UI component and developer tool provider Telerik has announced the Q3 2013 release of Kendo UI, its HTML5 and JavaScript UI framework that helps developers build cross-platform and mobile applications.

The last of three major releases of the year comes equipped with intelligent UI widgets and a range of improvements to address responsive design elements, a method for supporting multiple design layouts in websites and mobile applications.

“Responsive design has always been easy to do for various kinds of things like making a menu smaller or adjusting the width of a page, various things which are pretty simple,” said Todd Anglin, executive vice president of cross-platform tools and solutions at Telerik. “No one has ever before attempted to take those complex widgets that end up in business applications and have those be responsive as well, and that’s the problem we aimed to tackle in this release.”

With its intelligent UI widgets, the company said Kendo UI allows developers to build applications that automatically adapt to different screen sizes and form factors. The release also marks the first time Grid and Schedule widgets are commercially available in the industry, according to the company.

“Building websites and apps just doesn’t mean what it used to,” said Anglin. “With the proliferation of smartphones, tablets and other Internet-connected screens, responsive design has emerged as a powerful solution to deal with this complexity by enabling developers to build with flexibility.”

The Kendo UI release provides developers granular control through an API that specifies responsive behaviors for widgets, as well as out-of-the-box apps that adapt to the mobile devices their end users are using, without needing any additional code.

In addition to responsive design features, the Q3 2013 release also improves the Mobile Theme Builder, adding the Flat UI theme and better support integration with the Bootstrap framework. It also enhances the Kendo UI DataViz with responsive capabilities to automatically adapt to mobile and tablet screens; adds mapping and spatial visualization support (including full touch support); and includes Kendo UI Mobile support for iOS 7.