Tools and Toys
The tools range from fun toys to powerful, professional tools, and most of them are free! Many integrate with Google so you may want to create a Google account just for this project - it's up to you. Most, but not all of these tools are web-based.
You should be able to open this up, figure out how it works and have fun with this. There are lots of online "toys" that are actually worth playing with just for the experience, they'll give you ideas.
This category is for things that may take a little learning but don't need lots of effort.
These items will require some studying but are worth the time. You can watch a few YouTube videos to get to grips with it, right?
These are complex tools for those who are more technically minded, or researchers or professionals. But hey, don't let that stop you.
PIFuHD Demo
Amazing Google Colab notebook that takes a single image (of a body of some kind) and turns it into a 3D model (.obj)
Portmaneau Maker
Maybe use this tool with <a href="https://randomwordgenerator.com/">this random word generator</a> to create a new word.
Mercury Playground
Interesting. A web-based audio/music coding environment (a bit like many others) written in Ojack's Hydra (Javascript).
DroneFX
Requires Flash. Really interesting drone/soundtrack generator... Creating a moody filmtrack? This might be useful.
Tonespace
Tonespace lets you play one note and intelligently augments what you’re playing with chords and arpeggios.
It connects via Midi (so to a synth or Garageband) and plays musically similar notes. Because it generates midi, you can “record” it and then use it in whatever DAW you are using.
Godot Engine
Free, open source games development environment. One day, I'll get round to having a go with Godot.
Mesop
Rapidly build AI apps in Python Create web apps without the complexity of frontend development. Used at Google for rapid AI app development.
CodeConvert
These tools never work. This one worked perfectly, converting a few pages of Javascript with Cheerio code, to Python with BeautifulSoup code.
Little Sis
Brilliant site that is a mixture of a database of people and corporations and governments etc. and tools to "connect the dots" between them.
For example, take a look at How Fracking Special Interests Infiltrate the UK Parliament
See also: My Little Crony
PGLite
This is interesting. You can load a Postgres database using WASM (no server needed)... Maybe could create some fun stuff with this on Glitch.com
ToonyTool
Although having some quirks, this tool let's you easily add backgrounds, characters and speech bubbles etc, OR use the in-built collection of graphics. Simple, but I like it.
Openverse: Creative Common Search
An updated Creative Commons search engine (sponsored by Wordpress). Much better.
Meemoo
Interesting Lenticular project, like Holbein's anamorphic skull, using a really interesting visual programming tool, Meemoo.
Meaning Generator
Random concepts to help with creativity. Amazing what you can make with just three words
UVI Workstation
This free desktop app can make some interesting noises, and if you use the arpeggiator (ARP) then you can create almost ambient loops.
Electric Zine Maker
Pay your own price for this great downloadable zine-making app. This has to be the winner of THE CRAZIEST APP ever. It's really good fun.
Walking Poem
A really interesting idea. Not sure if it is a map or not. Is it a poem? Give it a whirl.
Inoreader
Best RSS reader (freemium is great) imo. See also Feedly - but they've gone off the boil for me.
These Lyrics Do Not Exist
Warning: Profanity! But, based on a training catalogue of lots of lyrics, this Machine Learning tool will take any subject and generate lyrics for you.
Search YouTube Transcripts - Filmot
Disaster of an interface, but a nice tool that searches YouTube transcripts for what you want.
Quickpoint Author
Really interesting way to make slides quickly, with text (NOTE: THIS ISN'T LIKE POWERPOINT AT ALL) a bit like Markdown.
Zettlr
Zettlr is personal notebook, in which you use the Markdown format to create and link your notes together into a "Digital Garden" or Personal Knowledgebase. There are lots of tools like this (NotionAI, Obsidian, AnyType etc) but Zettlr has nice features, is free, and open.
Colour Collage Maker
Upload an image and this will create you multiple colour schemes based on the colours in the image.
Vertex Meadow
Really interesting tool. You can upload an image, and that image becomes the landscape in a 3D VR world.
Infogram
Quickly adapt infograph templates to fit your data. Used to freemium and nice. Now you can't download. RUBBISH!
Clapper
Not sure I can get this to work, but it's a video editor and sequencer where all the assets are generated by AI (I think).
Hydra
Crazy livecoding tool for visual effects. Learn a few functions, chain them together, and boom! Crazy!
Studio D
Not free, but you get 14 days trials and you can either select a character, or upload a photo and get A.I to generate a video of them speaking your text. Pretty freaky.
AI to Midi
Upload an audio track, get midi back. You might have to split audio in basic tracks into instruments with a different tool (maybe https://www.lalal.ai/ or https://www.audioshake.ai/)
Magic Poser
Like those jointed wooden toys that animators, or artists use to see what a body in a certain position might look like.
Orca
"Esoteric" generative music coding tool. Can be a challenge to set up, it works with midi, but is so intriguing to use.
Aphantasia Colab Notebook
Text-to-Image Google Colab notebook. Run all the code sections, add your text, and get an image AND a movie.
Tuneflow
An online music sequencer that is pretty amazing AND A.I generation of tunes and chord progressions is built in. Amazing!
Morph Thing
Designed to blend, or morph, faces together, I added an elephant's eye and got this strange output.
FastHTML
With FastHTML you create good-looking modern web applications in pure Python and deploy them in minutes.
Design for Inclusivity Cards
The Cards for Humanity team have created this fabulous deck of cards to help you think about inclusive design.
Arcade Makecode
A block-coding/javascript tool (like Scratch) aimed at creating games for things like Raspberry Pi (small computers)
oTranscribe
This tool doesn't do it for you, but helps you make it easier to transcribe a video by hand.
Cables
Shaders are the code that runs complex computer graphics. Cables is a visual language to create shaders. Now has desktop apps too.
BaseRow
Open-source database/spreadsheet tool that offers something between a relational database and a spreadsheet, like NoCoDB.
FlickGuy
I'm really not sure how to describe this image editor. Like nothing you've every seen. Just go give it a go.
WebModular
Old skool synthesis, pulling out and plugging in wires. Interesting because you can type notes using strange notation.
Artbreeder Collage
Draw your design with simple colours and have A.I turn it into a more realistic image.
Random Animal Generator
Generates a number of random animals for you. If you dig around, it can also generate places, flags, food and lots more.
Hatch
Excellent little multimedia tool for creating interactive thingies. Has stickers, effects, gifs etc.
Have I Been Trained
A tool that purpotedly tells you if your image has been used to train AI. Not sure if it works, but it's return interesting results anyway.
Stract
An open search engine with some interesting features, transparency about its alogorithms, and no tracking.
Taguette
If you need to tag, or codify some text, looking for themes in transcripts, this free web-based tool is great.
Freesound Timeline
Strange tool that takes the popular sounds from Freesound and turns them into an automatic soundscape.
ADHD Task App
A task helper app, aimed at ADHD peeps. There may be AI in there too (pretty much a given nowadays). Looks interesting.
Pipes
The spiritual successor to Yahoo! Pipes? A visual online-data piping tool for getting data, processing mainly news data and re-publishing data. I used to love Pipes back in the day. Back then a lot more data was a lot easier to get to via RSS, XML and open APIs.
Flag Maker
This wonderful flag making tool lets you start from all the world's flags, or add Wikimedia commons graphics.
See also, this catalogue of imaginary flags.
List of Idioms
A brilliant list of idioms. For fun, pick one at random and "bend" it slightly to give it a different meaning.
Rebelle
Quirky, and with annoying ads, but still worth a play. This simple paint tool really mimics drippy paint - without the mess.
Charticulator
Fantastic data-driven drawing and visualisation tool. For when you want to extract data from unstructured text. NOW OWNED BY MICROSOFT.
Style Transfer App
This tech demo shows Style Transfer being applied to your webcam or a picture you upload. Lots more interesting demos <a href="https://streamlit.io/">here</a>.
Boomy
Boomy is A.I. that automatically generates music in various genres. And as an added extra you can upload a vocal audio and it will bend it to the melody.
MyLens, Timeline Creator
Enter a subject and let AI create a timeline for you. Fails to interleave two topics though.
MidiMaker
AI that generates a Orchestral/Ambient/Rock song in midi format (that you can export and import into Garageband for example). Can do loads for free but good to try.
Shortbread
Create comics with AI. I like the fact that panels are separate, and bubbles are editable.
Mixwords
Need help creating a name for something out of other words? This app lets you add a number of words then makes all the alternatives for you.
PocketBase
Small database for Javascript dev... looks like it might be powerful and useful to use on Glitch.com. It's SQLite under the hood but has things like authentication which appeals to me as a hobby dev.
Your World Of Text
Create your own URL - I made myworldofnonsense, and you have a "live" editable grid you can share with collaborators.
Rowboat CSV Explorer
Drop a CSV or Excel file on this app and your data becomes interestingly presented.
Geo Poetry Generator
Find the latitude and longitude coordinates of a place here: https://www.latlong.net/ then have it make a poem about that place for you. Or just go to the site and see what it makes.
PlayCode
Really nice REPL for lots of languages which might be useful for teaching or learning coding.
In-G
Interesting sonification example that takes Github upload data and turns it into "music". See this article. NO LONGER ONLINE
GodMode
An interest AI tool. I used it for generating ideas and it sort of tells you what it is going to do, and why in order to reach its goal, iteratively. Odd, but it did a good job.
ThreadQuilt
A search engine that only searches widely used discussion boards. No AI junk content (we hope!)
FlipAnim
Lovely little flipbook animation maker (slight shame about the gridlines. See also Pencil, the desktop app)
Penzu
Private Diary or Reflective Journal. Emails a useful "nag" message every day, which can be a useful reminder.
WordWanderer
Like a word cloud thingy, but better because it does concordance and you can navigate it. Go try it.
DALL·E mini
A text to image tool. I put in "Digital Skills and Creativity at the University of York" and got this.
Evoke AI
Choose the genre and mood and let AI generate a two minute track. 3 downloads with free use. Quite interesting. Could be used for a promo video.
PyGameZero
Successor to Pygame, PyGameZero is a python-based game engine that is fun to use, easy and powerful.
Bespoke Synth
I'm in love. Bespoke Synth is a way to make music and sounds using a visual flow diagram metaphor. Never have I had more fun. This tool is fabulous and free.
Text to Image Notebook (nsheppard's)
A slow, but create Google Colab Notebook that turns text into images.
BitBox
Designed for kids (and very like p5js), BitBox is great for learning coding. It has lots of "stamps" and sounds built in.
Constraint Systems
A really interesting collection of image tools to do really unusual things. Worth a play. Go make art.
Exactly AI
Interest AI, where you can upload 15ish images and then generate more similar images. The freemium option is a bit stingy, but interesting nonetheless.
mscompose95
Scribble on this strange Mondrian-like grid, click the samples below, and instant funky rhythms.
Slingcode
Interesting dev/coding tool. Slingcode is a personal computing platform in a single html file. You can make, run, and share web apps with it. You don't need any complicated tools to use it, just a web browser. You don't need a server, hosting, or an SSL certificate to run the web apps.
Faust Playground
Start audio processing with a flow diagram like language in the browser. OMG! Amazing!
Replay AI
Desktop AI app to alter vocal tracks in music tracks. So replace Thom Yorke with Spongebob... or something.
Alpaca Ai
One of those doodle-and-prompt-to-image AI things. The prompt for this was "a fierce and scary cartoon rat"... and er...
Easy Lang
EasyLang is a web-based programming language that is simple and doesn't have arbitrary syntax.
This is how Python started, a language to help people learn coding. Really excellent.
Rasturbator
Rasturbator is fabulous tool. It chops up your image so that you can print it on twenty or thirty pages, glue them together to fill an entire wall.
Tabletop simulators
The White Box is a collection of bits n pieces with which you can prototype your game. The Tabletop simulator is a digital game-maker.
MuseNet
Musenet takes an "intro" and then "evolves" it with AI in different styles such as Beatles, Mozart or Bluegrass. Interestingly you can upload your own custom midi track and let it evolve that too.
I tried adding a file created by Computoser as a starting point, and I think it made it more Beatles-y but it's hard to tell. Doesn't have a download option.
Ossia Score
One of those apps for controlling and sequencing other things, apps, devices, etc by HTTP or OSC. Fascinating.
Pixlr Express
A more "Instagram-like" version of this fanstastic image editor with some funky effects
Diigo
My favourite bookmarking, or tagging, app. Others include Pocket, Pinterest, Pinboard etc. With these, using any account (both your Chrome personal account, and York account) you can save a bookmarks, and even on your mobile device too. AND you can annotate PDF etc. I have used the free version for over 10 years.
Google Colab
Google Colab Notebooks are documents where you can mix notes and Python code.
They are brilliant for creating teaching resources, or, working on a project where you are figuring it out as you go, because you can create little fragments of code, and run them one at a time.
British Placename Mapper
Search for British placename by "starts with" or "ends with" ... for things like "wold" or "brough".
OctoStudio
Fabulous Scratch-based authoring system (on mobile) that has better connection to the devices gyroscope, camera, light etc.
ChordChord
This wonderful tune creates interesting chord progressions for you. I tend to choose piano, turn off drums and set the bpm to around 80.
You have to pay to download the midi, but there are ways around this, using tools that turn recorded audio into midi. Although this may introduce errors or inaccuracies, we will live with these happy accidents.
Talk To Transformer
See how a modern neural network completes your text. Type a custom snippet and see what is generated
A.I Generated Spotify Playlist
You describe the sort of music you want to hear, and A.I creates a playlist based on that description.
I added "post-punk-industrial tribal drums distorted guitar with funk bass, creating incredibly anger and tense discordant melodic noise" and it made this list - how'd it do?
SoundTrip
Totally crazy audio experience. Choose some words then travel in a universe made of those sound samples.
PromptBase
No sooner does a new technology arrive, than someone tries to leech money out of it. A site to BUY prompts for A.I.
Rivet
Visual programming tool. I've had a play with this and realised it's a nice dataflow tool, that has both plugins, like being able to execute Pythin code and the ability to call/use AI APIs.
Play Sound
Interesting tool that searches Freesound, and lets you create soundscapes by clicking samples repeatedly, or letting them loop.
Wrong Covid (Timegraphics)
This particular timeline has a collection of disgraceful peoples' pronouncements surrounding Covid, from Toby Young to Julia Hartley-Brewer.
But the tool itself, is a pretty amazing tool for creating timelines, with features such as being able to import from Google Calendar.
AnyType
A fabulous (local first) note-taking app, for your fragments of ideas, diary, notes, thoughts etc. One of the best "personal knowledgebase gardening" wiki tools I've seen. There are also to-do lists.
AskPandii
A search engine that uses AI but can do interesting things with your results, such as "create me a timeline about xxx" or "give me alternatives to xxx" . Requires (Google) login.
Thing Translator
Works on a laptop or mobile. Point your camera at something and AI tell you what it is (hopefully) AND translates it for you.
Nimp.app
Nimp is like Apple Quartz Designer, or Touch Designer. A web-based flow diagram image editor. Interesting.
Lots of high end GLSL graphics tools use this model to create special effects, this tool might be a good introduction to the concepts.
Prezi
Is a fantastic tool to create zoomable presentations. When artfully used you can simply add a heap of pzazz to a simple presentation.
Grist
Grist is a spreadsheet-relational-database hybrid (like Baserow and NoCoDB). I like these no-code/low-code products because for most people (i.e not enterprises) a relational DB makes a lot of sense, but in terms of tools and UX they are awful, so people use spreadsheets and lose "relationalability".
Autochords
Select your mood and key, and Autochords does the rest.
p.s You may need Soundflower to record your chords...
Veed
Veed is an easy to use video editor, with which you can edit YouTube videos, along with your own content.
AIVA - AI Music Generation
This tool generates music (based on parameters) in lots of different genres and you get three free downloads. You can get a mixed .mp3 or midi file. Very impressive.
UltraOutliner
Unusual Russian tool for designing interactive narratives or story plots. You enter characters, and locations and plot points, linking them together.
At the end, you can export as a .csv file.
Five Minute Poem
The Five Minute Poem gives you prompts, but also has a ticking clock.... "don't over think it!" Brilliant!
Textable
Textable is an Add-on to a really interesting visual tool call Orange3. With them together you can do textual or data analysis and shaping, and filtering, WITHOUT coding.
EarSketch
A web-based code-to-music tool, like Sonic Pi (ish) but web-based and using Python or Javascript.
StriveMath
Really interesting collaborative Processing (but the Python version) code editor. Useful for teaching?
GenType
I entered "Spooky high contrast Silver birch trees at night atmospheric lighting" and got this.
Things
A site that has a collection of, er, things. I think this would be a great site for ideation, or being creative but you will have to figure out how.
CardStock
Callooh! Callay! A HyperCard clone that doesn't suck AND has programming in Python (rather than HyperTalk). Brilliant!
AI Repository
Not a tool, but AIAAIC's independent, free, open library of 900+ incidents and controversies driven by and relating to AI, algorithms and automation.
Decker
Based on Hypercard, this web-based authoring tool looks great. Except the Lil language is, er, not to my taste at all... And you can't (or I can't) just make a stack's size to be fullscreen... and why the hell does the UI fetishize Hypercard, rather than ape it brilliance. I could imagine making wonderful 1bit stuff with this, but it's LOCKED into recreating zombie Hypercard stacks rather than giving them new life. (imo)
PhraseMe
Brilliant tool, but paid unfortunately, but you can use it once (or clear your cookies and use again).
It turns a text phrase into YouTube videos with those phrases. Amazing.
Monster Mash
A really easy and fun 3D animation tool. Draw a character, inflate it, then animate it by moving the points.
Teleprompter
Lovely free, web-based tele-prompter, or autocue. Really helpful if you're recording a voice track.
It even has mirroring so you can hold a sheet of glass, and reflect onto it, looking straight at the camera. Nice.
Acoustic Atlas
Do you want to hear what your voice would sound like in the Temple of Love in the Taj Mahal? Of course you do. You'll need headphones for this.
Pixlr X
The latest version of this fantastic image editor. Has fantastic tools for isolating a part of an image.
Draw Audio
Really interesting audio tool where you draw kind of midi notes and and tweak effects and envelopes etc.
SoundBox
Small pattern-oriented web synth with which you can create electronic music very easily. Lots of fun once you figure it out.
Hyperscript
With some Hypercard influence (if you can even have that in a markup language)... this looks very interesting... A coding framework for making web pages that sees the return of me and it. I made this in no time at all.
CalmlyWriter
Minimalist distraction-free text editor. For when you just need to get on with it.
This tool also lets you save to Google Drive or to your desktop.
Weird Text Generator
Enter some text, and it gives you your text in lots of weird fonts and characters.
Book Creator
Aimed at educators, Book Creator has a REALLY GOOD comic creator. Easy to use, and has nice speech bubbles and POW! things. AND you can export to ebooks. This really is nice.
OpenAI API
Lots of example text-based A.I apps that you can use to help your ideas along. If you like what they do, you could maybe integrate that feature via an API into your app.
Google Sites
Create a web site for free, that integrates with other Google content like Google Drive folders for example.
Solitude
Brilliant text tool. Write, or paste in a few paragraphs of text. This tool then translates it to and from lots of languages, bending the words into similar but strange reflections of the original.
Minimator SVG
Nice little SVG doodling app. A sort of join the dots way of working, maybe for making plans.
KREA Realtime
You have to join a waitlist, but when you're in, as you doodle, an AI image is generated in realtime. Fun!
Goblin ToDo
Interesting take on a to-do list that the ADHD adjacent may like. Add a task and it breaks it down into smaller ones for you
Study Crafter
An amazing tool to create interactive games with a flow-coding interface, but equally could be used to make training materials. The primary use for this tool is to collect research data about what choices people made.
Free.
Tynker
A coding-for-kids environment, with Scratch-like block coding, or indeed Javascript and Python for more ambitious projects. Also has "Parent" mode. Free
Zine Maker
Zine are small and often handmade, self-published magazines.
This tool is something I made so that you can draw all the pages and then download it and print on one A4 or A3 sheet. You can then fold it into an 8 page zine and colour it in.
The source code is here.
InkleWriter
A lovely tool for creating "unfolding stories" that get longer, interactive narrative style, but different. You can add paragraphs, choices and add image URLs (which is interesting, because that means you *could* use almost any image out there on the web.
For developers, stories can be output in .json format, meaning *real writers* could use this tool to "tell a story" and developers might incorporate it into a game easily. Interesting.
Renderforest
Create animated explainer videos, animations and more easily. I made this movie ident in a few seconds.
Kinetix Studio
Interesting idea. A.I turns your videos into 3D figure animations by uploading a video of you dancing.
Globe Explorer
Globe Explorer is a search engine (that uses AI, but in an interesting manner)... When you do a search for a topic, it returns the results in a categorised form, as if you were going to learn that topic.
Comic AI
An AI that makes comics from your textual stories, but doesn't seem to be able to imagine an old, bald, fat badly dressed character.
Wikitude
Not free, but you can use it developer mode to create compelling image-based Augmented Reality experiences. Great tool
ruDALL-E
Another Style GAN tool that takes a sentence you give it and artificial intellgence creates your picture. Here I said "Boris Johnson looking like a pig". The result isn't always what you expected but they are always interesting in someway.
Point In History
Brilliant map tool that shows which dynasties and empires have owned that land over time.
Molecular Music Generator
Give this app a short piece of midi and it will generate a repeating generative version of it, Philip Glass style.
Web Audio Sequencer
Another strange tool. Search for sounds, add them, and then draw on the timeline grid to play them to create unusual beats and soundtracks.
ProsePainter
Amazing A.I. tool that lets you define the text for painted areas of an image. A.I then fills in and blends a generated image into the image you have uploaded.
Canva Comic Maker
Canva's Comic tool, with loads of great templates is fantastic. Start from a layout and you can drag in your graphics.
JoyPanner
Interesting idea, an AI (owl) with which kids can "go over" and talk through concepts they don't quite understand. I tried it and I'm still not 100% about why rainbows are the shape they are.
Self Hosted Tools
Fabulous collection of server software you can host yourself, if you are a geek who is that way inclined.
Graphite
Incredible vector, image and SVG editor. Wow. Open source and free. Very like Photoshop, Vectorpea etc.
Mu
Mu is a "micro-framework". I like the idea. A way to make web apps that have authorisation and payments, but not much else.
Face Morph 2
A brilliant tool to morph between two images. You plot the points, it generates a gif file.
Regex AI
Lovely tool that uses AI (though why we need to know that, I don't know) to help you create regular expressions (if you don't know what those are, count your blessings).
Collection of ML Text To Image Tools
A collection of various text-to-image tools, often Google Colab files for creating unusual images.
Another few excellent tools here too (including a tool up upsize small images)
Mindful Harmony
A tool to compose or arrange unusual chords - and you can then save it in midi (maybe importing it into Garageband or BespokeSynth).
BandLab
Oh my word! Amazing. A full audio workstation that works in the browser, on Android and iOS.
Marginalia
A search engine that doesn't return the obvious, well known, high ranking results, but instead returns unpopular, obscure, less visited pages. Go find weird stuff you couldn't before.
See this <a href="https://search.marginalia.nu/explore/random">random</a> link.
MIT App Inventor
MIT App Inventor is a block-coding tool with which you can create downloadable Android applications as .apk files, FOR FREE!
A Million Short
A search engine that removed the first million results - or what Google would give you - and instead rummages around in the "less popular corners" or the internet. Free for 100 searches.
GigaBrain
Interesting AI powered search engine, that uses Reddit as its info store, and summarizes disparate messages boards.
Bright Sparks
This tool selects a random person for you to use as a creative prompt, and then asks leading questions to help you develop your ideas.
Infinite Zoom Maker
Create an infinite zoom video. Although I never quite get what I want, the results are always interesting.
Be Creative
If you select your problem type, Be Creative will then suggest creative methodologies for you to use.
H20 Wave
ANOTHER great-looking Python platform for making web apps. There seems to be a glut of these lately.