Steal some buttons

Happy Hump Day! In today’s digest, I’m covering a new browser extension that makes it easy and fun for designers to collect buttons that inspire them. But first…

The headlines: 

🎧 Meta and Spotify are working on a new music-sharing feature for Instagram.

🍎 Apple is cutting jobs across its news and books departments.

🗳️ X has updated Grok in response to election misinformation accusations.

People have a knack for collecting odd things—anything from banana stickers to celebrity hair. But here’s a new one: collecting buttons. Not the kind that keeps your shirt closed, but the ones you click on websites.

Enter Button Stealer, a quirky Chrome extension that lets UI designers (and anyone with a soft spot for digital oddities) gather a trove of online buttons. Created by Hamburg-based designer Anatoly Zenkov, this tool is as simple as it is strange. Visit a website, and it automatically saves a button to your collection. And yes, these buttons are live links that’ll whisk you back to their original sites with a single click.

Zenkov calls his creation “fun, useless, and free!” While it might not revolutionize your design workflow, it’s oddly satisfying—kind of like curating your own gallery of UI inspiration. You can even prune your collection, keeping the buttons that spark joy and ditching the rest.

This isn’t Zenkov’s first foray into the weird and wonderful when it comes to building. Seven years ago, he launched IOGraph, an application that turns mouse movements into contemporary art. The idea is that you have the program running in the background while doing your usual daily stuff at the compute, and when you finish up, you get a stunning art piece.

So, if you’re looking for a fresh if slightly eccentric, way to gather design ideas—or just want to indulge in a new kind of collecting—Button Stealer might be just what you need. After all, who says stamps are the only thing worth collecting?

MAKER TOOLS

HTML to React is a Chrome extension that converts snippets of any website into a usable React component. You can use the Magic Patterns editor to customize and iterate before exporting.

Seline is a simple & private website and product analytics platform. It’s simple to use, doesn’t track cookies, and doesn’t collect any personal information.

PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS 

Noteey is a visual note-taking app to capture ideas, organize thoughts and bring your creativity to life. It’s designed as an offline alternative to Miro and Milanote.

new.space is an app that makes it easy and fast to securely share links, notes, and files, get feedback, and plan what’s next. 

HEALTH TOOLS

Healthy Shortcuts lets you track your water consumption, caffeine intake, vitamin usage, weight or any other data HealthKit supports. Directly from your Watch or iPhone.

Guava Tags is an NFC tag that tracks your health data. You can stick it to anything and tap it with your phone to log your meds, coffee, water, activities, and more.