I’m trying to make a list of useful static web applications without backends. For example:
- https://sha256algorithm.com/ - visually explains SHA256
- https://www.speedscope.app/ - a flamegraph visualizer
- https://www.h-schmidt.net/FloatConverter/IEEE754.html - IEEE-754 float converter
I was trying to Google for more but I realized I don’t know what the proper term for these are.
https://gchq.github.io/CyberChef/ Run mutations on inputs in your browser. Lots of useful little operations.
https://numbr.dev - web version of soulver. Calculator with currency rates.
This is pretty neat! I may never need a spreadsheet again.
Edit: I was going to contribute some trivial grammar fixes (in the Tips & Tricks) but it doesn’t look like the full app is on GitHub, is that true or am I just missing something? And there’s no index.js?
Thanks! Right now only core is published. UI is still in development so will release it later)
https://tls.ulfheim.net/ - tls explained (not quite a full app, but still)
https://devdocs.io/ - offline searchable language reference docs
https://app.diagrams.net/ - diagram drawing tool
https://nginx.viraptor.info/ - nginx location matching tester (mine)
The nginx one looks really useful, thanks!
whoa, that diagram tool is very impressive
I’m not going to put favourites here, but I’ll shamelessly plug my own Little.Webby.Press which is a book assembler. It can generate eBooks and static websites for the books from a set of Markdown/Textile/Asciidoctor files. I used it to generate its own documentation.
It is a pure client-side webapp. Everything runs in your browser. Your data is never transmitted anywhere, there is no tracking or accounts.
I’m now working on Gamebook assembler targetting the Playdate handheld, it will be the same architecture as this one.
also, be gentle, the code is messy as hell. I build this for myself.
This is a really cool concept. I’d love to explore it more, thanks for sharing!
Thanks for the kind words. I tried to document all of it and made a video showing its usage as well. Feel free to reach out if you ever need a hand or if you have some feedback about it.
Haven’t had the chance to dig into the codebase, but it honestly sounds like a really fun concept. I’ll take a look at this tonight.
https://transform.tools/: Lots of useful conversions between data formats (JSON->CSV, GraphQL->TypeScript, auto-generate Rust struct definitions with serde and everything from JSON, etc.)
https://squoosh.app: Image optimizer/compressor and converter into different formats, including experimental ones like JPEG XL and AVIF. Made by the Wasm people at Google iirc to show off fancy new browser tech.
For playing with regexes https://regexr.com and https://www.debuggex.com/
TiddlyWiki has been around since the early 00s and been pretty influential. It’s been years since I looked at it and it might have a back-end now, but it started as a HTML file you’d save locally.
You can use a backend if you want but (AFAIK) all it does is serve the wiki HTML file and let you save it without passing through the browser’s save dialog or download queue, everything else is entirely handled in the HTML file. I wrote a backend for it and it’s just 161 lines of Rust.
Mostly toys. Wordle and Alkulukuja Paskova Karhu, The Prime Number Shitting Bear.
There are a million online calculators for different things like https://www.omnicalculator.com/physics/ideal-rocket-equation
There are some online calculators for planning out production lines in Factorio :)
https://emojinator.fun/ for creating custom emoji mashups for Slack et al
I built an in-memory data IDE: https://app.datastation.multiprocess.io/. It’s a demo of the full desktop app but it’s pretty functional. Let’s you load from files, run HTTP requests (if CORS headers are set by the server), script in Python (using Pyodide/wasm), JavaScript and SQL (using AlaSQL), and make graphs from the results.
The code is open source: https://github.com/multiprocessio/datastation.
I’m obviously biased because it’s my app, but here’s a visual MTU/header size calculator: you click protocol buttons to add encapsulating and encapsulated protocols, and it shows the overhead and maximum payload size.
https://baturin.org/tools/encapcalc/
Kinda biased but my https://deadbeef.app/ is a favorite ;) quickly convert between bases, written out of a desire for a converter that didn’t look like it was from 1995. Could probably add a lot more features, it’s OSS so feel free to send patches :)
https://randomkeygen.com/ - random key generator with various handy special-case uses
https://hexed.it
That’s nice. Now I wish it had https://hexinator.com/ style format parsing.
https://bulkresizephotos.com is really handy for resizing batches of photos. It’s all client side.
Some interesting ones: https://andrei.codes/ascii-camera/ and https://andrei.codes/predator-vision/ for cool, frontend-only camera shenanigans. The code is simple and can teach you easily how this is made.
Also, a stream-related one: http://thlorenz.com/stream-viz/
I’m pretty sure we should not skip Photopea.
+1 to devdocs.
https://networthify.com/calculator/earlyretirement A when can I retire calculator.
https://mholt.github.io/json-to-go/
Something I use all the time:
https://snapdrop.net/ - Send text or files between devices on your local network, P2P via WebRTC
Plus, I’ve made a couple of those:
https://sshign.tcardenas.me/ - Sign and verify text or files with the SSH key you probably have already associated to you on GitHub https://instamock.tcardenas.me/ - Give a Go interface, get a struct-of-funcs that implements it
I like the wifi QR code generator at https://qifi.org/ - useful for when guests come over and you want to conveniently give them wifi access.
https://localpdf.tech/ transform pdf files local in the browser
I like tetris.
Anybody know beginner learning resources for creating such static web apps? I’m assuming these can be easily hosted via GitHub Pages by just putting the required files in the
gh-pagesbranch.The only requirement is to write it only using JavaScript and browser APIs. You could use vanilla JS or one of the popular frameworks like React, Vue, Svelte and others.
https://zz85.github.io/kafka-streams-viz/ - Kafka Streams Topology Visualizer
Depends how you define ‘useful’, but mine has to be ‘The Scale of the Universe’, a zoomable view of things in the universe from the scala of quarks to universal super-clusters: https://htwins.net/scale2/
https://viresh-ratnakar.github.io/exolve-player.html is a browser-based crossword player with a ton of features, including the ability to paste in a bunch of clues and have it figure out the grid (useful when e.g. you have a crossword in a pdf and you’d like to do it interactively).