Best new design, developer and self-hosted resources: 22 October

Forty fresh additions arrived on 22 October: thirty free tools and websites, and ten open-source projects from GitHub. To make them easier to browse, they're split into design and images, places to launch and find tools, web and developer utilities, planning, focus and calm, research and learning, and open-source tools you can host yourself. Features and pricing change, so check each tool's own page before you commit to one.

Design and image tools

Got a great photo spoiled by a stray person or a line of text? With Cleanup.pictures, you brush over the object, person, blemish or text, and AI fills in the gap. The free version handles unlimited images, but exports are capped at 720p, and results vary when the background is busy. Pika is a browser-based screenshot editor for adding backgrounds, padding, shadows, device frames and annotations. Free images come with a small Pika watermark, and high-resolution exports need Pro.

Untitled UI is a design system for Figma and React with hundreds of components and over 4,600 icons. You can cover the essentials with the free Figma kit and the open-source React components, while the full kit and page templates cost money. If you want illustrations, DrawKit has packs, icons and animations in a consistent hand-drawn style. Many packs are free in SVG, PNG and Figma formats, and a Pro membership gets you the full library.

Picking colours? UI Colors takes one base colour and creates an eleven-step palette in the same 50 to 950 format Tailwind CSS uses. ColorBox builds colour scales shaped by easing curves and exports them to Tailwind CSS, OKLCH, Swift and JSON. And for shapes, Clippy is a free tool, with its source on GitHub, that helps you make CSS clip-path shapes from presets, which you adjust by dragging points.

Need a placeholder image fast? Lorem Picsum gives you a photo of any size when you change the numbers in a URL, using images from Unsplash. It's meant for mockups, not final images. Gratisography has free, high-resolution photos with a playful style, and you can use them in personal and commercial projects without attribution. For inspiration, Awwwards has been showcasing creative web design for a long time. It's free to browse, but submitting your own site costs a fee.

Where to launch, and where to find more tools

Hacker News, run by Y Combinator, is a community-ranked feed of links and discussions about programming, startups and science. Built something? You can share it in a Show HN post, but be ready for feedback that can be blunt. Open Launch, TinyLaunch and Awesome Indie all let makers launch for free through a queue, and each offers optional paid launches if you want to skip the wait or pick a day. Their audiences are smaller than the biggest launch sites, so think of them as one channel among several. And if you're hunting for AI tools, Future Tools is a free directory curated by Matt Wolfe, with filters for category and pricing. Some listings can go out of date, though.

Utilities for the web and for developers

Changed a DNS record and wondering if it's live yet? DNS Checker looks it up from dozens of public servers around the world, so you can see whether the change has spread. Crontab.guru explains a cron expression in plain English as you type, and shows the next run times. explainshell matches every flag and argument in a command line to its manual page, which is a sensible check before you run a command you found online. And TableConvert turns tables from Excel, CSV, HTML or JSON into Markdown, LaTeX, SQL and many other formats.

Security Headers grades a website's HTTP response headers from A+ to F. Keep in mind it covers headers only, not full security, and results are public by default. PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse on any URL and lists Core Web Vitals alongside concrete suggestions. For testing integrations, Webhook.site gives you a unique URL that captures incoming requests, and free URLs expire after 7 days or 100 requests. VirusTotal checks a file, URL, domain or IP address against more than 70 antivirus engines, and it's free for personal, non-commercial use. The catch? Uploaded files are shared with the security community, so keep private documents out of it.

Planning, focus and a little calm

KanbanFlow puts kanban boards, a Pomodoro timer and time tracking in one place. The free plan gives you unlimited boards and tasks, while swimlanes and reports need Premium. Coggle is a simple mind mapping tool with real-time collaboration, and on the free plan you get unlimited public diagrams but only three private ones. When you need to tune out, Rainy Mood plays a looping recording of rain and distant thunder in your browser, free and with no sign-up. Insight Timer offers a large free library of guided meditations, music and sleep tracks, and courses come with its Member Plus subscription.

Research and learning tools

Writing something with references? ZoteroBib, made by the team behind Zotero, builds citations from a URL, ISBN, DOI or title in styles like APA, MLA and Chicago. There's no account to create and no ads. Learn Git Branching teaches Git through interactive levels: you type real commands and watch the commit tree change in front of you. And Google Dataset Search finds datasets published by governments, universities and data portals. Quality depends on the original source, and some datasets are paywalled or outdated.

Open-source tools you can host yourself

LibreChat is a self-hosted chat app that brings models from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral and local providers into one place. The app itself is free, but you pay each provider for API usage, and setting it up takes a server and some technical skill. Around the house, Donetick handles tasks and chores with flexible repeat schedules and rotation between people. Wallos tracks your subscriptions, with monthly and yearly totals and renewal reminders. Monica is a personal relationship manager where you log birthdays, conversations and notes. Mealie takes care of recipes, meal plans and shopping lists for a household. Most of these need a server or Docker to run.

Reactive Resume is a private resume builder with templates and clean PDF export, which you can use on the hosted site or on your own server. Sioyek is a PDF viewer for technical books and papers that previews references and figures without making you lose your place. On Windows only, Ditto is a clipboard manager that saves text, images and HTML. Kopia takes encrypted, deduplicated incremental backups to a local drive, a network share or cloud storage that you choose and pay for yourself. Last up, OpenAdapt records you doing a task once in a web, desktop or remote app and turns it into a program you can run again. It's aimed at technical users and is still evolving quickly.

All forty sit alongside everything else in the directory. To compare them with other tools in each category, browse the full Best Productivity Resources directory.