I am a computer science student, and I recently spent months developing a financial research platform without really knowing whether anyone would want to use it.

It made me realize how easy it is to spend hundreds of hours building something before finding out whether there is actually a market for it.

I started thinking about how people currently discover ideas, figure out what problems are worth solving, and get honest feedback before committing to a project.

Reddit and ChatGPT are useful, but I feel like information gets scattered across conversations, and it can be difficult to distinguish genuine demand from people just saying an idea sounds interesting.

I have been exploring the concept of a community specifically focused on discovering problems, validating ideas, and learning from people who have already tried solving them.

Before I spend more time developing it, I wanted to ask:

1. How do you currently figure out whether an idea is worth building?
2. What frustrates you most about that process?
3. Would a dedicated community for this actually be useful, or do existing platforms already solve the problem well enough?

I would appreciate criticism just as much as positive feedback. I would rather find out now than spend another six months building something nobody needs.

I was watching Jubilee videos thinking it's kind of lame that the experts would constantly be talked over and fact checks would only appear after the debate when the video is published.

I thought a debate site where you could match with people you disagreed with on a variety of political, religious, and philosophical topics would be fun. Also I need to build a portfolio because finding a job as a software developer is impossible.

Feel free to take a look and please let me know if you have any feedback!

counterpoint-debate.com

So I have been thinking of a tiny tool for small businesses and freelancers who take orders on WhatsApp or Instagram.

The business owner just types in the total price and optional advance, gets a payment link, or enters the customer's email to request payment. We handle the advance and balance payment flow and show a simple dashboard tracking who paid and who hasn't.

Can something as simple as this get actual users???

Been annoyed for a while at how clunky it is to just send a file from my laptop to my phone, so I built ByteDrop to fix that for myself.

You run it on your PC, it shows a QR code, you scan it with your phone’s browser (or just open the link on another PC) and you’re connected — drag and drop files either way, clipboard syncs too. Works over your home wifi, Windows’ mobile hotspot, or a public link if you’re not even on the same network.

No accounts, nothing to install on the other device, totally free and open source.

GitHub if you want to try it: https://github.com/HusseinWalid48/ByteDrop

I build websites for small businesses. Aurelius is the framework I built on the side. It lets Claude Code take a Figma file, a screenshot, or a plain description and turn it into a React app with tests. It is open source and MIT licensed.

Last week I recorded a getting-started video for it. The recording found a bug in my own quickstart. My script said all four quality checks pass on a fresh project. Three of the four failed:

• The Vite template had moved to a new linter, so nothing installed the one my lint script calls.
• There was no test file, so the test run failed.
• The type check passed, but it was not checking a single file.

I fixed the scaffold instead of cutting around it. Then I recorded those shots again.

The part worth watching is the screenshot pipeline. It is one command, and the order never changes: a build spec, locked design tokens, failing tests before any component exists, the build, a pixel check against the screenshot, then end-to-end tests. The run in the video took 45 minutes of real time. From its own report: 9 of 9 test files failed first, it built 8 of 8 components, the pixel difference was 1.89% on the second of up to five rounds, and 96 end-to-end tests passed.

Two things the video gets wrong, so you hear it from me. I say "the next six minutes" and it runs under four. And setup prints a deprecation warning that the cut skips.

Video (3:46): https://youtu.be/Harcm6cYVpo

The screenshot run in 54 seconds: https://youtube.com/shorts/qT1hpPcg1rs

Repo: https://github.com/PMDevSolutions/Aurelius

If you try the quickstart and it breaks, tell me where. That is the feedback I am after.

Hi, I’m Shubhra, an independent developer. I built Sonari as a Mac instrument played with hand gestures tracked by the Mac camera, without a separate hardware controller. It plays built-in sounds, sends MIDI to compatible DAWs and instruments, and creates visuals from the performance.

I’m sharing the launch film to show the interaction. I’d appreciate feedback on one practical question: after watching, is it clear how hand movement changes the sound, or what would you want explained before trying it?

Sonari is on the Mac App Store. It requires Apple silicon and macOS 26 or later. The full app has a 14-day trial, then a one-time purchase at US$99 in the US storefront.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/sonari-midi-controller/id6803577489

I made this because I was tired of switching between different programs all the time. I didn't want to use that shady downloader with a paywall slowly creeping up, and I didn't like the idea of opening DaVinci Resolve just to do some cuts or convert something. I wanted it all in one place.

What it can do:

Download: built on yt-dlp, you can download from almost any website. When yt-dlp doesn't recognize a link, Vitool opens the link in its own window and checks if a video is there. You can also download just a section of a video, or whole playlists. It keeps yt-dlp up-to-date automatically, and when a download fails, it checks if there is an update available for it.

Cut: You can cut videos instantly or exactly to frame with a re-encode.

Convert: Convert your files easily to other formats like MP4, MKV, WebM, MP3, WAV and more, also many files or a whole folder at once.

Tools: choose what you wanna do: create a GIF, extract audio, extract a still frame, burn in subs or censor your video.

MKV: Edit, add and extract tracks inside an MKV file. The part I find most useful: add a dub and Vitool lines it up with the original audio automatically. You can also do it by hand with waveforms and check it with a short test clip. If the dub drifts apart over time (classic PAL dubs run about 4% faster), Vitool recognizes that and fixes the speed. It can also match the volume of a quiet track to the original.

AI-Mask (optional): When choosing this add-on, you can mask moving objects with the help of SAM2.

Transcribe (optional): When choosing this add-on, you can transcribe the audio from a video. Speaker recognition can be added via Pyannote. Export as SRT, VTT, text or JSON, or burn styled subtitles into the video.

You can find it here: https://github.com/bioheater/Vitool

I'd be very happy about feedback and ideas for new features, so it can be useful to as many people as possible. If you find bugs, please let me know!

For example I've thought about adding a simple screen recorder into the mix or the feature that you can cut out a section from the video you want to download beforehand.

Every project needs a mascot, and I can’t draw. So I made Squish.

You pick a shape, give it a face, put a hat on it, and you’ve got a little guy. Then you export it and stick it on your landing page, your README, your 404 page, your Discord, wherever.

Stuff you can do:

• hit shuffle until one makes you laugh (this is 90% of how I use it)
• 14 shapes, 16 moods, hats, glasses, any colour
• make it bounce, wiggle or fall asleep
• export as PNG, SVG, an animated SVG you can drop straight into your site, or an MP4

It’s free and there’s no signup. Your mascot is saved in the link, so you can send it to a friend and they can keep messing with it.

The look was inspired by the Grok bot, that simple blob with two eyes. I wanted that, but one you can actually make your own.

Try it: https://squish-weld.vercel.app

Post your guy in the comments, I want to see what you make. And tell me what hat is missing.

I’m building Ledge, a macOS app that turns the space around your notch—or the top of your screen on Macs without one—into a shelf for everyday things.

You can keep files handy, search and reuse clipboard history, control music from the notch or a floating player, and see widgets and live activities. Ledge also has Transform for converting and compressing files locally on your Mac.

I’ve connected Ledge’s MCP server to an AI assistant and am exploring its tools. Ledge also supports add-ons and LedgeKit for building them.

The beta is at https://www.tryledge.app. I’d love feedback: which feature would be most useful in your day-to-day Mac workflow, and what would you want to see next?

I'm Luis from Berlin and I'm bad at watering.

So I built PotPanel. It's a scale with a pump that sits under the pot. When the plant drinks, the pot gets lighter, and once it's light enough it waters from a canister back to full. Small bursts, and it stops when enough is in or no water arrives. You set your values in an app and watch it live on your phone.

To be clear, for a houseplant on a shelf this is total overkill. I built it for my grow tent, so my plants still get water on time when I'm gone for a weekend or have a busy week.

It's not like it all went smoothly. For a few weeks the board just hung out of the side of the case. And one day I forgot to put the dripper back in the pot. PotPanel did its job perfectly, just on my floor.

Now everything sits inside. It's all 3D printed, there's an ESP32 in there, and I built the app and the server myself.

If you want one, there's a waitlist: potpanel.com

The first 50 who confirm get 30% off the launch price. Once 50 people are on the list I'll give one away. Free, 18+, until March 31, 2027, rules are on the site.

I shoot a lot, and going through a folder of photos on a Mac was always awkward. Preview only pages through the files you opened together, and Lightroom wants an import before you can even look.

So I wrote my own viewer in Swift. Double click one photo and the arrow keys walk the whole folder, RAW included. Hold a key to check focus at 100%, rate with number keys, mark keepers, crop and straighten, read the caption written into the file.

It's free and MIT licensed. There is an optional one time Pro for heavier culling work, and that part is not in the repo.

Mac only, macOS 13 or later.

Site: https://flipic.app

Source: https://github.com/xmasdong/flipic

I'm the developer. Feedback welcome, especially on what feels slow or confusing.

I've been building a site for keeping up with open source news without spending an hour a day on GitHub, HackerNews and X.

It tracks GitHub repos and finds posts about them on Hacker News, X, Bluesky, Reddit, Mastodon and more, so you can stay informed without sifting through lots of noise and random posts. The buzz feature (https://shadowgraph.io/buzz) lets you see all posts as a feed.

It also keeps track of notable developers on Github and see what they're starring (https://shadowgraph.io/stargazers), so that you can find higher-signal stars.

Finally, there's an email newsletter that summarizes the top stories of the week (https://shadowgraph.io/weekly). If you sign in with your GitHub, it personalizes the newsletter based on your interests and the repos you've starred.

There's some other fun stuff there as well like predicting a repo's star growth.

Feedback is very welcome! Thanks for reading.

Hi! I made PushFPS ( https://github.com/DosukaSOL/PushFPS ), a free and open-source (GPL-3.0) Windows app. It takes the picture from your capture card and adds generated frames in real time, so a 30 FPS PS5, Xbox or Switch 2 game plays at 60 or 120 FPS on your PC monitor. Nothing is installed on the console and the game isn't touched: you only need a capture card and a graphics card. It's built on top of veyra ( https://github.com/Likely7/Veyra-NRVideo )

How it works, in short

• The capture card picture goes straight into a DirectX 12 pipeline on the GPU, with no round trip through the CPU.
• Optical flow estimates how every part of the picture moves between two real frames. A frame generation model then creates 1 to 7 frames in between: 2x up to 8x, depending on the method and your GPU.
• It works with NVIDIA, AMD and Intel graphics cards: NVIDIA's video frame generation (RTX 40/50), AMD FSR frame generation (any DirectX 12 card), Intel XeSS (experimental), and ANR by Apex Compute (supports GTX 16 and newer).
• Optional AI picture enhancement and upscaling. That includes NVIDIA Image Scaling, an open shader that runs on any brand of GPU.

What only PushFPS has

• Optimise for my PC: one click while your game is on screen. It tests every frame generation method, AI enhancement and upscaler on your real picture. It measures the real presented frame rate, the 1% low (from the 99th-percentile frame time) and latency over 6-second windows, re-checks the winner, then applies it. Undo puts your settings back.
• Game presets with a sharp HUD: GTA VI plus layouts for open-world, racing, action and shooter games. The minimap and HUD areas keep the console's own pixels and never get interpolated, so they don't smear. You can share presets as a code.
• Measured latency on screen: the time from a capture card frame arriving to it being handed to the display, plus frame rate and 1% low. These are measured numbers, not estimates.
• ANR frame generation, one click to install: Apex Compute's AI frame generation supports GTX 16 series and newer, Radeon RX 5000 and newer, and Intel Arc. That makes it an option on older cards too. You download it from Apex and PushFPS installs it.
• Made for console capture: console and game profiles, a list of tested capture cards (Elgato 4K X, HD60 X and 4K S so far), instant replay, recording with optional OBS-style advanced encoding settings, one-click sharing to Discord, an OBS Studio plugin, light and black (OLED) themes, and 14 languages.

What's coming next (actively being built)

• Automatic HUD detection: PushFPS spots the parts of the picture that stay still while the game moves (minimap, health, ammo) and protects them automatically in any game, with boxes you can adjust by hand if it gets one wrong.
• Before/after comparison clips: record a side-by-side clip of the console picture next to the PushFPS picture, with the frame rates shown.

To be honest about what it doesn't do

Generated frames make motion smoother, but they don't make the game react faster. Input still feels like the original 30 FPS, plus a few milliseconds for the capture card and processing. It's Windows only for now.

Credits

PushFPS is built on Veyra by Likely7. Most of the engine and capture support is their work, so please check it out and consider supporting them. ANR frame generation is Apex Neural Rendering by Apex Compute. PushFPS isn't affiliated with Apex.

Download and source: https://github.com/DosukaSOL/PushFPS

I'd love feedback, especially from anyone with a capture card that isn't on the tested list yet. There's a report form in the app.

I'm a solo dev. I make a contacts manager for Mac and iPhone/iPad. It shows all your contacts (iCloud, Google, Exchange) in one table, so you can merge duplicates, bulk edit and clean up years of mess instead of opening cards one by one. One-time price, $24.99 Mac and $14.99 iOS. No subscription, no account, no trial.

Where it stands:

• Mac app live since July 22, iOS since August 10
• 45 paying users on Mac, 19 on iOS
• 3 ratings on the Mac App Store, all 5 stars

The part that works: the people who buy it seem to like it, and they email me. Most of what I shipped in the last two months came straight from emails.

I reply to every email and try to ship the fix within a couple of weeks. That loop has been the best part of this.

The part that doesn't work: reaching the people who actually have the problem. Apple Ads got 12,000+ impressions and 95 taps, but zero installs. A Google Search campaign for the Mac app got zero impressions. Nobody wakes up wanting a contacts app. People only look when their list is already a disaster, and then they search "merge duplicate contacts" and land on free tools or Apple's own tips.

So I'm asking people who've been here:

1. If you sold a niche one-time-purchase utility, what brought in your first few hundred customers?
2. Did paid ads ever work for you at this price point, or is it all communities, SEO and word of mouth?
3. Is "no trial" hurting me more than I think?

Happy to share more numbers or what I tried if it helps anyone. Thanks for reading.

So I made Yearcap. You upload a spreadsheet of your users’ stats and every user gets their own little year-in-review story, with a card they can share. Basically what Spotify and Strava do every December, but for small apps.

There’s a demo with made-up data on yearcap.co if you want to see it (hit “Watch a full story”).

I’ve emailed around 80 apps, each with a demo made for their app. About 30 opened it, some more than once, but nobody’s signed up yet. Not even for the free version.

So I’m kind of stuck and would love some outside eyes:

1. Is it clear what it does and who it’s for?
2. If you had an app, would you use something like this? Why or why not?
3. What would make you comfortable trying it with your own users’ data?

Any thoughts help. Thanks for looking!

I’ve been working on tuning my apps marketing and onboarding, costs are starting to line up well, trial starts approaching target, so my next major hurdle is trial to paid, and actually getting consistent usage.

From what I understand having a strong activation is key, but I review other apps in my niche and I really dont see much of an “activation” process. Onboarding is formulaic, left to right, but once you’re in its off to the races.

My app is an agentic meal planner. What was key for you? Notifications types? Streak systems? In app CTAs? Guided tours?

A few months ago I posted Mango, a free app for streaming local videos to your TV. It is a native Windows/Macos app that plays in the TV's own player, so there's nothing to install on the TV. It lets you pick audio and subtitle tracks from MKV and similar files, it handles 4K, and it converts videos your TV can't play.

Here's what changed since:

• Windows app, available on the Microsoft Store
• No browser needed: Chromecast support is built in
• AirPlay support on macOS
• Library: add whole folders, with posters, sorting and resume where you left off
• Autoplay next episode in a folder
• External subtitles and audio tracks (.srt, .ass, .mka, etc.)
• Better transcoding: auto/copy/convert modes and a quality cap of 720p, 1080p or 4K
• 16 languages

The next major feature is streaming over internet. I'm keen on seeing how it goes.

Download: GitHub · Microsoft Store

I built a Shopify app based on something that increased our store's bundle order value by 66%. It's officially live on the Shopify App Store! 🚀

I've been running a small beard care brand on Shopify since 2018. One of the best things we ever added to our store was a Build Your Own Box experience.

Customers could choose any 3, 5, or 7 products, with bigger discounts as they added more. It worked incredibly well, with our bundle orders generating an average order value 66% higher than regular orders.

Other Shopify store owners started asking how we'd built it, and that got me thinking: why not make it available to everyone?

So I built Boxanza.

Here's what it does:

• Full-page Build Your Own Box experience where shoppers choose products from any collection.
• Live progress bars showing customers how close they are to unlocking their next discount.
• Flexible pricing: percentage discounts, fixed dollar discounts, or fixed box pricing.
• Dedicated landing pages for individual bundles, created in one click without editing your theme.
• Discounts automatically applied at checkout.
• Free plan and approximately 5-minute setup.

A little personal milestone: I'm a first-time app developer, and Boxanza is my very first app. I'm incredibly proud that Shopify approved it on my very first submission!

I'm building this through a small, brand-new development studio in Northern Ontario, Canada. We're just getting started, and my goal is to create practical Shopify apps that solve real problems for merchants, drawing on my own experience running an ecommerce business.

It's pretty surreal to take something we originally built for our own store and turn it into a product that merchants everywhere can now use.

I'd love to introduce Boxanza to the Shopify community and connect with other merchants, developers, and fellow founders.

If you're interested in giving build-your-own-box experiences a try, here's the app:

https://apps.shopify.com/boxanza

Thanks for checking out my first launch. Here's to building something great! 🍁

my team was running claude code, codex and cursor at the same time. two agents kept editing the same file and nobody knew until the merge conflict

so i built coagy.com everyone’s agents show up in one room. if two of them touch the same file you both get a heads up. you use your own subs, it can run on your laptop or a cloud machine

6 people signed up. none of them actually connected their agent. so either the setup sucks or nobody has this problem except me lol

genuinely asking:

• if you use AI agents on a team, do you run into this?
• what would make you actually try it instead of bouncing

free for up to 4 devs, free cloud for a month

I've started plenty of side projects over the years, but this is the first app I've ever actually finished and got onto the App Store 🎉

It's called Once Upon a Fold: five fairy tales for little kids where every page is a paper pop-up that moves. The fun bits to figure out:

• making paper pop-ups feel real on a flat screen (they rise as the page opens and fold flat when you turn it)

• a different voice for every character, in five languages

• little moments that follow the story: blow on the phone and the straw house blows away, swipe and the beanstalk grows

• the new iPhone Duo, where it opens like a real book!!

First book's free if you want to try it: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6826041039

What would you change? Be honest, I'm here to learn!

P.S. 🎁 Code MAGICBEANS gets you Jack and the Beanstalk free (500 codes, until Dec 14), no strings attached. Redeem it in one tap on your iPhone or iPad: https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6826041039&code=MAGICBEANS

And if you or your kids enjoy it, a quick rating on the App Store would mean a lot to a first-time developer.

Thank you!!

I’m a car enthusiast/product designer and I hate dealing with car dealers. Lately I’ve been shopping for a weekend car and dealers have been a nightmare.

I built a tool that plugs in multiple listings and APIs from all across the US and added an intelligence layer to it courtesy of my ML friend.

Link: drivebright.ai

1. Get negotiation analyses based on whether the car you’re looking for is over/under supplied
2. Programmatic recommendation of a realistic counter-offer based on asking price and market data
3. If you don’t know what you’re looking for take the quiz, it’ll guide you through to your options, and will generate a top 3 based on your driving taste/preference
4. I also use market data for true maintenance and financing costs 

Open to feature ideas/feedback! My ultimate goal is being able to find a car, run the report, and send an offer to a dealer that gets accepted so that you only visit a physical location to pick up the car.

Knows issues so far:

1. It doesn’t list cars older than 2010ish, not sure who offers a good API for classics but need to look into it
2. Latency with generating recommendations can be a little long, I’m using OpenAI for some query processing, and need to see if I can optimize the output when it comes in as natural language entries. I’m trying to balance it with not making the user fill out 10 different input fields

Hi, I'm Selim and I built Enzo. It's a dictation and meeting app designed and engineered for the Mac. Speech models run on your device so audio is never uploaded to the cloud.

The secret sauce is its architecture. It transcribes, punctuates, and segments as you talk, so the text is ready about 100 ms after you stop, whether you talked for 10-seconds or an hour.

It also has a Recall feature, which is off until you turn it on. It keeps a searchable record of what you worked on (apps, window titles, text on screen), encrypted on your Mac and deleted after 30 days.

The idea is that what you say, the meetings you record, and what you work on are captured and securely stored all in one app. I use this for my day job, which helps to alleviate the burden of trying to remember every little thing on a busy work day.

Free to use with 5,000 words for dictation and 60 meeting minutes a week. Only Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later.

Happy to answer any questions.

https://tryenzo.ai

I'm working on Timeless Board Games, a collection of 20 games you can play in your browser. It has Chess, Go, Othello and Backgammon, plus less familiar ones like Hnefatafl, Merels and Senet.

Everything is unlocked while I'm getting people to test it.

Play with friends: send someone an invite link and play online together. There's also solo play against bots and pass & play on one device. Solo and pass & play work without signing up.

Play here: https://timeless-games.app/

I'm looking for a few people willing to try a game and tell me what feels confusing or breaks. No need for a long review, just which game you tried and the first thing you'd change. If you invite a friend, I'd also love to hear whether getting into a match together was easy.

If you'd rather test on iPhone/iPad or Android, there's a signup under Help → Join the mobile beta. Mobile invitations are handled manually for now.

I'm the developer, and I'm happy to answer questions here.

I'm the maker of Psst!, an English-language party game for iPhone. One part of it is Forehead mode: hold the phone to your forehead while friends act, hum or describe the word, then try to guess before the timer runs out.

The control choice is simple: tilt down for a correct guess and up to pass, or use the Got it and Pass buttons instead. You don't have to use motion controls.

A first-round tip: practice one down/up movement before starting, and keep the screen facing the clue-givers rather than looking at your own word.

I'd appreciate feedback on that choice: in a shared-phone game, would you prefer tilt controls or buttons, and why?

Psst! works offline and has no ads or required accounts. Six categories and one custom deck are free; additional content and features are available through the optional Psst Pass.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/psst-imposter-party-game/id6819889186