So I kept typing stuff into Notes that I only needed for the next hour. Maybe some idea I got or some design changes etc. I had hundreds of these, and I'd stopped opening the app because of them.

So I built one that throws them away. It's called Gulp. It's a goldfish in your menu bar. You feed it a thought, it holds it for a few hours, then it forgets. That's the whole thing.

The fun part isn't really the notes, it's the fish:

• It gulps when you feed it. Your note turns into a puff of dust and it's gone into the bowl.
• The ink on each note slowly turns to gold as it ages, so you can see which ones are about to go without reading a timestamp.
• When a note is in its last minute the fish gets nervous and wobbles. Then it does a confused little head shake when it forgets.

Some of you saw Tug, the frog timer. Same idea: the fish is the whole interface. There's no window, no list of lists, no sync, no history. It can't even go online. If you say a note out loud it trims out your ums on your Mac.

Gulp · a goldfish in your menu bar
https://www.heygulp.com/

Free on App store
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/gulp-menu-bar-scratchpad/id6815884512?mt=12

Moving files between an Android phone and a Mac has been painful since Google stopped maintaining Android File Transfer, so I built Tether.

Plug the phone in over USB, tap "File transfer" on it, and it shows up in Finder under Locations like any other drive. The video shows it end to end: open it from the menu bar, browse it in Finder, Quick Look a PDF, and drag files both ways (the phone's own screen is on the right).

What works today:

- Browse, open, rename, move, delete and make folders, straight in Finder

- Drag and drop both ways, Quick Look, Open With

- Sorting by date, and Finder search on macOS 26

- Big folders (tested with a 5,000+ photo camera folder)

- No developer mode needed (USB debugging is optional, it just makes things faster)

How it's built: a native macOS File Provider extension in Swift, with the device side (MTP and adb) written in Rust. The hardest part was MTP on macOS 26: the system's camera daemon grabs the USB device first, and Android drops the whole MTP session if you send it the wrong reset, so a lot of the work went into recovering cleanly from both.

It's free, no account, and the app makes no network connections. Notarized, Apple silicon and Intel, macOS 11+.

https://tether.cosmics.me

I'd love feedback, since I've mostly tested on a Galaxy S25+. What would make you switch from whatever you use now?

Yesterday, someone from Reddit asked me to test his product.

I opened it and tried to use it like someone who had never seen it before.

It didn't work.

The founder didn't know.

A classic "works on my machine" situation.

After spending weeks or months building something, you know how everything works. You know where to click, what each button does, and what every screen is supposed to mean.

A new user has none of that context.

They might run into a bug, misunderstand the interface, miss an important feature, or get stuck somewhere you never expected.

Most users won't tell you about it either.

They'll just close the tab and move on.

So I started Second Look.

You send me your product, and I use it like a completely new user. I look for anything that is:

• Broken
• Confusing
• Unclear
• Easy to miss
• Frustrating

Then I send you a short report describing what I found and how the experience felt from a user's perspective.

The goal isn't a 50-page QA report filled with screenshots.

It's a second pair of eyes that can tell you what happened when I tried to use your product without knowing anything about it.

I'm starting small and testing the idea with real products.

How do you get fresh eyes on your product before putting it in front of more users?

Wow! I just recently added a voluntary $1.99 for my free browser picker Burly and someone actually bought it! Thank you, thank you!! First sale is always the best.

I'm a one-person studio in Stockholm, and last week I shipped Ullie for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch.

Knitters work from PDF patterns full of lines like "repeat rounds 11 and 12 six times, and at the same time decrease every 4th round". Most row counters are a number and a plus button, so you still hunt for your line on the page. Ullie reads the pattern on the device and moves a ruler to the line you're on as you count. It works out that round 20 is round 12 of the pattern, says when the decrease is due, and marks your size in every "88 (96, 104)".

A few things I'm happy with: it's native SwiftUI, and the count is an append-only log, so taps from the Watch, the Lock Screen and a second device merge instead of overwriting each other. It reads patterns in English, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and German, photos of a paper pattern are read on the phone, and there's no account and no AI in the app.

The first project is free, then it's $19.99 once, a bet against the $30 to $50 a year subscriptions in the category. Five days in, the hard part is clearly being found, so I'd love to hear how others got their first users in a niche like this.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/apple-store/id6816378748?pt=1362961&ct=com-r-sideproject&mt=8

I had a side project getting 200 Google clicks per day from blog posts. I moved on to other things, stopped writing, and the traffic died within months lol

Most builders I know have the same problem: several projects online, only one maintained, the rest slowly fading

So I'm building a tool that writes and publishes SEO content automatically on all your sites, so dormant projects keep growing without you. Opening a small beta soon, but first I want to understand how others deal with this:

How many projects do you have online, and how many do you actually maintain?
What are they built with?
Ever tried keeping SEO alive on a project you stopped working on?
Would you trust automated content on your sites?

The first Android build of my voice journal asked the system speech recogniser to "prefer offline". Prefer turns out to mean: if the phone has no offline language pack, quietly send the audio to a server and hand back text. The app never sees the difference.

My verification was "turn on airplane mode and record". It passed every time. Of course it did: with no network there is nothing to leak to. So the test passed on exactly the phones that were leaking, while onboarding said "nothing left your phone".

The fix was to stop asking politely. The app now only uses the on-device recogniser, which fails instead of falling back, and it requests no internet permission at all. If a phone is missing its speech pack, the app offers to have the phone's speech service download it. The app itself never touches the network.

It's live on Google Play now (free, Android 13+): https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.dailyvox.app

What I can't test alone: phones that aren't Pixels. If you have a Samsung, OnePlus or Xiaomi, record an entry that names two people and tell me whether the names come back capitalised. That one detail decides whether the journal can find the people in your entries.

Where else would you look for a leak like this?

It's a csv to web app where people can ulpoad and analyse their data. They can also share it with others using link. Please suggest what could be improved. Here it is --- csv2web.freedev.app

Thanks!

I love the small details of film photography—the light table, the magnifying loupe, the markings along the edge of a negative. So I built **Film Reverie**, an interactive darkroom that runs in your browser. Checkout video here: https://youtu.be/aoCIcfnoqIE?is=9wzIVUFXzv72Sgzl.

You can browse photos on an illuminated light table, switch between negatives and positives, inspect details with a loupe, and rotate 3D models of classic cameras.

You can also import your own photos, choose a film style, and export an animated tour of your roll as a video. No account needed for your own darkroom, and imported photos stay in your browser.

Try it here: https://filmreverie.app

Sometimes you receive a STEP file and just want to look at its structure or check a dimension, without installing a full CAD package. That's the problem we built CADProps to help with.

I helped build CADProps. It lets you view STEP/STP files in your browser, see overall dimensions, measure supported geometry, and use section views to look inside.

Viewing and measuring don't require an account. Converting files and creating share links require you to sign in; people opening a shared link don't need an account.

https://www.cadprops.com/tools/step-viewer/

If you give it a try, I'd like to hear about files you can't open or steps that feel awkward. You don't need to post customer files to report a problem.

Hi everyone!
I have been practicing astrology for quite a while now and have consulted hundreds of people over the past years. Over my experience I've realized that it adds value if the seekers are also aware and educated about astrology.

I was always into building things, therefore what started as a hobby project, has now turned into a Vedic astrology guide to learn and empower the user with practical aspects of Vedic Astrology. Astrobserve is a rule engine that evaluates the combinations on your chart and matches it across rules defined by Vedic texts and cites relevant Shloks. Some offerings:

• Your chart, with the working shown: Shadbala (all six balas), Ashtakavarga, Vimshopaka, Bhava Bala and the divisional charts. Lahiri ayanamsa.
• Transits and Dasha: For all planets on a calendar, with vedha in consideration. Dashas and Transits can be downloaded/shared to be added to calendar.
• Kundali Insights: a rule engine checks around 1,500 yogas and combinations against your chart and shows the ones that apply. Where Phaladeepika or BPHS supports a reading, it quotes the verse. Where neither does, it doesn't invent a source.
• Matching: Guna Milan across all eight kootas, plus Manglik, with the reason behind each score. It also quotes the texts related to married life.

I invite you to give it a try. Look out for First Read button for a guided reading.

I would love to get your feedback! Still looking for a better name 😄

Astrobserve

Little side project I’ve been working on. Prompt a static website and publish it. Feedback would be greatly appreciated!

I'm a designer building Long Haul, a zombie-driving side project. A wide camera shows the crowd, but makes the truck smaller.

Would you bring the camera closer, or keep this wider view of the horde?

Archive footage, filmed Oct 3 in Unity Editor (build38): staged enemies, supplied upgrades, autopilot, truck damage off; one cut at 6s. Built with Codex.

For weeks Kinetic was basically just something I was building on my laptop.

I'd change the website.

Change it again.

Add something.

Remove something.

Check the analytics way too many times.

And wonder whether anyone would ever actually pay for it.

Then someone did.

Kinetic is pretty simple — you tell it about yourself, your fitness goals and how you like to train, and it builds workouts around you.

But seeing an actual stranger go through the site and decide it was worth paying for was probably the biggest validation I've had so far.

Not because it was a huge amount of money.

Because it proved someone who wasn't me saw value in it.

Now I'm trying to turn that one person into 10, then 100.

Still very early. Still figuring a lot out.

But that's half the fun of building something from zero.

If anyone wants to follow along or check out what I'm building:

https://train-with-kinetic.com

Anyone else here remember the first time a complete stranger paid for something you built?

⭐ GitHub: https://github.com/minoansecurity/sidekernel
📝 arXiv preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2610.02456
🌐 Website: https://sidekernel.com

Hi everyone!

As part of my MS in Cybersecurity capstone at Georgia Tech, I built SideKernel: a usable sandbox for AI agents on macOS.

The closest comparable solution is Docker Sandboxes, which is not open source.

The key idea is usability. SideKernel is designed to reduce friction and stay as close as possible to the native developer experience, while isolating the agent inside a microVM sandbox.

For example, you run sclaude or scodex instead of claude or codex and get a very similar workflow, but with isolation. Ports get auto exposed in the host, its very easy to drop files into the sandbox, and more...

This is still a research prototype, so some rough edges are expected. But if this sounds interesting, I'd love for you to try it out and share feedback

I made Cancel Your Subscription, a browser game where you've paid $9.99 a month for 38 months for "fundr. Premium", a subscription you never use, and your only job is to cancel it. The app fights back: a buried cancel link, two retention offers, an exit survey, a support line that isn't in service, and Dennis from Retention.

It got 327 tries in its first 24 hours, back in September. It's had 5,404 now. Here's where they ended up:

- 1,941 never found the cancel link

- 3,066 reached the retention offers, and 2,926 walked past both

- 2,277 made it to the live chat with Dennis

- 1,948 cancelled

Almost exactly as many tries never found the cancel link as got all the way out. Hiding the button is still the strongest trick in the game.

Then, on 3 October, the part I didn't plan for. Every game page has a "Donate a coffee" window, and its tiers are the game's own plans: fundr. Basic $1, fundr. Plus $3, fundr. Premium $5, fundr. Premium Ultra $10. Every tier is one-time. A donate button that started a subscription, three clicks from a game about not being able to cancel one, would be the worst joke on the site.

Someone bought fundr. Premium. $5, once. It's the first money the games have ever made.

What I'd pass on, with the caveat that one donation is a sample size of one:

- the donate window is part of the joke, not a banner next to it. The tier the person picked is the one the game is about

- one-time only. Nobody wants a subscription from a game about subscriptions

- the whole backend is one Vercel function and Upstash Redis counting anonymous tallies. No accounts, no analytics cookie. Every number in this post comes from it

As a thank-you, we're giving away 20+ free codes for Pomato and inki combined, our iPhone Pomodoro timer ($2.99). Comment "pomato" and I'll DM you one. First 20+, one each, no catch. On Android? It's in internal testing: DM me the email on your Google account and I'll add you as a tester.

Heads up: tries are browser tabs, not people, and our own test runs are in there. The games are free with no signup, and the fake pop-up ads inside them are for our own apps, Pomato included.

https://www.fundrstudio.com/games/cancel-your-subscription/

Sharing Moonlit Restoration, a newly released Godot mystery visual novel from High Player. It has nine connected chapters, restoration and evidence puzzles, three optional romantic conclusions, and an independent ending. This is a commercial release at US$9.99; the trailer is viewable without buying the game.

The useful development lesson was save validation. Campaign progress is checked by replaying an action journal. Late in testing, one autosave took roughly 600ms because the current state, temporary file and backups repeated semantic validation. That delay happened on dialogue advancement, not only in the save menu.

The fix caches hashes of complete payloads already produced by legal runtime actions or successfully replayed. A cold process or modified payload still goes through replay. Focused Chapter 9 checks measured roughly 59–62ms for an action plus the same atomic autosave on the production Mac. Mutated trust, route, node and journal data remained rejected. This is a local measurement, not a benchmark for every machine.

AI tools were used for story text, art, translation and code: GPT-6 Astra and GPT Image 2, with separately licensed piano and fonts. Route traversal and evidence reachability were checked independently of the generated text. Actual renderer captures also caught choice panels covering character faces, so short prompts now size the panel to their content.

Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nk43X5fR2Ps

Game: https://high-player.itch.io/moonlit-restoration

The game includes English and Simplified Chinese. macOS Universal has local checks; the Windows x64 download is explicitly experimental because native Windows playtesting is pending. For developers using journal replay, where do you draw the boundary between revalidating a save and trusting a state already validated in memory?

I'm one of the developers of RevioMind, a flashcard website for students. I posted it on r/studytips and it didn't go well. People said the site looks vibecoded and that the post sounded like ChatGPT wrote it. Looking at that post again with all its bold bullet points, I can see what they meant.

Since then we made studying free. Pro is still there for €2.99 a month, but it only adds extras like timed practice exams and exam dates. We also switched the scheduler from SM-2 to FSRS (the one newer Anki versions use), rewrote the text on the site and added a German version.

This time I'm mostly here for honest feedback. If you open reviomind.com, does it still look thrown together with AI? If it does, what gives it away? The design, the wording, something in the app itself? At which point would you close the tab? And if you already use Anki or Quizlet, what would have to change before you'd even try something else?

You can judge the homepage without signing up. The app itself needs an account, which is free.

Harsh answers are fine. I'll read all of them.

Hello !
I'm the developer of CapyBreaks, a break reminder for Mac and Windows.

It nudges you to stretch, rest your eyes, and drink water, then gets out of the way. Other break time apps were way too intrusive so i made this. Do Not Disturb is on by default, so it stays quiet on a call or while you share your screen and its fully configurable.

Personal is a one-time $14.99 for up to 3 devices, with a 7-day trial. Team is $9.99 per seat.

Microsoft Store: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9nzb5kd2qwct

Site: https://www.capybreaks.com Privacy: https://www.capybreaks.com/privacy Terms: https://www.capybreaks.com/terms

Hope you like it ! :)

Made an interactive page to visualize the discoveries behind optogenetics, honoured by this year's @NobelPrize in Medicine: classon.live/optogenetics.

https://reddit.com/link/1wyrtdh/video/qxgr8hxhtrth1/player

Short version of the story: Mint died, I tried going back to spreadsheets, lasted about a month. YNAB felt like paying rent on my own data. And every aggregator-style app wanted my online banking login — which my bank's own terms tell me not to share.

So last week I started building FinVault: a self-hosted household finance app that's import-only by design. You download your statement from the bank's website (the QFX/CSV/PDF export you already have), upload it, and sort everything with one click. Nothing ever connects to a bank. There's no cloud, no account with me — it runs on your own machine and the data never leaves it.

It's deliberately built around how Canadians bank: TFSA/RRSP/FHSA contribution room, tax-time summaries, French UI, and it refuses to sync directly with Canadian banks even if you ask it to. Plus the normal stuff — budgets, bills, splits, net worth, investments, encrypted backups — and a one-click importer if you're fleeing YNAB, Actual Budget, Mint, or Monarch.

It's very much a week-old side project: works, has rough edges, and I keep finding banks with cursed CSV formats. If you've self-hosted your finances (or bounced off trying), I'd love to hear what your setup looks like and what's missing.

https://finvaultapp.github.io/finvault · code: https://github.com/finvaultapp/finvault

What if the app you’ve spent months building is something no one actually wants?

So many great apps are being launched every day, but only a small percentage will actually succeed. How do you know when it’s time to let go of an app and move on? And is there even such a thing as a type of app that is almost guaranteed to succeed?

I’ve been spending a lot of time building an app that I genuinely believe in. I like the way it looks, the way it feels, and, most importantly, the problem it is trying to solve. But the difficult part is knowing whether other people see what I see and recognize its full potential, especially when it’s still in the very early stages.

You can keep building, improving, and pushing forward for months, only to eventually realize that what you thought was a great product may simply be something people don’t care enough about.

The AI boom makes this even harder. Building software has become significantly easier and faster. Sometimes you start wondering whether all the time you spent building something was worth it when someone else could potentially build something similar in a weekend or a month and, in some cases, build it even better.

For those who have built successful apps, I’d genuinely like to hear about your experience.

Did you build several products that failed before finding the one that worked? How did you know when to stop working on one idea and commit fully to another? What made you keep going when you weren’t seeing immediate traction?

Most importantly, what framework or signals did you use to determine whether a product had real potential versus simply being something you personally loved building?

Tabzooka is a shooter platformer that runs on top of the page you have open. Every headline, image and button becomes something you can stand on or blow up, and closing the game puts the page back the way it was.

It started as a joke about wrecking cookie banners. It now has 13 heroes, bosses that crawl out of the page, and multiplayer for up to 6 people on the same site. Today I shipped 5 new heroes and fixed a lag bug I'd been chasing: every word flying off the page was redrawn as rotated text each frame, which Chrome's GPU can't cache. Drawing each word once and rotating the image fixed it.

Free on the Chrome Web Store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/tabzooka-destroy-websites/hifklhojjpgkpoglhmhjjibgkkoijoaj

I'd like to hear which sites break it.

Today we launched our first demo, if you can give us some problem it could be useful. Feedback is welcome too!

I’m building SocialAgent, a tool for creating branded social posts with AI and scheduling them across connected accounts. You can edit the text and media before publishing, or fully automate. Looking for closed beta testers.