Riot's original web development app hit 1.0 today - and alongside a visual refresh, we're happy to announce some pretty neat and seamless integration with our other app, Hammer!

Hammer integration

Anvil now integrates directly with Hammer, which means all your Hammer projects will now show up in Anvil. Even better, it's completely automatic. You'll be able to access your Hammer builds by browsing to the project name at my-project-name.hammer.dev.

While Hammer builds are still accessible the way they've always been (via file:// URLs) you'll now also be able to access them from a well-formed url. If you're using services like Typekit you can add *.hammer.dev (or just *.dev) to your kit settings to get web fonts working perfectly.

Visual Refresh

Hitting 1.0 means Anvil deserves a fresh lick of paint. The UI and icon have been refined slightly. We've also added the ability to easily launch Anvil at login.

We're super happy that Hammer and Anvil are now even better friends, and we hope our users will appreciate the tight integration between the two. They're a pretty great combination! Anvil 1.0 is available as a free download - grab your copy today!

Love,
Riot <3

It's been a while since we talked about Anvil, so alongside a nice new website refresh we thought we'd update you on the latest features we've added and our plans for Anvil later this year.

xip.io support

xip.io is a fantastic service by 37Signals for sharing development sites over the local network. By running a clever custom DNS server, they redirect *.192.168.1.2.xip.io to 192.168.1.2 - so you can share your sites over your local network as site-name.your-ip.xip.io.

Fortunately, Anvil now makes this super-duper easy. Just right-click a site and copy the URL to your clipboard, ready for sharing across the local network.

The future

In the past few months we've paused on developing Anvil to support our other app: Hammer. Hammer is a great app for building out static sites, and Anvil is great for hosting them locally!

As their names suggest, Hammer and Anvil make a super-powerful combination when working with static HTML sites. If you're using Typekit, or widgets that require an http:// URL schema, Anvil is the best way to get them working locally on a .dev URL.

We're planning a set of updates that should bring Anvil and Hammer closer together, and make your life a breeze. So stay tuned for more news!