Subject
127 entries
Tools
Bookmarks
Just Put It on a Map: land value visualization tools
The Center for Land Economics released five free GIS tools for visualizing land values, including a 3D mapper showing how Manhattan's assessed values tower above the rest of NYC combined. The case: geographic visualization makes land economics arguments visceral in ways that text and tables can't.
Ethos: Hacker News analysis with vector embeddings
Ethos analyzes Hacker News discussions using vector embeddings to surface concepts, entities, sentiment, and discourse patterns. Open-source, from devrupt.io.
Textream: live teleprompter for macOS
Textream is a free macOS teleprompter that highlights your script in real-time as you speak using speech recognition. Clean tool for live streams, interviews, and podcasts — no subscription, no cloud.
Animated Knots: reference for knot-tying
Animated Knots is the web's reference for learning knot-tying through step-by-step animations — organized by activity (climbing, sailing, fishing, surgical) and by knot type. iOS and Android apps available.
WhyThere: data-driven city comparison for relocation
WhyThere is a data-driven city comparison tool for relocation decisions — side-by-side high-density visualizations of weather, cost, sunlight, and proximity to nature across cities. Factual rather than subjective.
Whosthere
Whosthere is a Go TUI/CLI tool that discovers devices on a local area network using mDNS, SSDP, and ARP scanning without requiring root privileges. It's a practical home network visibility tool that also runs as a headless daemon with a simple HTTP API.
Font of Web: AI-Powered Font Discovery
Font of Web uses AI to match fonts to design aesthetics — describe or upload a design and get font recommendations. Design inspiration and font discovery in one tool.
GPU Calculator for LLM Inference
An interactive calculator for estimating GPU requirements for LLM inference — input model size, quantization, batch size, and context length to get memory and throughput estimates. Practical first tool when planning self-hosted or cloud inference deployments.
Hacker News Summary by betacat: AI-Powered HN Digest
An AI-powered Hacker News summarizer that uses ChatGPT to generate daily digests of top HN stories and discussions. Useful for keeping up with HN signal without spending time in the comment threads.
ChezWizper
ChezWizper is a GitHub project by silvabyte, likely a local Whisper-based speech transcription tool. Part of the growing ecosystem of local AI tools that run OpenAI's Whisper model on-device for private transcription.
Lighthouse: Inbox Zero for RSS Feeds
Lighthouse converts email newsletters to RSS feeds, bringing them into a single inbox-zero RSS reader workflow. Solves the problem of newsletters fragmenting your attention across email and RSS by unifying them into one feed-based interface.
Visualizing a Codebase (GitHub Next)
GitHub Next's repo visualization project creates circle-packing diagrams of codebases where circle size = file size, color = file type, and nesting = folder hierarchy. Generates a visual fingerprint of a repo, with a GitHub Action for auto-updating README diagrams.
Inbox Zero: AI Email Cleaner
Inbox Zero is an AI-powered email tool for bulk unsubscribing, cold email blocking, and analytics — designed to clear inbox clutter fast. Targets the newsletter and cold-email overload problem with automation rather than manual filtering.
Heimdall: Local ML App for macOS
Heimdall is a macOS app that brings machine learning tools to a local native interface — positioning itself as an accessible way to run ML models without needing a Python environment or cloud API. Part of the 2023 wave of ML-powered local productivity tools.
VDO.Ninja: Free P2P Live Video via WebRTC
VDO.Ninja (formerly OBS.Ninja) is a free, no-account P2P video streaming tool that brings live video from phones, cameras, and remote guests directly into OBS Studio or any browser via WebRTC. The simplest way to pull in a remote camera feed without third-party software or monthly fees.
altLINE Equity Simulator: Cap Table Dilution Calculator
AltLINE's equity simulator shows how raising angel or VC money dilutes founder ownership across funding rounds — an interactive tool for demystifying cap table math before signing a term sheet. Simple but concretely useful for first-time founders.
Prompt Parrot — Replicate
Prompt Parrot is a Replicate-hosted model that generates creative variations of text-to-image prompts. A simple tool for exploring the prompt space around a seed idea when using Stable Diffusion or similar generators.
OpenBB Terminal: Open-Source Investment Research
OpenBB Terminal is an open-source Python-based investment research platform that brings Bloomberg Terminal-style capabilities to retail investors and developers. A community-built alternative to expensive financial data terminals.
BetterBrain: Natural Language to SQL with Schema Awareness
BetterBrain converts natural language to SQL while correctly handling schema constraints — an early 2022 demo of LLM-powered text-to-SQL that understood the database schema rather than generating syntactically-valid but semantically-wrong queries.
Talkwalker: Consumer Intelligence Platform
Talkwalker is an enterprise consumer intelligence platform for social listening, brand monitoring, and market research — tracking brand mentions and sentiment across social media, news, and forums at scale.
Reactive Resume
Reactive Resume is a free, open-source resume builder focused on making creation, updating, and sharing easy. No proprietary lock-in — you own your data, export to PDF, and can self-host the instance.
Interactive and Visual Prompt Engineering for Ad-hoc Task Adaptation with Large Language Models
A research paper presenting interactive and visual tools for prompt engineering that let users iteratively adapt large language models to ad-hoc tasks without fine-tuning. It addresses the core usability gap in prompt engineering: the feedback loop between prompt edits and output quality is opaque without tooling that makes the connection visible.
Save All: AI-Powered Bookmarking
Save All is an AI-powered bookmarking and knowledge management tool that goes beyond save-and-forget — using AI to summarize, tag, and surface saved content when relevant. Part of the 2022 wave of AI-augmented PKM tools.
Starship: Cross-Shell Prompt
Starship is a minimal, fast, infinitely customizable shell prompt written in Rust. Works across bash, zsh, fish, PowerShell — one config file covers all shells, and it shows contextual info like git status, language version, and cloud context without slowing down.
AI Generative Art Tools (Pharmapsychotic)
Pharmapsychotic's comprehensive catalog of AI generative art tools — covering text-to-image, image editing, upscaling, and animation tools available as of late 2022. One of the most widely-shared resource lists during the early Stable Diffusion era.
DeFi Saver: Next-Generation DeFi Management Dashboard
DeFi Saver is a management dashboard for creating and tracking DeFi positions across Maker, Aave, Compound, and other protocols from a single interface. It adds automation features like automated liquidation protection that native protocol interfaces don't offer.
Looria: Reddit-Powered Product Research
Looria analyzes Reddit posts and comments to surface the most-recommended products in any category — turning unstructured community sentiment into structured product rankings. A practical application of NLP on social data to solve a real consumer decision problem.
CLIP Interrogator
CLIP Interrogator by pharmapsychotic is a Google Colab tool that reverse-engineers what prompt would produce a given image — using CLIP to describe an image in terms that Stable Diffusion understands. The go-to tool in 2022 for figuring out how to replicate an image style.
Writesonic: AI Writing Assistant
Writesonic is a GPT-3-powered AI writing tool focused on marketing copy, blog posts, and ad creative. One of the early AI writing SaaS products that demonstrated commercial viability for LLM-powered content generation.
Krea.ai: AI Prompt Explorer and Gallery
Krea.ai is a prompt exploration and gallery tool for Stable Diffusion — browse millions of AI-generated images with their prompts, and use those prompts as starting points for your own generations. The community discovery layer that was missing from Stable Diffusion's launch.
KTool: Send Anything to Kindle
KTool sends web articles, blog posts, and newsletters to your Kindle — a simple send-to-Kindle service that extends the long-read experience to arbitrary web content. Useful for anyone who reads better on e-ink than on a screen.
Upscayl: Free and Open-Source AI Image Upscaler
Upscayl is a free, open-source AI image upscaler for Linux, macOS, and Windows built with a Linux-first philosophy. It wraps Real-ESRGAN and similar super-resolution models in a polished desktop UI, making AI upscaling accessible without command-line knowledge.
Lexica: Stable Diffusion Search Engine
Lexica is a search engine for Stable Diffusion images and the prompts that generated them. It became the go-to reference for empirical prompt knowledge — what prompts produce what visual aesthetics — and later added its own image generation feature.
Gene Kogan's Stable Diffusion Collage Tool (WIP)
Gene Kogan's WIP collage tool built on Stable Diffusion — a hybrid workflow where human collage composition meets AI generation. Kogan is a prominent artist-researcher at the machine learning × creative practice intersection, and this was shared days after SD's open release.
Topaz Labs: AI Image Enhancement
Topaz Labs makes deep learning-powered photo and video enhancement software — noise reduction, sharpening, and upscaling. One of the earliest commercial successes applying neural networks to real-world creative workflows, predating the generative AI wave.
Rytr: AI Writing Assistant
Rytr is an AI writing assistant for generating marketing copy, blog posts, and emails using structured templates — one of the early consumer LLM writing tools that predated ChatGPT. The template-driven UX made it accessible to non-technical users before free-form prompting became normal.
Fontjoy: Deep Learning Font Pairing
Fontjoy uses deep learning to generate font pairings — one click finds combinations of Google Fonts that work together aesthetically. A practical tool for non-designers who need readable typography without expert knowledge.
Prompts.ai: Advanced GPT-3 Playground
Prompts.ai was a community-built advanced GPT-3 playground that extended OpenAI's official interface with chaining, templates, and variable injection — an early tool for the prompt engineering community before ChatGPT made LLMs mainstream.
Vector Magic: Raster to Vector Conversion
Vector Magic converts raster images (JPG, PNG) to clean vector formats (SVG, EPS, AI) using smart tracing algorithms. Produces significantly cleaner results than Illustrator's built-in Live Trace, particularly for logos and icons with complex curves.
The StoryGraph — Goodreads Alternative
StoryGraph is a Goodreads alternative built by a Black founder that focuses on mood-based book recommendations and detailed reading stats. It's privacy-respecting, ad-free, and adds reading pace, mood tagging, and pace tracking that Goodreads never bothered building.
musicForProgramming();
musicForProgramming() is a curated collection of long-form ambient and electronic music mixes designed for sustained concentration. Each episode is a single unbroken mix, free, no distractions — the antithesis of algorithm-driven playlist services.
PromptSource: An Integrated Development Environment and Repository for Natural Language Prompts
PromptSource is an IDE and community repository for creating, sharing, and iterating on natural language prompts that map dataset examples to input-output pairs for language model training and evaluation. With over 2,000 prompts for ~170 datasets, it provided the infrastructure behind the T0 family of models and multitask prompted training research.
AllTopLinks: Link Aggregator
AllTopLinks is a link aggregator / bio link tool — similar to Linktree, letting creators consolidate multiple links behind a single URL. Saved in 2022, likely as an alternative to Linktree or Beacons.
Resoume: AI Resume Assistant
Resoume's AI resume assistant — an early AI-assisted resume writing and optimization tool from 2022. Part of the first wave of consumer AI tools for job searching before ChatGPT made AI writing assistance mainstream.
Bear Blog
Bear Blog is a free, minimal, no-tracking blogging platform — fast by default, no JavaScript, no ads, no analytics. Part of the IndieWeb / personal blog renaissance against surveillance capitalism in web publishing.
Art Diario: Daily Art on Your Desktop
Art Diario delivers a new piece of classical or fine art to your desktop each day — a simple daily art practice embedded in your environment. Part of a pattern of ambient art applications that surface museum collections in daily digital life.
Trait Sniper: NFT Rarity and Trading Tool
Trait Sniper is an NFT rarity and sniping tool that calculates rarity scores for NFT collection traits and reveals them before official reveals. Used to identify underpriced NFTs with rare traits at mint or on secondary markets.
Zas Editor
Zas (later Zeditor) is a minimal macOS writing app — a distraction-free markdown editor positioned between Bear and iA Writer. Focused on the writing experience rather than feature breadth.
Vim Color Schemes Gallery
vimcolorschemes.com is a curated, searchable gallery of Vim color schemes ranked by GitHub stars — the standard reference for finding and previewing Vim themes before installing them.
Rectangles: macOS Window Manager
Rectangles is a free, open-source macOS window management app — keyboard shortcuts to snap windows to halves, thirds, corners, and custom sizes. The most popular Spectacle successor.
ResyMatch: Resume Scanner and Optimizer
ResyMatch scans your resume against a job description and scores it against what ATS systems look for — keyword matching, formatting issues, and language alignment. Helps optimize resumes before submission.
Photofeeler: Profile Photo Testing
Photofeeler gets unbiased ratings on profile photos from real people — shows how your LinkedIn, dating, or social photos score on competence, likability, and influence before you commit to using them.
macOS Keyboard Shortcuts Reference
A developer's comprehensive collection of macOS keyboard shortcuts covering system, terminal, browser, and editor workflows. The kind of reference that saves micro-friction across hundreds of daily interactions.
interviewing.io: Anonymous Technical Mock Interviews
interviewing.io provides anonymous technical mock interviews with engineers from top companies — practice with real interviewers under realistic conditions, with feedback, before your actual loop.
ABX: Blind Audio Comparison Testing
ABX by jaakkopasanen is an open-source tool for conducting blind A/B/X audio comparison tests — the gold standard for objectively evaluating whether two audio signals are perceptibly different. Used for testing headphone EQ curves, codecs, and audio processing.
Nat: Personal CRM for Relationship Building
Nat is a personal CRM focused on relationship building rather than sales pipelines — tracks when you last spoke to people and surfaces who you should reconnect with. The anti-Salesforce for personal networks.
1-toolbox.com: Curated Web Tools
A curated Notion-hosted toolbox of web tools — one of many 'tools I use' pages popular in the 2021-2022 Notion public pages era. Useful as a snapshot of what tools were popular in the No-Code and productivity community at the time.
kindleServer: Serve Local Files to Kindle
kindleServer serves local HTML files with a Kindle-friendly UI and a Read Mode powered by ReadabiliPy — a simple self-hosted solution for reading long-form web content on a Kindle without relying on Pocket or Send to Kindle.
Goldilocks Zone Finder
Goldilocks Zone Finder is a climate analysis tool that shows monthly temperature ranges for locations — helping you find places that are 'just right' year-round. Useful for digital nomads, remote workers, or anyone researching climate before relocating.
Slow Hacker News
Slow HN surfaces Hacker News stories that are worth reading but don't get front-page velocity — filtering for quality over recency. An antidote to the attention-grabbing noise of the standard HN front page.
Texts: Unified Messaging Inbox
Texts is a unified messaging app that combines iMessage, WhatsApp, Telegram, Twitter DMs, Signal, and other messaging platforms into a single inbox. Addresses the fragmentation problem of having conversations scattered across 5+ apps.
Grist: Open-Source Spreadsheet-Database
Grist is an open-source spreadsheet-database hybrid — like Airtable or Notion Database but self-hostable, with Python formulas and a relational data model. Fills the gap between rigid spreadsheets and heavyweight databases for structured data work.
Huetone: Accessible Color Palette Tool
Huetone is a color palette tool for UI design that generates WCAG-accessible palettes using the OKLCH color space for perceptually uniform lightness scaling. Solves the practical problem of creating design tokens that meet contrast requirements across all shade steps.
hue.tools: Color Utility Suite
hue.tools is a color utility suite for designers and developers — format conversion, harmony generation, palette tools, and color manipulation in one place. A no-frills reference tool when you need quick color work.
IRA Design: Gradient Illustration Builder
IRA Design is a free gradient illustration builder from Creative Tim — mix and match illustrated components to create custom scenes. A quicker alternative to commissioning custom illustrations for landing pages and marketing.
Kinopio: Spatial Thinking Canvas
Kinopio is a spatial thinking canvas for organizing ideas as cards with visual connections — mind mapping meets whiteboard, without the VC-funded complexity of competitors. Community-funded and built to encourage creativity over automation.
Awesome OSS Alternatives to SaaS
A curated GitHub awesome list of open-source alternatives to well-known SaaS products, maintained by Runa Capital. The go-to reference when you want to self-host rather than pay for a specific commercial service.
Track Awesome List
Track Awesome List monitors 500+ GitHub awesome lists and delivers daily or weekly digests of what's been added. Solves the problem of awesome lists growing without you noticing — subscribe by RSS or newsletter.
AltTab — Windows-style alt-tab for macOS
AltTab is an open-source macOS utility that replaces the default Cmd+Tab app switcher with a Windows-style window previewer showing actual window thumbnails. Fixes the longstanding macOS pain point where Cmd+Tab cycles apps rather than windows.
Colony — Decentralized Organization Platform
Colony is a DAO platform focused on decentralized organizations — structured around teams, tasks, and reputation rather than pure token voting. An alternative DAO framework that tries to capture work contribution as a governance signal.
Cookiecutter Data Science Template
Cookiecutter Data Science is a standardized, opinionated project template for data science work in Python — a sensible starting folder structure that makes projects reproducible and shareable. The de facto standard for organizing Python data science projects.
Python Packages of Interest — Tao of Mac
Rui Carmo's (Tao of Mac) curated list of Python packages of interest — a practitioner's annotated reference of useful, battle-tested Python libraries organized by domain. A complement to PyPI search for finding quality packages.
AltTab: Windows-style alt-tab for macOS
AltTab brings Windows-style alt-tab window switching to macOS — full window previews, keyboard navigation, and extensive customization. The missing window manager feature that Apple never added.
virtual-builders: VM Environment Builder Scripts
virtual-builders is a collection of scripts for building various virtual machine environments — QEMU/KVM-based VMs for development and testing. Useful for quickly spinning up reproducible Linux environments without Docker.
Readwise
Readwise resurfaces your Kindle highlights, article saves, and book notes via daily email review using spaced repetition. Solves the highlight graveyard problem — where you underline everything and remember nothing.
Hacker News Books
Hacker News Books extracts and ranks book recommendations from HN comments — a crowd-sourced reading list from technically sophisticated readers. Useful for finding what books the HN community actually recommends, beyond bestseller lists.
TouchDesigner: Visual Development Platform
TouchDesigner is a node-based visual programming environment for real-time interactive media — used for architectural projections, live music visuals, interactive installations, and rapid creative prototyping. The industry standard tool for live visual performance.
House Stock Watcher
House Stock Watcher aggregates mandatory stock trade disclosures from US House of Representatives members, making congressional trading activity searchable and browsable. A civic transparency tool that emerged after insider trading concerns about congressional stock trades.
Openby.design: Open-Source Design Resources
Openby.design is a collection of open-source design resources curated for practitioners — fonts, icons, illustrations, and UI components available for free use. A useful bookmark for finding high-quality open-source design assets.
Backup Tool Alternatives: HN Thread
Hacker News thread cataloging backup tool alternatives — attic, borg, restic, and others — with practitioner perspectives on which holds up at scale. The comment thread is where the real comparison happens.
PandasGUI — A GUI for Pandas DataFrames
PandasGUI is a graphical interface for exploring and visualizing pandas DataFrames — drag-and-drop CSV import, interactive filtering, statistical summaries, and plot creation without writing code. Useful for rapid EDA.
Coded Mails — Responsive HTML Email Templates
Coded Mails provides 60+ responsive HTML email templates built with MJML across six categories — receipt, welcome, reset, notification, newsletter, and general. Tested across 80+ email clients including Outlook, eliminating the table-nesting pain of hand-coded emails.
fastcore — Python Extensions by fast.ai
fastcore is fast.ai's Python utility library extending the standard library with mixins, delegation, functional programming patterns, and parallel processing helpers. Used heavily in fast.ai's deep learning courses and libraries.
grep.app — Fast Code Search Across GitHub
grep.app is a fast regex code search engine across public GitHub repositories — half a million repos indexed, results in milliseconds. Useful for finding real-world usage examples of APIs, patterns, and idioms that GitHub's own search can't handle.
Insight Data Engineering Ecosystem Map
Insight Data Science's map of the data engineering ecosystem circa 2017 — a diagram organizing dozens of tools by pipeline stage (ingest, store, process, visualize). A widely shared snapshot of the Hadoop/Spark era's explosion of competing infrastructure tools.
TSAR — TimeSeries AggregatoR
TSAR (TimeSeries AggregatoR) — a tool for time series aggregation, saved via a Prismatic share link that is no longer functional. The URL itself is broken; content unrecoverable.
Visage: A Visualization Tool that Democratizes Good Design
Visage is a data visualization tool from 2014 designed to let non-designers create professional-quality charts and infographics without design expertise. It reflects the era's push to democratize data presentation beyond Excel and static image tools.
GitBook — Documentation and Book Publishing Platform
GitBook (2014) is a platform for writing and publishing books and documentation from Markdown and Git. It combined the Git workflow developers already knew with a clean web publishing layer, making it natural for technical writers and open source projects.
Announcing Portia — Open Source Visual Web Scraper
Scrapinghub's Portia is an open-source visual web scraper — a point-and-click interface on top of Scrapy that lets you build scrapers without writing code. It made web scraping accessible to non-programmers while keeping Scrapy's power underneath.
Some Useful Machine Learning Libraries
A 2013-era survey of machine learning libraries across Python, R, Java, and C++ — a snapshot of the fragmented ML tooling landscape before scikit-learn and deep learning frameworks consolidated the field.
The Data Visualisation Catalogue
Severino Ribecca's Data Visualisation Catalogue — a reference library of chart types organized by function, with descriptions of when to use each. The go-to resource for choosing the right chart type for your data and communication goal.
Design and Run Your First Experiment in Weka
Jason Brownlee's Machine Learning Mastery guide to designing and running experiments in Weka — the GUI-based ML tool from Waikato. Shows how to set up proper comparative experiments with statistical testing, not just running one algorithm.
A/B Test Calculator — ABBA (Thumbtack)
Thumbtack's ABBA (A/B Analysis) tool — a Bayesian A/B test calculator that reports the probability one variant beats another, rather than traditional p-values. Practically more useful than frequentist tests for the decisions product teams actually make.
Gaining Access to the Best Machine-Learning Methods
Strata/O'Reilly piece on how access to the best machine learning methods was democratizing — cloud computing, open-source libraries (scikit-learn, Spark MLlib), and MOOCs were putting frontier ML within reach of non-specialists.
crush-tools: Custom Reporting Utilities for Shell
crush-tools is a Google-hosted collection of Unix command-line utilities extending the standard toolkit for custom reporting — field manipulation, aggregation, and transformation on tab-delimited files. Purpose-built for the kind of ad hoc data work that awk handles awkwardly.
Ad Hoc Data Analysis From the Unix Command Line
Wikibooks guide to ad hoc data analysis using Unix command-line tools — awk, sed, sort, uniq, cut, and friends. A practical reference for doing quick data exploration without loading a language or framework.
Shit for Making Websites
A bluntly named web resource aggregator listing tools, fonts, frameworks, and assets for building websites circa 2013. One of many 'awesome list' precursors that collected web development resources before GitHub awesome lists became standard.
Set Operations in the Unix Shell
Peteris Krumin's catonmat guide to implementing set operations (union, intersection, difference, complement) using Unix command-line tools. A concise demonstration that shell pipelines can express set algebra without any code.
Five Text Processing Tools You Should Know
Symkat's guide to five Unix text processing tools beyond the basics — covering less-known utilities that handle common data munging tasks more cleanly than awk/sed alone. Practical shell tooling for anyone working with text data on the command line.
Don't MAWK AWK – the Fastest and Most Elegant Big Data Munging Language
Brendan O'Connor's defense of AWK as a fast, elegant big data munging language — arguing it beats Python for many common structured text processing tasks. A counterpoint to the idea that awk is an obsolete curiosity.
Map Stack by Stamen
Stamen Design's Map Stack tool, which let anyone create beautiful custom map styles by layering and compositing tile layers from different map providers. A 2013 milestone in making professional cartographic design accessible to non-cartographers.
Colourco.de – Find Your Colour Scheme
Colourco.de — a browser-based color scheme generator that lets you pick harmonious palettes interactively using color theory rules (complementary, analogous, triadic). A clean early example of applying color theory algorithmically in a web tool.
Introducing Tabula
Tabula is an open-source tool for extracting tabular data from PDFs — a specific but critical pain point for data journalists and researchers working with government and scientific publications that publish data as PDFs instead of structured files.
Working with Big Data: Assembling Your Toolkit
Acquia's guide to assembling a big data toolkit in 2013 — walking through the layered stack from storage to analysis. Practical survey of the Hadoop ecosystem components a team would actually need to evaluate.
Tributary — What We've Learned from a Year of Live Coding
EJ Fox's retrospective on a year of building Tributary — a live-coding environment for D3.js data visualization. Tributary became an important tool for learning and prototyping D3 through immediate visual feedback.
Getting Started with Python for Data Scientists
Data Community DC's guide to getting started with Python for data scientists — the standard 2013 on-ramp to scientific Python covering NumPy, Pandas, matplotlib, and scikit-learn. Represents the moment when Python decisively won the data science language wars.
Data for Dummies: 6 Data Analysis Tools Anyone Can Use
GigaOM's roundup of data analysis tools accessible to non-engineers — covering self-service BI and visualization tools that put analysis in the hands of business users. A 2013 snapshot of the early self-service analytics movement.
10 Tools for Creating Infographics and Visualizations
A roundup of 10 tools for creating infographics and data visualizations in 2013 — covering both no-code tools (Infogr.am, Piktochart) and more sophisticated charting libraries. A snapshot of the early infographic content marketing boom.
iWantHue — Color Palette Generator
iWantHue generates palettes of maximally distinct colors for data visualization — optimized in HCL color space for perceptual uniformity and colorblind accessibility. The go-to tool for assigning categorical colors to data categories.
Bartender — Mac Menu Bar Item Control
Bartender is a macOS utility for organizing and hiding menu bar icons — solving the cluttered menu bar problem that grows as you install more apps. One of the long-running Mac productivity staples.
GenomeBrowse: Free Tool for Visualizing DNA-seq and RNA-seq BAM Files
GenomeBrowse from Golden Helix — a free desktop genome browser for visualizing DNA-seq and RNA-seq BAM files. A 2013 alternative to IGV for exploring aligned sequencing data.
Cinder: The Library for Professional-Quality Creative Coding in C++
Cinder is a C++ library for professional-quality creative coding — graphics, audio, video, computer vision, and OpenGL, all in one framework. The C++ equivalent of Processing, but faster and used for commercial-quality interactive installations.
slitscanner.js by Sha Hwang
Sha Hwang's slitscanner bookmarklet applies slit-scan photography to YouTube and Vimeo videos in the browser — collapsing a spatial slice through time to produce streak-style images. A clever application of a classic experimental film technique to browser video.
Samizdat Drafting Co.
Samizdat Drafting Co — a small design studio or tools project whose name invokes the Soviet underground self-publishing tradition. Saved in the same cluster as designer tools and visualization references from January 2013.
Designer News
Designer News was a Hacker News-style news aggregator built by LayerVault for the design community — launched early 2013. It briefly became the primary link-sharing hub for UI/UX designers before LayerVault shut down in 2015.
Datavisualization.ch Selected Tools
Datavisualization.ch's curated selection of data visualization tools — a 2013 reference for the ecosystem of charting libraries, mapping tools, and visualization frameworks available before the current consolidation. A snapshot of what practitioners were using.
CanvasXpress: Scientific Data Visualization
CanvasXpress — a JavaScript library for scientific and genomics data visualization, specifically designed for bioinformatics use cases like expression heatmaps, scatter plots with gene annotations, and interactive exploration of multi-dimensional biological data.
The Setup (usesthis.com)
The Setup (usesthis.com) — an interview series asking interesting people what hardware and software they use to do their work. One of the most-read sources on how practitioners actually configure their environments.
A Programmer's Guide to Big Data: 12 Tools to Know
GigaOM's 2012 reference guide to 12 big data tools a programmer should know — covering Hadoop, Pig, Hive, HBase, Storm, and emerging alternatives. A snapshot of the Hadoop ecosystem at its peak complexity, before Spark simplified much of it.
Middleman: Hand-Crafted Frontend Development
Middleman — a Ruby-based static site generator for building hand-crafted websites. Saved in the same cluster as other frontend/static site tools when static site generators were becoming the standard for developer personal sites and documentation.
Top 20 Data Visualisation Tools (2012)
Net magazine's 2012 roundup of the top 20 data visualization tools — a snapshot of the ecosystem just as D3.js was establishing dominance. Covers both code-based libraries and drag-and-drop tools across the complexity spectrum.
New Tools Simplify the Power of Hadoop
InformationWeek's 2012 survey of tools making Hadoop more approachable for enterprise practitioners — the abstraction layers (Hive, Pig, HBase) and commercial distributions (Cloudera, Hortonworks) that were papering over Hadoop's low-level complexity. Captures the ecosystem's maturation moment.
New Software Makes Synthesizing DNA As Easy As Drag and Drop
Singularity Hub on new software making DNA design as simple as drag-and-drop icons — a 2012 snapshot of the movement to democratize genetic engineering through better tooling. If DNA synthesis software follows the CAD-to-CAM trajectory, biological programming becomes accessible far beyond PhD labs.
We Use That
We Use That was a site where tech teams shared what tools and services they used in their product stacks — an early forerunner of what StackShare.io later systematized. Useful for discovering tools by seeing what respected teams trusted.
Bikesy: SF Bike Route Planner with Elevation
Bikesy was a San Francisco bike route planner that accounted for elevation — a key differentiator from Google Maps, which in 2012 didn't prioritize bike-friendly or flat routes. Ryan called it his new favorite website.
Back That Gmail Up
Jerod Santo's guide to backing up Gmail using getmail or similar IMAP tools — a practical reminder that cloud-hosted email is not automatically backed up and depends entirely on Google's availability and goodwill.
Shadow and Substance: Eclipse Visualization Tool
Shadow and Substance was a web tool that showed an animated view of solar eclipses in your area, including the May 2012 annular eclipse. A clean educational visualization for understanding eclipse geometry — where the umbra and penumbra fall across the Earth's surface.