As developers are asked to be more involved with the look and feel of a website, not just creating it and wiring it to a back end, Infragistics last week added design and UI tools to the NetAdvantage Ultimate 2012 v1 release of its developer productivity suite.

The Quince Pro design pattern library gives developers, designers and other stakeholders the ability to collaborate on the user experience throughout the development life cycle, according to Jason Beres, vice president of product management at Infragistics. The tool, he said, allows teams from different disciplines “to share and comment on digital assets, to associate screenshots with user experience patterns, and that all ties into the design/development experience.” The suite sells for US$1,895, or $2,395 with priority support, the company announced.

Also included in the new release are NetAdvantage ICONS, a set of graphics the company is now offering in legal, office basic and software “packs” for use in jQuery/XAML products, Beres said. The company claimed there are more than 380,000 of the plug-and-play graphics to choose from, to liven up applications with the need to get a designer involved to create an icon.

The Ultimate 2012 v1 platform release features several major enhancements, including additional support for touch controls. “That’s an all-out effort across all our products,” Beres said. He added that along with Metro themes, Infragistics “has taken ‘click’ to the next level” with a bouncing effect when you try to drag a grid past the top or bottom of a screen, for example, as well as scrolling that has been enhanced for touch, and the ability to zoom in on a grid via touch.

The platform now features XAML Data Visualization controls in NetAdvantage for Silverlight and for WPF line-of-business tool kits, and data visualization controls also have been added to the company’s jQuery tool with “mobile controls to deliver the same experience to a phone or tablet,” Beres said.