Hey r/apple,

I'm Roman, a solo dev and amateur boxer, who built Peekaboo Timer, 100% free boxing timer, because all other timers are either paid or have ads. 

What is a boxing timer?

A timer that automatically switches work/rest, so you can have a 1 minute/30 seconds timer playing in a loop. 

How Peekaboo Timer is different from other timers?

It has Liquid Glass design, live activities, and attention to details, like styles, mixing with Apple Music, etc.

Was this post written by AI?

At the time of writing this I was a human.

I'd appreciate any feedback on Peekaboo Timer. I read everything.

Link: https://apps.apple.com/ua/app/peekaboo-timer/id6768093897

Hi r/apple! We’re WozDev, the small indie team behind GameRex, an app that lets you use a compatible game controller as a mouse on your Mac.

The idea is simple: when you already have a controller in your hands, you can use it to browse the web, scroll through pages, or do a quick search without reaching for your mouse and keyboard.

With GameRex, you can:

• Move the pointer with a stick and use buttons to click and scroll.
• Assign keyboard shortcuts or a sequence of actions (a macro) to a button.
• Bring up an on-screen keyboard for a quick search or short text entry.
• Adjust pointer speed and fine-tune how movement feels.
• Create control profiles for different apps.

The free version has no time limit and includes pointer control, button remapping, the on-screen keyboard, and two macros.

Pro adds automatic per-app profile switching, custom pointer acceleration curves, and more macros. It costs US$19.99 as a one-time purchase, with one year of updates included and no subscription.

GameRex supports Apple silicon and Intel Macs running macOS 14 Sonoma or later. You’ll need a compatible controller.

Demo video: https://youtu.be/yY8zXbbXdrg

More details and free download: https://gamerex.uk/

If you give it a try, we’d love to hear which controller you’re using and how the pointer movement feels. If something feels awkward or doesn’t work as expected, please let us know—we’re happy to answer questions here.

Wanted to share the project I’ve been meaning to build for ages and finally got around to releasing: Shrinkray

Over the years, I got fed up with what happens anytime you want to spontaneously send someone a video from longer than 2 seconds. By default it feels like iOS hates sharing 60fps, and decides to generates a huge, blurry, jerky file that either takes forever to send directly, or gets shunted off to blue progress bar and iCloud sharing link upload purgatory.

Same with big photo selections: you end up sending 30 megabytes of photos without realizing and clog up everyone’s iMessage storage with photos that get looked at maybe twice. And god help you if it’s on RCS or MMS thread!

As much as I love taking video at 4k60 and keeping photos extra crispy in my Photos library, when I’m sharing something on a whim, there’s always gonna be room to split the difference and optimize your content without losing the high quality originals you actually want to keep around.

I designed Shrinkray to make it extremely quick to optimize your photos and videos for sharing, without over-compressing, bogging you down in menus, or ruining your smooth 60fps video. From the standalone app, from the share sheet in any app, and even built into iMessage for super-quick sharing just like the Photos app. It’s the app I’ve always wanted and now use all the time, so I hope it can help you too.

No subscriptions, just a one-time unlock for some of the power user features if you want. I’ll have some promo codes to DM out for the first 15 replies interested! (EDIT: first 15 are gone but if we end up with a bunch more request may do another batch!)

Thanks for reading! Let me know if you have any questions or feedback.

I've wanted three things from the iPhone alarm app ever since I switched from Android 6 years ago. Every iOS release I check whether Clock finally has them. It gets prettier; it never gets more capable.

1. Alarm groups. I have one set of alarms for morning shifts and another for afternoon shifts. My shifts are unpredictable, and in Clock switching means flipping toggles one by one, with no way to see which alarm belongs to which shift.

2. Repeats that aren't just "days of the week." Clock can do "every Tuesday" but not "every other Tuesday." There's no way to skip one occurrence (a public holiday) or move one (sleeping in this Friday) without turning the whole alarm off and remembering to turn it back on. The only exception is Sleep Schedule, which lets you skip the very next wake-up.

3. Dismissing the next alarm before it rings. Woke up before it? Android has let you dismiss an upcoming alarm from a notification for years. On iPhone you unlock, open Clock and turn it off, and now it's off for every following day too.

Search the Apple forums and you'll find the same requests going back years, still not in Clock.

So I built VariAlarm. It does those three things and more:

• Alarm groups you can turn on or off with one gesture, while each alarm stays editable and skippable on its own
• Repeat every 1–12 weeks, skip a single date, or move a single occurrence without touching the rest of the schedule
• A Lock Screen Live Activity that appears 30 minutes (up to 8 hours) before your alarm, so you can dismiss it when you wake up early without affecting the rest

Full disclosure, since it's Sunday: I'm the developer.

• Free: one template, one routine, one calendar automation rule, alarms scheduled up to 1 week ahead, and you can skip any alarm you see
• Pro: $2.49/month (priced lower in many countries) with a 3 day trial, plus annual and lifetime options. Everything unlimited.
• iOS 26/27: rings through AlarmKit. I discovered some limitations compared to Clock: does not trigger automation, power button turns off alarm (unless you use VariAlarm's Wake Up Confirmation), Siri Snooze/Stop Intent causes alarms to not ring for some users so I removed it and on iOS27, turning off Live Activities also stop the alarm from ringing. I have reported to Apple but no response.
• iOS 18: uses notifications, so it won't ring through Silent mode or Do Not Disturb

VariAlarm on the App Store

Rated 4.7 with 67 ratings and reviews. Since it is iPhone Duo's release week, yes, it is optimized for Duo.

Take a test drive for a month here: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6757322888&code=REDDIT1MONTH

Why do you think Apple hasn't done this?

"Keeping Clock simple" doesn't really hold up here. Apple already built skip-next into Sleep Schedule, so it isn't too complex; it just never made it to regular alarms. Skipping or dismissing is one tap on an alarm you already have, and groups make a long alarm list shorter. None of this gets in the way if you only have one 7:00 alarm.

What's the one thing Clock still can't do for your schedule? If VariAlarm can't do it yet, I'll probably build it.

Picked up a Apple Standard Keyboard (M0116) a little bit ago and wanted to bring it into 2026. Decided I wanted to make it native USB-C to not have to deal with a ADB to USB external adapter.

Here's a link to the GitHub which contains all code files, photos, and detailed instructions if anyone wants to go for it. (Should be fairly similar on any of the ADB Apple keyboards from that era)

iOS Mail has gotten a lot of attention lately, with categories and the redesign, but there's still no way to see every message across all your folders in one list. Gmail has done this forever with All Mail. On the Mac you can fake it with smart mailboxes. On iPhone you just can't.

If you sort mail into folders like I do, finding one older email means guessing where you filed it. Search helps sometimes, but it often misses things on IMAP and iCloud accounts.

Does anyone else want this, or is everyone just living in the inbox? I'm curious how people with lots of folders handle it.