How to Save and Organize Developer Tools with My Toolbox

I often find a tool when I'm in the middle of something else. It looks promising, but I won't have time to try it until I get back to the project. Leaving the tab open works for a few hours. After a week, the tab tells me almost nothing about the other tools I was comparing or which one I wanted to try first.

We built My Toolbox for that gap between discovery and use. Save tools from AppyDev cards and detail pages, then return to a list you can filter by name or category. The list is stored in the browser you're using. You can build a shortlist and come back to it without signing in.

How to save a tool and find it again

Find a listing you want to revisit and select Save on its card or detail page. The control reflects whether the tool is saved, so you can also remove it from there. Open My toolbox from the desktop header or mobile menu to see the collection. More recent saves appear first.

Try it with a task you're already doing. If you need to generate diagrams from sample data, open a couple of listings that might fit and save the candidates you want to test. Give each tool the same small input. After you see the results, remove the entries that can't produce the format you need. The next time you open the list, the options you kept are the ones worth a second look.

Filtering helps when you've saved enough tools to forget what you called them. You might remember the category of an API tool and very little else about its name. Start with the category. If you remember a fragment of the name, search within the saved list. A category or name filter changes what you see in the moment. Your saved tools are still there when you clear it.

The collection is useful even when you already know which product you want. You can keep the reference or utility you reach for every few weeks without searching the whole directory each time. Save a couple of tools you use regularly alongside the candidates you're testing. When the list gets longer, remove expired trials and projects you no longer need to consider.

Build a shortlist around a decision

A saved collection works best when you know what would make you open an entry again. For a new project, decide on a test before you save several alternatives. A simple test for an SVG utility is whether it handles a file with the gradients or IDs your app actually uses. For a documentation platform, try publishing one representative page and check its preview and export options. These are easier decisions than which product has the most features.

Start with a few tools from Find tools by task or the Alternatives pages. Open the entries that seem to fit and check their stated capabilities. If the provider has an interactive example, you can often eliminate a candidate after a single test. Save the remaining options in My Toolbox so you can find them again after looking up pricing or talking with a teammate.

My Toolbox keeps the catalog entries you saved. For a longer evaluation, record the reason for keeping each candidate in your own project notes. For example, write that one provider supports your preferred export format while another needs a manual step. Share those notes and the relevant listing links with a teammate. They can review the same products and use their own toolbox for follow-up.

There is also a good reason to revisit a tool you decided against earlier. Maybe your team's constraint changed or you now have a second use for it. A small list of products worth keeping in mind can be more useful than a large collection where you can't tell whether you tested a tool or just saw its name.

A useful habit is to review the list when a project ships. Keep the utilities you would reuse on another project and remove the candidates you explored for a one-time constraint. When the next project starts, the shortlist is ready to use again.

Where My Toolbox saves your data

The feature uses browser local storage. The saved data contains public tool identifiers, called slugs. AppyDev resolves those identifiers against the current catalog when it displays the list. If a listing changes its cover, title, or summary, the collection can use the updated listing instead of carrying a stale copy of the original card.

Local storage belongs to the site and browser profile. Opening AppyDev in another browser, profile, or device will give you that environment's own saved state. Clearing site data can remove the collection. Private browsing behavior depends on the browser, and some privacy settings can stop the site from storing the list. If saving falls back to memory, the interface gives you a warning because a reload can clear that temporary state.

Tabs in the same browser can synchronize updates. This matters if you save a tool from a search result in one tab while the toolbox is open in another. You can keep browsing without having to refresh the list every time you make a change. The app also handles entries that were removed from the catalog or are no longer public. They do not appear as available tools, and you can clean up stale saves.

Keeping this in the browser made it possible to ship the feature without an account or a database that holds everyone's collections. It also gives the feature a clear boundary. Use the list as a convenient place to resume work on this browser. If you need a shared project record or a durable archive, keep the relevant links in your project documentation.

How we implemented saves and recovery

The save control and the toolbox page share one controller. It keeps a list of tool slugs, avoids duplicate entries, and moves the most recent saves to the front. The app initializes the controller after the page mounts so it can read browser storage. That order keeps personal state out of the public HTML and lets visitors start from the same generated site.

The display has two pieces of information to reconcile. One comes from the user's saved IDs. The other comes from the current public catalog. Treating them separately means a saved slug can be handled even when its listing disappeared. It also means that a refreshed catalog does not need to rewrite the entire collection.

Validation covers malformed stored data and bounded list size. Browser storage can be unavailable or full, and a failed write should leave the save usable for the current session. Tests exercise the fallback, duplicate handling, storage changes between tabs, and loading the same list after creating a new controller. These are ordinary state and storage rules. The feature uses no trained model and never needs a model call to save a tool.

For indexing, the personal toolbox route carries a noindex directive. The tools you save still have their own public listings. Search engines can find those listings without treating everyone's empty starting toolbox as an article or category page. The original Toolbox PR covers the persistence and the site integration.

What counts as a useful return visit

At launch, there was no earlier Toolbox route with a comparable baseline. We verified that a user could save from a detail page, open the toolbox, reload, and find the same entry. We also verified updates from another tab and filtering the resulting collection. Those checks show that the workflow holds up across ordinary navigation.

The useful outcome is someone returning on a later day to continue work. A visitor might see a tool during a lunch break, save it, and open its provider website when they can try it at their desk. Returning visits to the toolbox and outbound tool visits from that page can help us see whether that pattern occurs. The existing measurement can distinguish the toolbox surface. The app doesn't need to send a visitor's saved collection to measure a provider visit.

Saving a tool is quick, but a large number of saves on launch day would tell us little about whether it became a habit. We don't have a measured retention improvement to report. A repeat visit followed by a tool visit gives us better evidence that the collection helped someone resume a task. It still leaves open whether the person chose the tool.

Try it with the project you keep reopening

Think of something you've looked up twice in the last month. Maybe it's a CSS generator you use for the occasional layout, or the API utility you reach for when a request behaves differently in production. Find its listing, save it, and open My Toolbox. Then close the tab and come back when you actually need it.

If you're starting a fresh search, save two candidates and give them the same test. Remove the one that fails a requirement and keep the one you'd try again. The next time you visit, you should be able to see your decision in a short list and get back to your work in a couple of clicks.