DevToys, a bundle of tiny tools designed to do quick, specific tiny tasks, has been updated with a cross-platform version supporting Windows, MacOS and Linux.

The developers say the toolkit, which they describe as a Swiss Army knife for developers, avoids the need to go to websites for utilities for tasks such as decoding text or compressing an image. The tooolkit offers a feature called Smart Detection that selects the best tool for the data on your clipboard.DevToys 2.0 comes with 30 default tools, offering converters, decoders, formatters, generators for tasks such as hash and checksum, graphics tools, testers and text utilities.

The converters include JSON, YAML, Date and number bases. Encoders and Decoders support HTML, URLs, Base64, GZip, JWT, and QR codes, while formatters cover JSON, SQL, and XML. There are generators for Hash & Checksum, Lorem Ipsum, and passwords, and testers for JSONPath, RegEx and XML.

Graphics Tools include a color blindness simulator and a PNG/JPEG compressor, while text utilities include a markdown preview, text comparer, analyzer and utilities. The developers say that more tools are available through extensions, and you can develop your own. The text editor is powered by Microsoft Monaco Editor, which is an open-source web-based code editor that is used by Visual Studio Code. This means that in DevToys JSON, XML and YAML are colorized, line numbers are displayed, whitespace can be made visible, and a palette command is available when pressing F1.

DevToys began as a UWP app, which is limited to Windows, but the developers were asked for macOS and Linux support, and that has been added to the recent release. This was a major effort for the developers, who considered a number of potential development frameworks before rejecting them for a number of reasons. The tools they tried include the Uno platform, .NET MAUI, Avalonia, WinUI 3 and WebView, and Electron, and there's a fascinating blog post detailing the reasons why each was eventually rejected - useful reading if you're thinking of trying cross-platform development.

The eventual framework used is Blazor Hybrid. Blazor is a framework for building interactive web UIs using C# and .NET instead of JavaScript, and Blazor Hybrid allows the creation of desktop and mobile applications where the UI is powered by HTML, CSS and the logic is powered by .NET, running natively on the system. The framework means the team can utilize the web view installed on the operating system, with no need to requrire a copy of Chromium and Node.js like Electron does. It will use the Edge Web View (based on Chromium) on Windows, and WebKit on macOS and Linux.The C# code runs natively on the operating system, outside of the web view's sandbox, which gives the team says provides excellent performance along with the ability to access all the system features.

DevToys 2 is available now

More Information

Blog post on development of DevToys 2

DevToys Website

DevToys On GitHub

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