Living Your Design Life with Dribbble: Tools and Apps

We are all great fans of Dribbble cause there is a dazzling variety of all possible design things. Apart from some other social media like Pinterest or Instagram - Dribbble is best for a (web) design-oriented community. Some people call it a 'Twitter for Designers' for sure Dribbble is the right place where you can showcase your works and get insight from like-minded people.

The only bad thing about this network is that some designs featured there lack context. Essentially Dribbble generally reduces the design to the prettiness factor without letting users understand what solution this very design is trying to answer. Some pieces of design may look great, but when looked they could possibly fail with interaction or consumption.

You definitely know that every social network has a bunch of apps with different usability levels (the perception of usability of their creators varies, as a rule). The same goes with Dribble there are tons of various Dribbble tools and apps aimed to make browsing more enjoyable. And in this round-up, we'd like to share with you some of these apps and tools. So let's start.

• Android
• iOS
• Web Apps
• WordPress Plugins
• Stuff For Devs
• Stuff From GitHub

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Since everyone is so much in love with mobile apps, let's have a look at some iOS and Android applications.

Android

Asssist

Asssist is a free Android app for Dribbble. It uses a relatively young, but fast-moving dribbble.com API to interact with the service. Features include the ability to browse common “shot lists” as well as view users’ shots and share shot links with friends.

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Driibo

This is one more Android client for Dribbble. It lets you browse all categories of Dribbble, popular, everyone, and debuts.

iOS

Dribbbits for iPad

Dribbbits for iPad is a perfect way to experience Dribbble. What's even more Dribbbits is fully functional offline.

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Dribbblr

Dribbblr is a simple-to-use and beautifully designed Dribbble client for your iPad. Browse the latest work of famous designers worldwide and never miss a shot again. You don't need to have a Dribbble account to use Dribbblr but if you provide a username, the App will show you the latest shots by designers you follow.

Web Apps

If you're not feeling comfortable browsing Dribbble shots from your portable device, have a look at these nice 'Dribble browsers'.

Midnightcheese browser

Bbbrowser displays the newest shots from everyone on Dribbble. Every 24 seconds new shots fade in as older shots are subbed out.

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fullcourtshots

One more example of a cool browser for Dribbble shops. Scroll to the bottom and shots will be loaded automatically.

WordPress Plugins

If you're running a WordPress blog where you'd like to feature some shots from Dribbble have a look at the following plugins.

SlideWizard

Easily create a slider on your website. You can add various sources for the slider, such as Instagram, Flickr, Dribbble, Twitter timeline, RSS Feed, and your WordPress posts.

Stuff For Devs

Jribbble

(function(e){"use strict";e.jribbble={};var t=function(t,s){e.ajax({type:"GET",url:"http://api.dribbble.com"+t,data:s[1]||{},dataType:"jsonp",success:function(e){e===undefined?s[0]({error:!0}):s[0](e)}})},s={getShotById:"/shots/$/",getReboundsOfShot:"/shots/$/rebounds/",getShotsByList:"/shots/$/",getShotsByPlayerId:"/players/$/shots/",getShotsThatPlayerFollows:"/players/$/shots/following/",getPlayerById:"/players/$/",getPlayerFollowers:"/players/$/followers/",getPlayerFollowing:"/players/$/following/",getPlayerDraftees:"/players/$/draftees/",getCommentsOfShot:"/shots/$/comments/",getShotsThatPlayerLikes:"/players/$/shots/likes/"},o=function(e){return function(){var s=[].slice.call(arguments),o=e.replace("$",s.shift());t(o,s)}};for(var r in s)e.jribbble[r]=o(s[r])})(jQuery,window,document);

A jQuery plugin for fetching shots from the Dribbble API.

Jribbble can:

• Get a shot
• Get comments
• Get rebbbounds
• Get list of shots
• Get list of a player's
• Get profile details
• Get draftees of a player

Stuff From GitHub

dribbble-php - the Dribbble PHP API Wrapper is exactly what it says on the tin: it’s a simple wrapper for the Dribbble API for use in your PHP projects.

dribbble - a simple Dribbble application to browse popular shots.

swish - a Ruby wrapper for the Dribbble API

dribbble - a simple Python wrapper for the Dribbble API.

dribbble - grab Dribbble feed with jQuery and Handlebars.

dribbble - a simple pure javascript library created to help develop applications using Dribbble API.

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Apps, tools listed in this blog post were just a part of that extreme variety. The item featured above were hand-picked and are most popular and usable examples of apps and tools.

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SPEAK UP! That's it guys, if you know some other Dribbble tools and apps you're welcome to share them in the comments below. All the best!