Cool Links Vol. 16: October, 2025

Hey there, Happy Halloween 🎃 ! As I enjoy my favorite season and prepare for my first winter in the northern hemisphere, I gathered just treats, no tricks, for you this month.

Cool Apps

Edit Photo, by Pintura Labs

Okay, this is pretty cool. This lil' website allows you to do quick image edits right on your browser. Nothing new there - except for the fact that it actually works with no account, no ads, no popups, no upsell. Truly a marvel!

Edit Video, by Pintura Labs

The same as Edit Photo, but for Videos!

Squoosh

Another cool little web utility. This one lets you squoosh your image files to greatly reduce their file size without any significant loss in quality. Especially useful if you have a website of your own and want to optimize your images.

Notebook Navigator - Modern File Explorer for Obsidian, by Johan Sandberg

This is beautiful. This Obsidian plugin completely overhauls the file navigation and makes it actually usable. It fixes one of the app's biggest problems for me: navigation. I've been using it pretty much everyday since finding it and it just made Obsidian exponentially better to use.

You can add custom icons to folders as well, which I used to need a separate plugin for.

Fun

A cartoonist's review of AI art, by The Oatmeal

A really fun web comic of an artist explaining his thoughts about AI art. I think I agree with all the points there.

Dev

CSS HDR Gradients, by Adam Argyle

A really cool CSS gradient generator that supports all the new CSS color stuff that's been coming out in the past years (and that I honestly don't know much about).

Aside from the cool UI and easy-to-understand code it generates, it can generate HDR and SDR gradients; which means that on supported browsers and devices, your gradient might pop out with higher dynamic range (and have the SDR as a fallback). Great if you really want the colors to pop.

Write Code That Runs in the Browser, or Write Code the Browser Runs, by Jim Nielsen

Really cool thoughts on the tradeoffs between control and performance in web development, and how whatever you build will never outperform the browser's built-in APIs.

AI can code, but it can't build software, by Matias Heikkilä

Yes! Any good developer will tell you that coding is the easiest part of the job. Making software actually go beyond a feature demo is what’s really hard. It’s something I’ve been taught ever since I began working on the field, actually. Learning to code is essential, but learning where to put the code and how to foresee all the hundreds of complexities is my actual job.

Expectations, feature scalability and security are very much human components of the job and can’t be properly done by something that’s not human.

Wrapping up

Thanks for reading once again, and see you next month!