One super useful feature of Claude that some may not know about:
Claude is pretty good at creating web apps via artifacts
You can run and use these web apps directly in the Claude UI
You can publish and share these artifacts directly with others
As far as I can tell, the above is even available for non-paying users.
Relatedly: browser bookmarklets can be pretty useful little tools to reduce friction for recurring tasks you do in your browser. It may take <5 minutes to let Claude generate such bookmarklets for you.
This is a web app built and hosted by Claude which creates a customized browser bookmarklet that provides a simple text-to-speech feature. It works like this:
customize the configuration on the linked page
drag the “Speak Selection” button into your bookmarks bar
from then on, on any website, when you mark text and then click the bookmark (or, after having clicked on it once, you can also use the defined hotkey instead), the selected text will be read out to you
Surely there are browser plugins that provide better TTS than this, but consider it a little proof of concept. Also this way it’s free, friction-less, requires no account etc. Claude also claimed that, when using Edge or Safari, higher quality system voices may be available, but I didn’t look into this.
Some other random things that can be done via bookmarklets:
a button cycling through different playback speeds of all videos on the current website, in case you sometimes interact with video players without such a setting in their UI
if you’re fine with having some API key in your bookmarklet, you can automate all kinds of, say, LLM calls
If you’re using Chrome and have enabled the local Gemini nano AI, you can even use that in your bookmarklets without any API key being involved (haven’t tried this yet)
start & show a 5 minute timer in the corner of the page you’re on
show/hide parts of the page, e.g. comments on a blog, Youtube recommendations
highlight-for-screenshot overlay: enable temporarily drawing on the page to highlight things to then take screenshots; maybe slightly lower friction than having to use a separate paint app for that. Usable here (relevant keys after activating: Enter to leave drawing mode, ESC to close overlay, 1-9 to change marker size).
inline imperial<->metric unit converter
For some of these, a browser plugin or tampermonkey script or so may be preferable—but beware fake alternatives. If you just think “I could do X instead” but never actually do it, then maybe just creating a bookmarklet may be the better option after all, even if it’s not the most elegant solution. Happy to hear about your use cases!
Cool! I didn’t know about bookmarklets. I knew Gemini would host little pages and apps made in canvas, so I played around a bit to see how different AI’s handle it. Gemini is like your Claude example. Here is a 5 min timer bookmarklet https://g.co/gemini/share/73048c89f2f2 Perplexity lab made a bookmarklet and a nice html explainer, but sharing is a little less intuitive. There’s a tab for “app” and at the bottom of that page a button to share the url. Here is a RNG (code works but the “drag the button” isn’t (and I was just looking for proof of concept) Random Number Generator Bookmarklet—Free Tool Chatgpt has canvas like Gemini. It should work the same but in my 15 min of testing the shared page hangs up and the bookmarklet doesnt seem to work. But I suppose it could be my work PC is breaking it somehow. Anyway, here is an attempted “read mode” for webpages: ChatGPT—Read Mode Static Grok’s canvas is Grok Studio. seems like it only can be summoned in chat, like Claude. Doesnt seem like you can share the app. Grok suggested: To share publicly, host it on a free platform like GitHub Pages, Glitch, or Replit (upload the file and get a public URL). I can share the chat that generated the bookmarklet though. Also, it doesn’t seem to work but again, proof of concept: Mute all tabs https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA%3D%3D_e0f91d33-7aba-4c8a-942b-db570b049536
One super useful feature of Claude that some may not know about:
Claude is pretty good at creating web apps via artifacts
You can run and use these web apps directly in the Claude UI
You can publish and share these artifacts directly with others
As far as I can tell, the above is even available for non-paying users.
Relatedly: browser bookmarklets can be pretty useful little tools to reduce friction for recurring tasks you do in your browser. It may take <5 minutes to let Claude generate such bookmarklets for you.
You can also combine these two things, such as here: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/9c58fb4a-5fae-48ce-aed3-60355bfd033e
This is a web app built and hosted by Claude which creates a customized browser bookmarklet that provides a simple text-to-speech feature. It works like this:
customize the configuration on the linked page
drag the “Speak Selection” button into your bookmarks bar
from then on, on any website, when you mark text and then click the bookmark (or, after having clicked on it once, you can also use the defined hotkey instead), the selected text will be read out to you
Surely there are browser plugins that provide better TTS than this, but consider it a little proof of concept. Also this way it’s free, friction-less, requires no account etc. Claude also claimed that, when using Edge or Safari, higher quality system voices may be available, but I didn’t look into this.
Some other random things that can be done via bookmarklets:
a button cycling through different playback speeds of all videos on the current website, in case you sometimes interact with video players without such a setting in their UI
if you’re fine with having some API key in your bookmarklet, you can automate all kinds of, say, LLM calls
If you’re using Chrome and have enabled the local Gemini nano AI, you can even use that in your bookmarklets without any API key being involved (haven’t tried this yet)
start & show a 5 minute timer in the corner of the page you’re on
show/hide parts of the page, e.g. comments on a blog, Youtube recommendations
highlight-for-screenshot overlay: enable temporarily drawing on the page to highlight things to then take screenshots; maybe slightly lower friction than having to use a separate paint app for that. Usable here (relevant keys after activating: Enter to leave drawing mode, ESC to close overlay, 1-9 to change marker size).
inline imperial<->metric unit converter
For some of these, a browser plugin or tampermonkey script or so may be preferable—but beware fake alternatives. If you just think “I could do X instead” but never actually do it, then maybe just creating a bookmarklet may be the better option after all, even if it’s not the most elegant solution.
Happy to hear about your use cases!
Cool! I didn’t know about bookmarklets. I knew Gemini would host little pages and apps made in canvas, so I played around a bit to see how different AI’s handle it.
Gemini is like your Claude example. Here is a 5 min timer bookmarklet
https://g.co/gemini/share/73048c89f2f2
Perplexity lab made a bookmarklet and a nice html explainer, but sharing is a little less intuitive. There’s a tab for “app” and at the bottom of that page a button to share the url. Here is a RNG (code works but the “drag the button” isn’t (and I was just looking for proof of concept)
Random Number Generator Bookmarklet—Free Tool
Chatgpt has canvas like Gemini. It should work the same but in my 15 min of testing the shared page hangs up and the bookmarklet doesnt seem to work. But I suppose it could be my work PC is breaking it somehow. Anyway, here is an attempted “read mode” for webpages:
ChatGPT—Read Mode Static
Grok’s canvas is Grok Studio. seems like it only can be summoned in chat, like Claude. Doesnt seem like you can share the app. Grok suggested:
To share publicly, host it on a free platform like GitHub Pages, Glitch, or Replit (upload the file and get a public URL).
I can share the chat that generated the bookmarklet though. Also, it doesn’t seem to work but again, proof of concept:
Mute all tabs
https://grok.com/share/c2hhcmQtNA%3D%3D_e0f91d33-7aba-4c8a-942b-db570b049536
Just to see if these bookmarklets were even possible I re-tried in Gemini
-Read mode works: https://g.co/gemini/share/dc55070e0dc4
-RNG, app works “drag to bookmarks” doesnt: https://g.co/gemini/share/024d865cbbae
-Mute all tabs works: https://g.co/gemini/share/5dba86dee603
A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised to find out that you can create artifacts that call the Claude API. Silly example: Chat app with Claude always responding with capitalized text.
Wow that feels almost cruel! Seems to change the Claude personality substantially?
Claude can also invoke instances of itself using the analysis tool (tell it to look for
self.claude).