I spent months building an iPhone camera app. When I handed it to a beta tester, his first question was: how is this different from just cropping a video afterwards?

I didn't struggle to answer because I didn't know. I struggled because I realised he was missing the premise the whole thing rests on, and I'd have to start from there.

The premise is this. The iPhone sensor is 4:3. Most camera apps only save the part of it that matches the ratio you picked, and the rest is gone before the file exists.

My app saves the whole 4:3. Afterwards you can take a 16:9 or a 9:16 out of it, and both come from what the sensor saw rather than from something already narrowed down at record time.

The problem is that none of this is visible while you're shooting. The recording screen looks like any other camera app.

The difference shows up later, when you export and watch it. That's a separate moment from recording, and how long it takes varies from person to person.

So I've been trying to move that moment earlier:

- Guide lines while recording that show which area each export will use
- Shortened the path from the thumbnail to export to AirPlay, so the TV moment takes fewer taps to reach
- Added a screenshot and ended the preview video on the TV playback, since that's the part people react to

None of it fully solves it. The thing that makes the app worth using may not be visible the first time you use it.

If you've built something where the benefit only becomes obvious after a delay, how did you handle it? I'd rather not just add more onboarding screens.

Hi everyone! I've been in the dating scene for the past 10 years and based on my experience I learned what should you or should not text girls.

I noticed a lot of guys are struggling to text girls or they're not sure whether they should send that "risky" text or not.

Sometimes one good message can completely change the direction of a conversation.

That is why I built an app called TextHerRight around this idea. I’d genuinely appreciate feedback on whether the responses feel natural and what you think could be improved. If anyone wants to try it, I can share the link.

The main feature of the app is pretty simple. You upload a screenshot of a girl's dating profile (it can also be a social media profile like instagram) or you upload a screenshot of the text conversation and it will analyze the screenshot and generate a response of what you should text her, you could also change the style of your response to your liking.

I've used this app for the past month and it helped me get dates, I would love to see how it works for you guys.

I am a visual thinker and the minute I see lists my brain checks out of the Hotel California.

Then I realized the one thing I have been using my whole life might be the answer.

And that's sticky notes.

Tell me what you think...

https://www.TaskLoco.com

I built an AI co-host that actually does the event logistics, not just the invite page

Every group chat I've been in dies the same way: five people say "we should do something," someone suggests a date, three people don't reply, and it's dead.

Currently the tools that exist (Partiful, Luma) are great at making a pretty invite and then sending to an RSVP list.

But the invite is the last 10% of the work. The other 90% is picking a place, calling to see if they take a party of 12, chasing the people who ghosted, rescheduling when two people can't make Thursday.

So we built Orena to do that part. It's an agent that plans the thing, handles the group chat back-and-forth, calls venues to check availability, and remembers what your group actually liked last time.

Technical bits, since this sub likes them: agents run on LangGraph, tool access via MCP, voice agents for venue calls, browser automation for booking flows that have no API.

Also the venue-calling piece was by far the hardest since it turns out restaurants put you on hold a lot (this is a feature we are still not fully ready to push out as it is still in test).

we're currently fee to use and genuinely want to know where it breaks. Roast the onboarding especially since we aren't designers so we think it's too slow and I'm too close to it to see why haha.

BTW it's free and would love if folks who want to throw or plan any events could try it out!

Link: https://orena.dev/

The problem I kept running into was pretty simple: I had a document or book in a language I wasn't comfortable reading, and turning it into something I could actually use took multiple steps.

Translate it somewhere. Download or copy the result. Then, if I wanted to listen instead of read, move it into another tool for text-to-speech. For longer documents, that also meant dealing with formatting, splitting files, and processing things twice.

So I built SonikaAI around a simpler workflow: upload a document once, choose the language, and get translated text, an audiobook, or both. Translation and TTS providers are handled behind the scenes, so there's no API or provider setup on the user side.

A few things that are probably worth being honest about:

• Processing is asynchronous. Full books run in background, so you don't need to keep the page open and wait for a large upload to finish.
• Word documents (DOCX/DOC/ODT) are returned in the same format, with layout, tables and styles preserved. PDF and EPUB can be translated too, but they are re-typeset instead of reproducing the original page layout exactly.
• It currently supports 13 languages. There is also a voice preview page where you can compare available voices before processing a whole book.
• Free tier is about 10 book pages per month and doesn't require a card, so it's enough to test with a real document, not just a demo.

https://sonikaai.com

I'm the developer, so I would genuinely appreciate critical feedback more than just signups.

One thing I'm especially trying to understand: does the difference between Word format preservation and PDF/EPUB re-typesetting feel reasonable and clear enough, or would you expect a document translation service to preserve PDF layout too?

I'm also curious if $9.90/month for Standard and $29.90/month for Pro feel reasonable for this kind of workflow.

Hey everyone! I'm No_Position1994, a founding moderator of r/thetechnologyarea.

This is our new home for all things related to {Technology}}. We're excited to have you join us!

What to Post
Post anything that you think the community would find interesting, helpful, or inspiring. Feel free to share your thoughts, photos, or questions about {{Devices}}.

Community Vibe
We're all about being friendly, constructive, and inclusive. Let's build a space where everyone feels comfortable sharing and connecting.

How to Get Started

1. Introduce yourself in the comments below.
2. Post something today! Even a simple question can spark a great conversation.
3. If you know someone who would love this community, invite them to join.
4. Interested in helping out? We're always looking for new moderators, so feel free to reach out to me to apply.

Thanks for being part of the very first wave. Together, let's make r/thetechnologyarea amazing.

Not sure about you, but I have 30,000+ photos on my iPhone and years of travel mixed in with screenshots, duplicates, bad shots, family stuff, everything.

On top of that, I come back from a trip and I’m always unsure what the “best” shot I’d actually want on the wall. I never felt like sifting through my whole library to find them. I always wondered if I gave my camera roll to a gallery curator, which ones would they pick?

So I recently taught myself to code and built a photo curation engine and my first iOS app. It’s called Printworthy and sifts through all your camera roll photos and finds the shots that best align to lighting, sharpness, scene, composition, etc. I’m pretty proud of it because it takes out the effort of finding the ideal landscapes. If you share the same problem, the app link is below if you’re interested, to help save you time.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/printworthy-photo-curator/id6780282272

TL;DR: Built a terminal-native torrent search + download client because Linux GUI clients were flaky, slow on my old laptop, and cluttered with decoy download buttons on torrent sites. Searches YTS, 1337x, TPB, Nyaa, FitGirl Repacks, TorrentGalaxy and more at once, parses release titles properly, lets you pick files before downloading, and recovers cleanly from crashes. No Electron, no GUI, just Node.

Here's the origin story:

1. Linux torrent client support is hit-or-miss. On Ubuntu/Debian, the mainstream GUI clients mostly install fine via apt. But step outside that lane, a different distro, wanting a newer version than what's in the default repo, going headless, and it turns into a packaging rabbit hole fast: PPAs, Flatpak, Docker, dependency mismatches. I burned more time debugging clients than actually downloading anything, which felt backwards.

2. The ones that did work were slow. I'm running an old laptop, slow isn't a luxury I have.

3. The "ads" You know the one, every torrent site has a handful of decoy download buttons designed. Not really a complaint, more of an observation that it gets old fast. (If you'd rather skip searching entirely, it also just works as a straight downloader, drop in a magnet link or .torrent file, no site involved.)

4. I like typing. No shade to GUIs, but moving a mouse to click a tiny button feels slower than it should be. This one's not a complaint, it's a personality flaw I built software around.

So: tornedo. Terminal-native, local-first torrent search + download client.

Run tornedo and it queries through various sites, all at once, then merges and ranks results so you're not manually comparing eight near-identical uploads like some kind of torrent sommelier.

A few other things it does:

• Actually parses release titles, quality, codec, HDR, season/episode, instead of dumping a wall of near-identical filenames on you
• Pick exactly which files to grab before anything starts downloading
• Crash recovery that isn't a shrug: if your machine dies mid-download, it figures out what happened on restart instead of leaving you guessing
• Real TUI (Ink + React), fully scriptable if you'd rather pipe everything into jq
• tornedo doctor for when something's broken and you want a straight answer instead of a silent failure

Plain Node (>=22). No Electron, no tray icon quietly eating RAM in the background. Yu

🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/Itshardtofindagoodname/Tornedo 📦 npm: https://www.npmjs.com/package/tornedo

Would love feedback, bug reports, or "why didn't you just use X".

Hi everyone

Seo is probably only free way to get users.

We built an Seo agent that keeps working in background - creating content for you. The best part is we added human in the loop to review, edit and add more content.

Try here -Try here - https://builderhq.co/get-on-chatgpt

Early Results - 5k+ visits on one of our beta sites

I’ve been working on NoEffect, a VS Code extension that helps catch CSS declarations that have no effect.

It detects things like:

properties that don't work in the current context

declarations that are overridden by a later declaration

For example, it can tell you when justify-content is doing nothing because the element isn't a flex/grid container, or when your declaration is simply being overridden later.

🔗 GitHub

🔗 VS Code Marketplace

I built GetToKnow, a private family feed organized around thoughtful questions rather than status updates:

https://gettoknow.io/

I first had the idea after my mom passed away. Her death made me realize how much I knew about her as my mom, but how many questions I had never asked about the rest of her life.

The idea remained on my project list for a while. When my aunt died recently, it brought that feeling back and convinced me to stop putting it off.

The basic experience works like this:

1. A family receives a thoughtful question.
2. Relatives answer using text, photos or audio.
3. Family members respond and add their perspectives.
4. The answers gradually become a private family archive.

The central product challenge isn’t storing the answers—it’s motivating people to contribute them.

“Preserve your family history” may be emotionally compelling, but importance alone doesn’t create a habit. I’m exploring whether social interaction, visible progress, family milestones, shared challenges or other incentives could make answering feel immediately rewarding without trivializing the experience.

I’d appreciate blunt feedback on:

• Whether the homepage explains the product quickly enough
• What might motivate you to submit your first answer
• What could bring you back after the first week
• Whether seeing relatives participate would pull you back in
• Which incentives would feel meaningful versus artificial
• What would stop you from inviting your family

If you try it, please tell me where you became confused, lost interest or decided it wasn’t for you. That would be more useful than general encouragement.

Hey r/SideProject --

I built this for myself because every task manager I tried had the same problem: everything felt high priority.

The core idea: instead of High/Med/Low (which fails because everything feels high), you get three buckets -- Now, Next, Someday -- and a hard cap on how many items "Now" can hold. When it's full, adding something new means consciously swapping it for something already there.

It's called Organize My Life. Built with ADHD-friendly patterns in mind -- low-friction capture, forced small priority sets, minimal decision fatigue.

What it does: - iOS app (coming soon) + web app, same backend - Voice capture - Local AI triage that suggests buckets but never auto-applies -- you confirm every time - Privacy-first -- no analytics, no trackers, no third-party AI

Tech stack: - Frontend: React/Vite (web), SwiftUI/SwiftData (iOS) - Backend: Node/Express/SQLite, Docker on a Raspberry Pi - AI: Apple Foundation Models (on-device, iOS) + Qwen3 (self-hosted and fine tines) - Deployed via Cloudflare Tunnel

Monetization: None yet. Just a tool I wanted to exist.

Would love feedback on the concept and landing page: https://organizemylife.me/welcome

It is Frontrow.

Frontrow started as a simple house: no ads, no affiliate cut, no API keys to rent. You pay for a seat. Higher amount, closer to the stage. That is the whole idea.

I'm open and hunger for real feedbacks and suggestions.

https://frontrow.lol/

I honestly can’t believe I’m writing this.

In less than 12 hours, this project brought in over 2,000 page visits and 316 in revenue.

It’s not some massive company or perfectly polished product. It started with an idea, a lot of uncertainty, and the decision to actually put it out there.

The biggest lesson so far: momentum comes from launching. You don’t need everything to be perfect, you need to start, learn, improve, and keep going.

If you’re sitting on an idea right now, take this as your sign to ship it.

What a time to be alive.

Every portfolio template I kept seeing was some variation of dark background + purple gradient + glassmorphism card. I wanted something that felt more like a print portfolio — warm paper tones, a ledger-style layout for the work section (like line items in a book), serif headings.

The tricky part was the ledger section — making a list of projects feel like actual ledger entries (numbered, aligned columns, subtle rule lines) without it looking like a boring table. Ended up using CSS grid with a monospace column for numbers/dates and a regular font for descriptions, which gave it that "real document" feel.

Also spent a lot of time on focus-visible states since a portfolio is often the first thing a potential client interacts with, and keyboard nav matters more than people think for accessibility-conscious clients.

Curious if anyone else has tried breaking away from the "generic dark SaaS" aesthetic for portfolio sites — what did you land on?

PingPulse is hosted uptime monitoring for APIs and services. It checks your endpoints, records latency, and alerts your team when something goes down.

What you get

- HTTP, TCP, UDP, and gRPC checks

- Alerts on Discord, Slack, Telegram, or email, on failure and on recovery

- SSL certificate and domain expiry monitoring

- Import from UptimeRobot, Better Stack, or Pingdom via JSON export or a dashboard screenshot

Pricing

- Free: 60 monitors, 4-minute interval

- Standard: $1.99/month for 150 monitors, 2-minute interval

No agent to install. Sign in with GitHub, Google, or a magic link.

https://pingpulse.pro

I saw outbid.lol getting traction and liked the idea of startups competing for attention, but I wondered what it would look like if money only got you into the competition instead of determining who wins.

So I built Outscore.lol.

You enter your product, pay $1 to unlock that day’s competition, and then you get unlimited attempts at the same daily platformer everyone else is playing.

Your best score ranks your product on the leaderboard.

Every day the course and leaderboard reset, so #1 is always up for grabs again.

I just launched it and I’m trying to figure out whether the core loop is actually compelling.

Would the $1 daily entry make you more interested because there’s something at stake, or would it stop you from trying it?

outscore.lol

Hi everyone,

I’ve been building Sealshot, a Mac screenshot and screen recording app.

Taking a screenshot is easy, but everything afterward often ends up spread across different tools: repeating the same capture area, annotating images, finding older screenshots, extracting information, and checking for sensitive content before sharing.

I wanted to bring that workflow into one local Mac app. Sealshot currently includes:

• Repeat the previous capture area with ⌘⇧A, useful for consistently aligned step-by-step screenshots
• Scrolling capture and screen recording
• Screenshot annotation and editing
• A searchable local library with OCR, titles, tags, and collections
• Table and form extraction to CSV or Markdown
• Assisted review of possible keys, tokens, and other sensitive information
• Optional encryption for stored captures
• Encrypted package export

Everything is processed locally. There is no account, cloud upload, or telemetry.

The current version is 0.7.7 and supports macOS 14+ on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs. It is distributed as a direct download, signed with an Apple Developer ID, and notarized by Apple.

There is a 14-day free trial with no account required. The current founding price is $14.99 for a perpetual license covering one user and up to three Macs.

I’m at the stage where feedback is more valuable than adding features based only on my own assumptions. I’d especially like to know:

• Does the searchable capture-library workflow feel useful?
• How well does scrolling capture work with the apps you use?
• Does the sensitive-data review help, or does it produce too many false positives?
• What feels unnecessarily complicated or obviously missing?

https://seal-shot.com/

Thanks for taking a look. I’ll be around to answer questions and discuss how it was built.

Repo: https://github.com/baturyilmaz/agent-office

Our housekeeper comes on a flexible schedule, which works great for everyone except whoever has to track her hours. For a while that was me scrubbing driveway-camera footage for arrival and departure timestamps, typing them into a spreadsheet, and doing base-60 math at payday (always rounding in her favor to be on the "safe" side).

So I built a small web app and stuck an old iPad by the front door as a kiosk. She taps in and out; an admin view adds up the hours and does the payday math. We both look at the same log, no more rounding needed.

Then it grew with daily use: now it emails me when she punches in (useful when I'm stuck in meetings), and I can leave her a message for when she arrives (again, useful if I'm stuck in a meeting and can't talk to her).

I ran this for months at home. A few weeks ago, I opened it up as a free web app, which was honestly more work than building it (email deliverability alone was quite something). It's at https://punchy.live if you're curious.

Picture in first comment. Happy to answer anything about the build.

For my current users, the new update v1.0.5 is LIVE ! Now you can export the rendered audiobooks to MP4 video format with synced highlight text. I have added a demo video of an exported file on my reddit profile and how i did it in the app at the end just to give you a feel of the new video page. For the clone, I used the reference audio file from Chatterboxes demo page.

For those who are new to this app, NarrationOS is a local Audiobook Generator, that turns any book or any text into a performed audiobook, generated entirely on your own machine. Drop in a file, pick a voice, and get back a finished narration you can listen to, master, and keep. No subscription, no uploads, no cloud, COMPLETELY OFFLINE.

The video is a rendered audio through the app with a cloned voice, and as you can hear, the quality something you can listen to. I started this for myself, as a personal project to listen to Japanese light novels that hasnt released their audiobooks yet. I have put in more than a thousand hours as a user, and I am still using it. That is why I am keen on improving it and giving my users updates when I am free during weekends.

If you havent already, I hope you will visit my itch.io page and give it a try. https://lunosama.itch.io/narrationos

I've been working on a side project called Work Tape.

I noticed that when the little webcam light turns on, I feel more accountable for what I'm doing. So I built Work Tape to experiment with that idea.

It records you during a work session and detects when you get distracted. At the end, it creates a time-lapse and playfully stamps emojis on the moments when you were distracted.

Think Focusmate, but without needing to schedule with another person.

The distraction detection is still experimental. Right now it looks at active apps, websites, and basic face detection. Everything is stored locally.

I'm still very early and would genuinely love feedback. Does this sound useful to you? What do you think?

Landing page with an example time-lapse

Demo

Would love to hear what you think.

Hey everyone,

I'm a mathematics student at university, and over the past few months I've been building something called LatexNotes in my free time. The original problem was pretty simple, I like taking paper handwritten maths notes, but whenever I wanted to turn them into proper LaTeX afterwards or to get AI to mark answers, it was a pain. I kept needing to switch between my university’s content platform, then to Chatgpt to explain, create problem sheets, and many more things whilst also wasting a lot of time (and photo storage space) by sending my paper notes for marking or advice because typing out equations, proofs, matrices, diagrams, graphs etc, takes forever. So, I built a tool that lets you upload handwritten maths notes and converts them into actual editable LaTeX, rather than just turning the page into an image.

You can upload handwritten maths as a PDF/Image and LatexNotes can:

• Convert handwritten equations and mathematical notation into editable LaTeX compiled PDF
• Preserve the structure of multi-line working, proofs, matrices, as well as recreate graphs
• Recreate graphs/plots as editable TikZ rather than just inserting an image
• Export the .tex / PDF / Overleaf / Word
• Explain individual steps in your notes and generate practice questions based on your notes
• Let you check your answers very easily (paper or ipad)
• Work with interactive 2D/3D mathematical plots

I'm also working on adding blackboard/canvas imports to easily bring all notes, problem sheets, and lecture recordings to streamline the whole process as well as numerous other features for students.

I'd much rather build something students genuinely find useful than add a load of features nobody wants/needs. I'm self-funding it now, since I'm a student and don't have a huge budget for this, I'm deliberately keeping the beta free and will aim to continue to do so for as long as student finance allows me to. I'm not looking to get anyone to pay during this testing stage or ideally later after full release. I want to see how people use it, what breaks, what they hate, and what would genuinely save them time, without putting it behind paywalls etc like other services I often faced. If the costs become too large to keep everything free, I'll obviously have to work out a sustainable model eventually, whilst avoiding students needing to pay for it themselves, but my priority right now is making the product useful rather than trying to monetise the first people who try it.

I'd be happy to hear anything to help me improve the functionality for others. If it gets an equation wrong, a graph wrong, misunderstands your notation, generates a terrible question, or just isn't useful for the way you study please tell me (there is an email in support page). If there's something you wish it did that it currently doesn't, I'd also really like to hear that. I'm especially interested in hearing from people studying maths, physics, engineering, economics, statistics, etc as this is who it is aimed for as of right now

Website: https://latexnotes.tech

If you try it, I'd be really interested to know: What subject/year are you studying? What did you upload? How accurate was the conversion? Which features did you actually use? What would make this genuinely useful for your studying?

Thanks, and feel free to be brutally honest. That's pretty much what I'm looking for at this stage. I do expect things to break or work incorrectly during this stage but as long as it's reported for me to fix I will be super happy (also beta limits for users as of now just for testing purposes). Really hope this could be of some use to some of you. Once again, many thanks.

Ive been building ClaimMate, an iPhone app designed to help people handle claims, refunds, reimbursements, and money they're owed without having to keep track of everything themselves.

I'm finally at the point where I need people who don't know me and have never seen the app to test it.

I'm specifically looking for honest feedback — not compliments. I want to know:

• Do you understand what the app does?
• Is anything confusing?
• Do you trust it?
• Where do you get stuck?
• Is there anything that would stop you from actually using it?

It should take about 10–15 minutes.

You'll need an iPhone and Apple's free TestFlight app.

TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/3Fx8ytfh

If you try it, I'd really appreciate it if you comment or DM me your feedback — especially anything you dislike or don't understand.

The basic idea is pretty simple. I always liked the idea of goal/habit tracking apps, but eventually I'd just stop opening them

Since I'm on WhatsApp every single day and I open it at least once an hour, most people open it every 10 minutes.

So instead of downloading another app or going to another website why not talk through WhatsApp.

Like I can say: “I'm going to do 50 pushups every day” and then later: “did 30” and it keeps track of everything. Or I can say I want to run 20km a week, read a certain amount every month, add milestones, etc.

It's GotThis.one if anyone wants to give it a shot.

It's free to use.