knowledge of specialist server technologies and use of the command line.

Anvil is a beautiful Mac OSX menu bar app designed for running local development environments with a .dev url. It requires zero configuration setup, which means you just install it and go.

Once installed, you can run both static sites and rack-based apps. You can even run your local apps across all the devices connected to your network, using the xip.io integration.