Issue #649 (Top Tools of 2025 (Part 1))

Generate UX/UI Designs + Code <15s Stop wasting your time with mockups, developers need buildable screens. UX Pilot generates polished designs that don’t look generic (like all other vibe-coding tools). Just write down a prompt, generate variations, and edit in a few clicks. When it’s perfect, export the code and start building. It’s 100% free to start. Try it for Free 🡺

This week and next week is a roundup of the 60 most-clicked tools in this newsletter over the past 12 months. They're listed in reverse order, so the top tools will be in next week's issue.

Thanks for everyone's continued loyalty to the newsletter and here are some links if you want to offer some support:

• Subscribe to my other newsletters:
  • Tech Productivity
  • VSCode.Email
• Give a one-time donation via PayPal
• Sponsor me on GitHub for as little as $1 per month
• Buy an ad in this newsletter; I've recently cut down my costs, so ad prices are currently very low.

Top Tools of 2025 (#60 – #51)

Carousel Configurator — A builder-like experience to help visualize the capabilities of CSS-only carousels, which are built using various features of the relatively new CSS Overflow Module spec.

MCSS — A modern classless CSS framework inspired by the typefaces of British type designer Matthew Carter, who created the commonly-used typefaces Georgia and Verdana.

Cardboard.js — A lightweight, performant, and simple reactive framework that lets you manage state, components, logic, etc., without the need to write any HTML, CSS, or JSX.

Foundations — An opinionated collection of 50+ components, patterns, hooks, and guides for building consistent and accessible user interfaces.

StaticSearch — A simple search engine you can add to any static website, using client-side JavaScript and JSON data files so there's no need for back-end server technologies or databases.

Developers, Now You Can Skip Design — With UX Pilot, developers generate unique UX/UI screens <15 seconds. No design skills needed: just polished screens and code ready to export and start building. Skip the design hassle today and start 100% for free.  SPONSORED 

hookcn — A collection of reusable React hooks that you can easily copy and paste into your apps or add directly through the shadcn/ui CLI.

Symbol.so — A categorized and searchable resource for finding just about any symbol to insert into your pages, with option to copy the symbol in 7 text formats or as a PNG or SVG graphic.

Nostalgist.js — A JavaScript library for developers that allows you to run emulators of retro consoles, like NES and Sega Genesis, within web browsers.

designtokens.fyi — A small info-app that lets you look up 30+ terms often used when creating and coding design systems.

Oklchroma — A web-based color pattern generator that helps lets you create harmonious color scales based on the OKLCH color space.

Top Tools of 2025 (#50 – #41)

SmoothUI — A collection of beautifully designed components with smooth animations built with React, Tailwind, and Motion.

ui-layouts — A suite of more than 50 free, beautiful, interactive React/Next.js components, based on Tailwind, Motion, GSAP, Three.js, and more.

Penguin UI — A plug-and-play UI component library for Tailwind and Alpine.js, with ready-to-use themes that can be customized, support for dark mode, and accessibility built in.

A New Place to Read Your Newsletters — We’re trying out a free app for reading newsletters called Khaki. The interface is clean, distraction-free, and only shows the newsletters you're subscribed to, no noise of everything else in your usual inbox.  SPONSORED 

Basic Design Patterns — A collection of essential design patterns for software development in JavaScript, with practical examples Singleton, Factory Method, Observer, and more.

WebTUI — A modular CSS library that brings the beauty of terminal UIs to the browser, with various styles designed to mimic terminal components.

Kigen Color Generator — A beautiful color palette generator that creates a palette for your design system based on an initial color value. Adjust the palette with sliders and choose the algorithm (Tailwind, Ant Design, etc.) before choosing a format for export.

Open Props UI — A library of 25+ pure CSS components, ready to copy and paste into a project, for forms, data display, buttons, tabs, and more.

RampenSau — A lightweight, dependency-free, and fast color generation library that makes use of hue cycling and easing functions to generate pleasing color ramps.

Flatlogic Templates — A set of 25+ web and mobile templates for startups, recently open-sourced, and covering a number of different frameworks (React, Vue, Angular, etc).

Artifact UI — A modern, space-themed library of React-based animated and dynamic components that are ARIA-compliant and easy to customize.

Advertisement

Top Tools of 2025 (#40 – #31)

opcode — Formerly Claudia Code, an elegant desktop companion for Claude Code (for Windows, Mac, and Linux) that has a beautiful GUI and makes managing Claude sessions, creating custom agents, and tracking usage effortless.

Rooks — A collection of 100+ React hooks covering a number of categories including animation/timing, browser APIs, debugging, events, file handling, state, and more.

Prompts — A lightweight, dependency-free JavaScript library built on Promises for creating accessible modal alert, confirm, and prompt dialogs, as an alternative to the native browser versions.

Dev Tools — A suite of 20+ web-based tools for developers, including generators, file converters, encoders/decoders, JSON utilities, and more, with option to use keyboard shortcuts to navigate the pages.

DevTools Desktop — No relation to the previous tool, a native suite of 20+ offline-first developer utilities for macOS, Windows, and Linux, featuring text/code tools, file converters, code generators, and more.

Human Regex — A human-friendly regular expression builder with English-like syntax, with features like an intuitive builder pattern with chainable methods, common pattern validators, and support for all regex flags.

Brain Food, Delivered Daily — Every day the folks at Refind analyze thousands of articles and send you only the best, tailored to your interests. Loved by 552,000+ curious minds.  SPONSORED 

Glass3D Generator — A code generator for creating a CSS-powered 'glass 3D' effect, displayed live on the page using three different types of backgrounds.

Circle — A project management dashboard UI, inspired by Linear, and built with Next.js and shadcn/ui, that allows tracking of issues, projects, and teams.

TailwindFlex — A library of 2,100+ ready-to-use components made with Tailwind, searchable and filterable via 80+ categories.

Monoco — A tiny JavaScript library that adds 'squircles' (smooth corners) and other unique corner types to HTML elements, with a small interactive playground to fiddle with the different types of corners you can generate.

Commercial Apps & Classifieds