totally legendary web applications

This is a very simple, single page web tool that might not quite classify as a ‘web application’ as such, but it’s a very handy tool nonetheless. Any coder worth his salt, will have had to, at one time or another do a Google search for some HTML entity, like À, è or fractions like ¼ or ½. More often that not, I can’t find what I’m looking for and I’ll resort to doing fractions like 1/2 and 1/4… which sucks. Enter the joys of this nifty little Ajax powered HTML entity character lookup.

Using HTML entities is the right way to ensure all the characters on your page are validated. However, often finding the right entity code requires scanning through 250 rows of characters. This lookup allows you to quickly find the entity based on how it looks, e.g. like an ? or the letter c.

Genius. This has definately been added to my list of design tools and I’ll be referring to it often. Mac users have the added bonus of being able to download a dashboard widget. Lucky bastards. Shameless praise aside, I think that after all the trouble these guys went to in designing this tool, they might’ve spent a little time styling the search results up a little. The live-search results are a little bland and it took a while to realize where each search result ended and the next one started. But apart from that, this is a great tool. Nicely done.