My Favorite Web Apps and Tools

I’ve found myself more often using web apps instead of dedicated desktop applications at work. It seems that in general, desktop apps have been getting slower and more resource intensive lately. The trend of teams using Electron or the Chromium Embedded Framework in order to ship dedicated desktop apps has also contributed to this.

If you are using the desktop versions of Slack, Skype, Atom, Spotify, VS Code, Github Desktop, or Discord (plus many more) you are likely running an entirely separate instance of Google Chrome as part of those apps. That’s a lot of overhead.

This is why I prefer web apps. They don’t usually consume so much RAM, they generally start up really quickly and best of all they don’t require constant updating. Below is my list of useful web apps and tools that make me more productive at work.

Productivity

• Slack Web - I also like the Refined extension that adds some good features
• Google Docs, Sheets, Slides - Duh
• Grammarly - Nice writing utility
• Simplenote - Fantastic note-taking app

Music

• Spotify Web - Much faster than desktop version
• Google Music - Fantastic player for playing your own music
• Soma FM - Great selection of ad-free radio stations

Diagramming

• Swimlanes - Great sequence diagram tool
• ASCII Flow - Amazing text diagramming tool

Graphics and Design Tools

• Photopea - Super fast simplified version of Photoshop :)
• Screely - Really handy tool for generating nice screenshots
• Fa2png - Useful tool for generating icons
• Remove.bg - Amazing service for removing backgrounds from pictures

Code

• Codepen - Favorite code playground
• JSON Prettify - Super fast and simple JSON formatter with adjustable indentation

Utilities

• Throwaway Mail - Awesome tool for generating temporary email addresses