Designer Tobas Ahlin (@tobiasahlin), working as a UI designer at Spotify, is known for his simple and useful OS X dashboard widgets for web developers. His widgets Loremify and Minicodes (both available for free) are well-known within the community. Loremify automatically generates “Lorem Ipsum…” placeholder text, with the option to specify the amount of characters and paragraphs — perfect for testing various text layouts on websites. And if you coded large CSS or JavaScript files, you can use Minicodes to “minify” them into smaller file sizes using the YUI compressing algorithm for faster upload and transfer. Both widgets feature minimalist, very polished UIs. And today, they are joined by a third one: KeyCodes.

When you develop a web application, you sometimes want to bind functions to single or multiple keys (for example to quickly toggle actions). For that purpose, you need their so-called key code (a specific number each key has) to make sure you adress the right one. KeyCodes makes it easy to get this code. Just open your dashboard, click on KeyCodes, and press the key whose code you need, and both the key and its key code number are instantly displayed using a neon-styled, stainless steel UI (similar to Loremify’s look; see header image).

Simple, fast, intuitive, and free of charge. Go ahead and download KeyCodes for free from Ahlin’s website.