Web Tools Weekly - Web Tools #545 - Top 30 Tools of 2023

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As mentioned last week, this is the final issue of 2023, so as is customary each year in this newsletter, I've put together the Top 30 Tools of the Year, based on click-through rates and open rates for issues of this newsletter over the past 12 months.

Next week the newsletter layout will have a few minor tweaks and improvements, so look out for that. And once again, if you'd like to offer your support for this newsletter, below are some links:

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Thanks to everyone for your readership this past year.

Now on to the Top 30 Tools of 2023!
 

Top Tools of 2023 (#30 – #21)

vov.css
Another older project I only first included this past year. A CSS library of about 60+ useful CSS animations that you can add to elements by class name and you can try out each one directly on the page.

Vessel.js
A WebGL/Three.js JavaScript library for conceptual ship design (i.e. boats), with an object-oriented paradigm. Not sure how useful this is, but the examples are neat to try out.

Modern Font Stacks
A one-stop reference for system font stack CSS, organized by typeface classification for every modern OS.

The Morning Paper for Tech
Want a byte-sized version of Hacker News that takes just a few minutes to read? Try TLDR's free daily newsletter. It covers the most interesting tech, startup, and programming stories in just 5 minutes. No sports and no politics.     SPONSORED 

FancySymbol
A categorized resource to copy/paste special characters, text symbols, foreign language symbols, and lots more.

Observable Plot
A JavaScript library for exploratory data visualization that allows you to create expressive SVG-based charts with concise code.

Washington Post Design System
A growing library of design tokens and interactive components purpose-built for Washington Post assets, but MIT-licensed and open-sourced for general use.

FormSpamPrevention
A small JavaScript utility to prevent spam bots from completing input, select and textarea fields, and from submitting online forms.

Chatbox
A cross-platform desktop app for the ChatGPT API that's fast, data is stored locally, supports GPT-4, and more.

CSS Generators
A small set of CSS generators that includes text and box shadows, CSS glow, CSS text glow, and unique underlines.

OS.js
A  library for creating desktop-like experiences on the web, that includes a window manager, application APIs, GUI toolkit, filesystem abstractions, and more.

Top Tools of 2023 (#20 – #11)

Calligrapher.ai
An online tool for AI-generated handwriting samples that you can customize stroke width, legibility, and style, and download as SVG.

Unicons
1000+ pixel-perfect SVG icons and icon fonts, for use with Flutter, React, Vue, React Native, and more.

Float UI
A set of 100+ responsive and accessible UI components with RTL support, built with React and Tailwind, along with 5 free templates.

Calendar.js
A powerful, lightweight calendar library with no dependencies that's fully configurable, includes drag-and-drop for events, exporting features, import from iCal and JSON, and lots more.

ServerAvatar – A Smart Cloud Hosting Solution
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PCUI
A library that enables the creation of reliable and visually pleasing user interfaces by providing fully styled components.

Accessible Color Palette Generator
You can generate a random palette or enter a color to generate WCAG-compliant color combinations.

Picography
High-resolution, royalty-free stock photos, categorized and searchable and available under a CC0 license.

Mailo
A component-based, interactive HTML email layout designer that helps you easily build cross-client and responsive HTML emails.

Pines
An UI library of animations, sliders, tooltips, accordions, modals, and more, built with Alipine.js and Tailwind.

Park UI
Beautifully designed components, to build your own component library, built with Ark UI and Panda CSS and compatible with a variety of JS frameworks.

Top Tools of 2023 (#10 – #1)

Iconhunt
An icon search engine with access150.000+ free, open source icons, downloadable for Notion, Figma, or just plain SVG.

Sailboat UI
A modern UI component library for Tailwind that includes 150+ open-source components and the components are searchable by name in the docs.

Shaper
A generative design tool for UI Interfaces, that allows you to visually fiddle with typography, spacing, vertical rhythm, and so on, after which you can copy and paste the design tokens as CSS variables.

ServerAvatar – A Smart Cloud Hosting Solution
Experience the actual power of cloud hosting. Host, manage and secure your PHP based sites on your own virtual machines from Google Cloud, AWS, DigitalOcean or any other provider with our easy, efficient and centralised control panel.    SPONSORED 

Maily
An open-source editor that makes it hassle-free to create beautiful HTML emails using a set of pre-built components.

Realtime Colors
An interactive website where you can test color palettes on real live UI elements in real time, with the ability to generate palettes and deep link to a specific palette demo.

Strawberry
A tiny frontend framework, not designed as a React or Vue alternative, that gives you reactivity and composability, with zero-dependencies, no build step, and less than 3KB gzipped.

Swap.js
A JavaScript micro-library that uses HTML attributes to facilitate Ajax-style navigation in web pages in less than 100 lines of code.

restorePhotos.io
An open-source online tool that uses AI to attempt to restore or correct old, blurry, or damaged photos.

Better Select
A web component that provides a minimal custom select element, with the option to fall back to the native select on mobile devices, with keyboard support.

Space.js
And finally, here is the top-clicked tool in this newsletter over the past 12 months: One of two sibling libraries based on Three.js, one for creating "future" UIs and panel components and the other called Alien.js for 3D utilities, materials, shaders, and physics.
 

Affiliate Links and Classifieds

An X Post for Thought

This X post from last January (or maybe it was still a "Tweet" then?) is a nice reminder that it doesn't cost a lot to begin a tech startup, besides your time and effort.
   

Send Me Your Tools!

Made something? Reply to this email or send links via Direct Message on X @LouisLazaris (details here). No tutorials or articles, please. If you have any suggestions for improvement or corrections, feel free to reply to this email.
 

Before I Go...

If you're looking to do a major overhaul in any area of your tech skills, you'll want to check out Awesome Certificates, a GitHub repo with a list of IT, computer science, and business courses that offer free certificates and badges. Currently has 18 categories to look through (front-end, back-end, data science, DevOps, Security, and lost more).

Thanks to everyone for subscribing and reading!

Keep tooling,
Louis
@LouisLazaris
PayPal.me/WebToolsWeekly