This month, Mark Penfold’s round-up of the best new tools ranges from cutting-edge experiments to down-to-earth utilities. Give them a try: they’re all free

This month sees a mix of the boundary-pushing and the practical. The two aren’t such strange bedfellows as they might appear, at least when it comes to web development – for the simple reason that just about any attempt to stretch the realms of the possible will cause a few holes to appear in what you’ve got. And that’s where the practicalities come in.

So we’ve got a 3D CSS3 lighting rig and a PNG image cruncher, a media production suite and a cookie cutter for jQuery. You can’t afford to lose sight of the details when you’re trying to make changes to the big picture.

What’s more, many of the dev community’s brightest stars are associated with detail work. Take, for example, the Modernizr project, also updated this month. When it actually comes to building the web, it isn’t content that is king: it’s utility.

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