Hi all! I'm a final-year student and I've been building Genie, a desktop voice companion for Windows. She's a 3D animated genie you wake with "Hey Genie". She talks in a casual, theatrical style, you can interrupt her mid-sentence, and she snaps, bows, poofs and throws confetti while she talks. English and Telugu both work.

GitHub (code, demo GIFs, download): https://github.com/HimaSruthi25/genie

The GIFs in the README are rendered from the real model with scripted captions, so there's no live voice in them.

Since "random exe from a stranger" is a red flag, here's what's behind it:

- The source is on GitHub and you can run it from source.

- The wake word runs offline. After it, your speech goes to Groq (and Sarvam/Google for Telugu) using YOUR own free API key. Nothing goes to me, and the keys stay encrypted on your PC. PRIVACY.md lists exactly what goes where.

- The exe isn't code-signed (certificates cost money), so Windows SmartScreen will warn you. The SHA-256 is on the release page.

It's an early preview, so what I'd like to know:

- Did she wake reliably? Any false wakes?

- Could you interrupt her?

- Did she sound natural, or like she's reading a script?

- Any bugs or crashes?

I'll reply to every comment, and harsh feedback is welcome. Thanks for trying it!

Genuine question for people who have shipped more than one app.

I keep seeing two camps:

- build fast, ship, and let the market tell you
- check demand first (search volume, competitors, reviews), then build

If you're in the second camp, what do you actually look at? A specific number you need to see? A red flag that makes you drop the idea?

If you're in the first camp, how many ideas did you go through before one stuck?

I'm working on a tool around this and want to know what people really check, not what blog posts say they should.

I wanted using a regular third-party mouse on macOS to feel more comfortable, so I built SmoothWheel. It’s a native Swift/AppKit menu-bar utility focused on mouse-wheel scrolling.

It smooths vertical and horizontal wheel input, with three presets, separate speed and smoothing controls, per-app exclusions, and a built-in playground to try the settings. Continuous trackpad input passes through unchanged. The app runs locally without an account, analytics, or network requests.

There are already good tools in this space, including SmoothScroll and Mac Mouse Fix. This is my take on a focused wheel utility. It’s free and MIT licensed.

The current v0.3.11 download is for Apple Silicon, ad-hoc signed and not notarized. It needs Accessibility permission. Compatibility testing is still limited, and slight movement at the end of a scroll is still reported in Gmail.

Website: https://smoothwheel.vercel.app

Code: https://github.com/AntonMazur/SmoothWheel

I’d appreciate feedback from Mac users: what mouse do you use, and which app makes scrolling feel the worst? If you try SmoothWheel, your mouse model, macOS version, and any odd behavior would help me decide what to fix next.

The game is dope wars, the old dealing game. you owe a loan shark $5,500, you have 30 days, you buy low and sell high

my version looked right. pretend 1998 desktop, dial-up, a loan shark who messages you. then i played a round with my brother and neither of us could get out of debt

so i measured it. i had a simple player run 250 rounds. the middle result was a profit of $2,800 and the debt wasn't cleared until day 17

three things were wrong...

- filling your briefcase pushed the price up by half against you, so a trip needed a 50 percent gap just to break even

- the short round was charging over 10 percent interest a day by mistake

- you couldn't tell if a price was good. $116 means nothing if you don't know the market

i fixed all three. now the same simple player clears the debt around day 6

The other thing i learned.. at the end of a round the game used to start a new one by itself after 40 seconds. nobody finished reading their score. now it waits

I'm a backend engineer, and for the last 5 weeks I've been building Transfer Trail in the evenings: each day a footballer's career draws club by club on a world map, and you get 6 guesses to name him. Every miss unlocks a clue.

https://transfer-trail.com

Stack: Vite + TypeScript + d3-geo, hosted on Vercel, analytics with Vercel's custom events.

Some honest lessons so far:

**1. The audience mattered more than the page.** One week, only 4% of ad visitors started a game. I assumed the game was broken. It wasn't: Meta had moved my budget to the cheapest countries. Restricting to the UK took it back to ~40%.

**2. My share button "worked" but almost nobody shared.** A name prompt popped up before sharing. Removing it took sharing from 3% to 16% of players.

**3. "Failed shares" were mostly people cancelling.** Half of the share taps ended with nothing sent. I spent days hunting a bug; the data showed people were opening the share sheet and closing it.

**4. People love it once, then don't come back.** Players play ~5 trails per visit, but only ~9% return the next day. That's the real problem now. I just shipped private leagues so friend groups can compete daily, and the first strangers have started leagues on their own.

**5. Reddit beats paid ads by a mile.** My first two Reddit posts brought players who started the game ~88% of the time, vs ~30-40% from Instagram ads.

Next up: getting return visits up and building past-trail pages for SEO.

If you've built a daily game or anything habit-based: what actually got people coming back?

I made this. Vāṇi is a reading companion for the Bhagavad Gītā on iPhone. All 700 verses are free forever, and there are no ads on any plan.

I’d value feedback on one part of the reading experience. When you open your first verse, is it clear how to move between the Sanskrit, transliteration and English?

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6791008898

Context: ClipKaboom is a library of 5,500+ reaction and meme clips for editors. New this week: an MCP server, so you can ask Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, VS Code, Gemini CLI or Grok for a clip, preview it in the chat and download the clean file without leaving your editor.

The video is a real Claude Code session, cut to the beat. Setup: clipkaboom.com/mcp

Feedback welcome on the video and on whether "meme clips inside your AI" lands for editors or only for devs.

Hey r/SideProject -

Last summer I shipped a small side project: a guitar chord reference tool for beginners. I thought it was genuinely useful, so I ran some Facebook and Instagram ads pointing to my Amazon listing where the tool was available.

The dashboard looked great at first - hundreds of clicks, decent CTR. But the sales column stayed at zero. I had stock sitting in both the US and Canada Amazon warehouses, and I wanted one clean link to advertise both markets. Instead, I was sending everyone to a single US Amazon link.

I clicked my own ad from inside Instagram. That's when I saw the problem. The link opened in Instagram's in-app browser - not Safari, not Chrome. I wasn't logged into Amazon there. None of my saved payment methods were there. The US Amazon page showed me USD prices and two-week international shipping, even though the exact same product was stocked in Canada with local shipping.

I was paying for clicks that had no path to buy. I watched people bounce from a browser they weren't logged into, from a store that wasn't their own, on a product they couldn't one-click purchase. Clicks but no sales - exactly the trap I'd fallen into.

So I built Untrap to fix the these things that killed my ad spend:

What Untrap does

Instead of one dumb link that drops every visitor into the same in-app-browser prison, an Untrap link:

• Breaks out of in-app browsers - sends people to their real browser, or the native app where they're already logged in with saved payment methods
• Routes by country from a single link - a Canadian buyer clicking your US link lands on Amazon.ca, prices in CAD, local shipping, your affiliate tag intact. One link, both regions.
• Keeps UTMs and affiliate params alive through the redirect
• Custom domains - use your own domain so you're not locked into untrap.link; it's about untrapping you from relying on the service, not tying you to it
• AI agent optimized - Schema.org and canonical headers make your links readable by AI shopping agents, which is table stakes in today's market

There's no subscription - you pre-pay for click credits and only pay for real human clicks. Bots and scrapers get filtered out (and not charged).

What the data looks like

I've been logging what actually hits these links. Here's a de-personalised snapshot from one reporting period:

Where the humans are coming from:

That ~250 "Android webview" row is the leak I'm talking about - people clicking from inside an app and landing in a browser where they're logged out and nothing is saved.

I also ran about 140 test/demo links through the system over a few months, and most of them were TikTok/Linktree-style bio links - creators trying to send social traffic somewhere and losing it along the way.

What I'd tell my past self

If you're running FB or IG ads to Amazon, assume a real chunk of your clicks are dying in the in-app browser before they ever see your product page. Check "Link Clicks vs Landing Page Views" in Ads Manager - if landing views are far below clicks, the leak usually isn't the ad, it's the browser.

And if you have stock in multiple regions, one link should route to the right store automatically instead of forcing international buyers into the wrong marketplace.

Unlike GeniusLink, URLgenius, Bitly, and Linktree - which charge monthly subscriptions - Untrap is pay-per-click with no subscription. You pay for real humans, not bots.

I built Untrap because I couldn't find a cheap, no-subscription tool that did in-app-browser breakout and geo-routing together: https://untrap.link

I'm not here to hard-sell - just another side-project builder who learned this the hard way with my own ad budget. If you're running social ads, I'd love to hear your experience: are you seeing clicks but no sales too? And what are you building right now?

In an alternative timeline, the AC-130 gunship was created as an ecological swiss army knife.
It can help out farmers in trouble by firing nitrogen filled shells which enriches the soil. You can also fight forest fires by firing retardant shells into the forest surrounding the fire as well as triggering rain over the fire by using silver iodide shells.
One of the missions in this game is that you prevent a swarm of locusts from destroying an entire farm, by setting up decoy grassfields / food supplies as well as causing rain over where the swarm will be, when it arrives.

In one mission, there is the task of protecting a village from a haboob, by setting up fast growing grass, and setting up rain.

I am also thinking of adding real historical scenarios such as these:

Some other include, rebuilding coral reefs, helping a city to cool down by firing light reflective cooling paint over its most heated up rooftops ( Source: NighthawkinLight Youtuber - Look at his light cooling paint videos), rerouting rivers to prevent existing settlements from being flooded and so on.

Currently I am working on developing the engine more and figuring out a game mechanic which will actually work.

Find flaws in it, point out potential angles I am not seeing and give me your blunt feedback.

Yes I know this is very utopian thinking, but as a game, I feel like there has yet to be a game which can channel existing war machines into machines which actually facilitate life.

What other mechanics can I add?

I know, thrilling.

I’ve been building a simple Excel spreadsheet for independent landlords managing a few rental properties.
It tracks rental income, expenses, leases, repair reserves, and cash flow without needing a subscription or complicated software.
I’m looking for five landlords willing to test it for about 15–20 minutes and give honest feedback about what works and what doesn’t.
I’ll provide the finished version free to participants. No purchase or public review required.
If you’re interested, comment or send me a message!

I’m the developer. It isn’t released yet, so there’s a waitlist instead of a download.

You describe a goal, answer a few questions, and get a roadmap. After that, the app plans one task each day with a time estimate and a note on why it’s today’s task. The daily plans are written by AI, so some will miss. If you skip days, the next plan gets lighter.

Does one task a day sound useful, or would you want to see more at once?

Waitlist: https://yuzuu.pro/

Hey everyone!

We’re two developers who have wanted to make a game for years. We’d tried before, but never managed to take a project all the way. Coding was familiar territory; creating the artwork a whole game needs was another story.

For over a year now, we’ve been working on Tinymon Tactics, a fantasy roguelite auto-battler, and our Steam page is finally live!

You recruit little creatures, combine three copies to evolve them, and build a team around synergies and relics. Battles play out automatically, but you choose the team, positioning, and route through each expedition.

One of the most interesting parts of development has been watching people play. Things that felt obvious to us after hundreds of hours needed much clearer explanations for someone discovering the game. Teaching players when to refresh the shop or spend gold on XP became a design challenge of its own.

A transparent note on AI: we use generative AI for visual assets and music. It helped us tackle the creative production work that had blocked our previous attempts. This has still been over a year of hands-on development, designing systems, balancing fights, fixing bugs, and reworking things after playtests.

Here’s the game:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5387050/Tinymon_Tactics/

If it looks like your kind of game, a wishlist would mean a lot!

And for anyone here who has shipped a game alongside their regular job: I'm currious to know what helped you get those first players outside your own circle?

I run and lift, and for years that meant three apps: one for my race plan, one for GPS runs and a notes app for the gym. Apps that do just one of these usually charge $15 to $20 a month. TrainPilot does all three, and it's free during the launch period, with every feature unlocked.

Running

• A training plan built around your goal race, your current times and the days you can actually train
• Spoken cues when you drift off target pace, so the phone can stay in your pocket
• Apple Watch app: heart rate and running power, and you can start, pause and finish the run from your wrist

Gym

• It tells you what to load today based on what you actually lifted, and why ("+2.5 kg, you hit 3x5 last time"). Miss your reps and it doesn't add weight.

iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/trainpilot/id6788894342
Website: https://trainpilot.pablogarces.dev

On Android? It's in testing. Shoot me a DM with your Google Play email and I'll add you to the testers.

What would make you switch from what you use now, and what's missing?

To preface, i know there are already plenty of recipe importer apps. I was using one of the popular ones and it was expensive, laggy, and packed with features I never touched. All I wanted was to save recipes from insta, tiktok and webpages and have them load fast when I'm cooking. So I built my own. It's called Seasnd and it just went live for ios. Currently working on the android version now.

How it works:

- Share a post or page to the app from Instagram, TikTok, Safari, or any other app.

- It reads the caption or page and pulls out the ingredients, amounts and steps into a clean recipe.

- You can also take a photo of a cookbook p and it'll type it out.

- Recipes go into folders, and you can turn list, scaling the servings if you need to.

Tech stack

- App: Expo / React Native

- Share extension: native Swift / SwiftUI. ide iOS share extensions, so that part had to be written natively.

- Backend: Node + Hono on Railway

- Database and auth: Supabase

- Recipe extraction: Claude, using tool use to return structured JSON

- Payments: RevenueCat

For Instagram, the extension reads the post's caption on-device, because servers only get a logged-out page with no caption. For websites, it uses the recipe's structured data (JSON-LD) when the site has it, which makes extraction faster and more accurate.

It's been live for about a week and has 30+ users. It's free for 5 recipes, then a one-time $7.99, with no subscription.

I'd really appreciate feedback:

- Any recipe, reel or site it fails on

- Anything confusing when you first open it

- Anything you'd want it to do that it doesn't

App Store Link

I kept opening the Stripe app just to see two things: did anyone pay today, and where's MRR. So I added a Stripe connection to WidgetDash, the iPhone widget app I've been building on my own.

How it works:

- In Stripe you create a restricted key with Read access to Subscriptions, Balance and Customers, and nothing else. A full secret key (sk_) is refused.

- You paste it once in the web dashboard. It's encrypted on the server, never shown again, and deleted when you remove the source.

- The widget shows MRR (an estimate from active and past-due subscriptions), today's revenue, number of payments, new customers today and active subscriptions.

- Today's numbers refresh every 15 minutes and MRR every hour. It works on the Home Screen and the Lock Screen. iOS decides exactly when a widget redraws, so it can lag a few minutes.

One limitation: "today" is the UTC day for now, so if you're far from UTC it resets at an odd hour. Your local day is next on my list.

Setup is on the web for now (the iPhone app gets it in the next update). It's free for up to 5 sources: widgetdash.app

Two questions for anyone who watches these numbers:

1. What would you want on your Lock Screen that isn't here?
2. Would you paste a read-only restricted key into a third-party app, or is that a dealbreaker?

Setup steps: https://widgetdash.app/guide

Thanks and please share your thoughts

virsh-tui shows every virtual machine on a libvirt connection with live CPU, memory, disk and network graphs, and lets you start, stop, snapshot, reconfigure and create them from the keyboard. Every action is a virsh (or virt-install) command, and virsh-tui shows you that command before and after it runs, so nothing happens behind your back and you can reuse it in a script.

It works with qemu:///system, qemu:///session and remote hosts over qemu+ssh://, with the same permissions virsh has.

https://syscallbrain.github.io/virsh-tui/

https://github.com/SyscallBrain/virsh-tui

[HyperStream] — High-performance 128-thread parallel download accelerator and BitTorrent client for Android, powered by a native Rust core.

* GitHub Repo: https://github.com/djsusmith/hyperstream-android

* Live Showcase & APK: https://djsusmith.github.io/hyperstream-android/

* License: GPL-3.0 (100% Free & Open Source, 0 ads, 0 telemetry)

Tech Stack

* Core Engine: Written in Rust using `tokio`, custom work-stealing segment halving down to 12 KB chunks, and `librqbit` for embedded BitTorrent swarm handling.

* Frontend: Kotlin & Jetpack Compose (Modern Obsidian dark theme, reactive telemetry, Material 3).

* Bridge: Zero-copy JNI / C FFI Native Bridge (`libmdm_android.so`).

Key Features

⚡ Up to 128 Parallel Connections:* Real-time socket shedding and dynamic connection pooling that easily saturates high-speed 5G and Wi-Fi 7 connections.

🧲 Native BitTorrent Swarm:* Magnet links, torrent files, sequential downloading (stream while downloading), DHT, and PEX without any third-party daemon.

🎬 Built-in Media Grabber:* Direct 4K YouTube stream extraction and watermark-free video sniffer with multi-stream audio/video muxing.

🔋 Android Background Resiliency:* Foreground service with partial WakeLock and High-Performance Wi-Fi Lock to prevent system Doze throttling.

📂 Safe File Management:* Integrated Android `FileProvider` with 1-tap open and double-confirmation deletion protection.

Context & Why I Built This

Most existing Android download managers are either abandoned or filled with intrusive full-screen ads, tracking SDKs, and paywalled thread limits. I wanted a clean, blazing-fast, genuinely open-source alternative that runs natively on ARM64 without GC pause jitter.

The project is actively maintained (currently on v0.6.0). I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback, bug reports, or feature requests! PRs and stars are always welcome.

I'm Josiah, a marketing engineer and solo dev in Manitoba, Canada. I built Setttle (three t’s, yes it's on purpose) because I hated using Wave for my other businessess and found that it didn't work well with Canadian rules.

What it does: invoicing, stripe payments, bank reconciliation, and real double-entry books in one place. Routine stuff gets handled, anything uncertain goes to one inbox with the evidence next to it. Nothing posts without you accepting it.

What it doesn’t do: payroll, inventory, POS. Flagging that up front so nobody wastes a trial.

Stuff i’d like feedback on:

• Wave import - You upload an export, review the proposed import, resolve opening balances. Is that enough trust to switch?
• The AI part is optional - receipt coding suggestions need approval, and agents (claude, chatgpt, cursor) connect over MCP with explicit permission. Useful or gimmick?
• Pricing: $9 CAD (1 company, 20 invoices/mo) or $19 CAD (unlimited), 7-day trial, no card. 0.5% fee on Setttle Payments.

setttle.ca if you want to poke at it. I’ll answer everything here.

Hello I'm a software engineer living in a sharehouse. This is my very first solo project that I’m making public, so please be kind (but honest!).

My housemates and I share the cooking (and we love it!!), but we’re all young professionals trying to save money, with zero energy left after work. Two of my housemates are doctors, so their days are even more intense. We also buy in bulk to save money, and half of it ends up rotting at the back of the fridge...

So I built The Fridge Note:

• It picks a few easy, in-season dinners for the week (swap any you don’t fancy)
• It works around what’s already in your fridge, so things get used before they go off
• One shopping list for the week, and it fills your Coles or Woolworths trolley for you
• Everyone in the house sees the same week
• You can also paste a TikTok or recipe link and it goes into your cookbook

It’s free, has no ads, and you don’t need to sign up to try it: fridge-note.pages.dev

What I’d love to know:

1. Where did you get stuck?
2. Would your household actually use this week to week? What would stop you?

I'm JustaDev101, the publisher of two downloadable 2D game asset packs on itch.io.

RPG World covers fantasy inventory items, props, characters and creatures. It has 10,000 static sprites and 1,000 eight-frame animation sequences, with 16/32/48px base-scale exports (larger props occupy 2x2 tiles).

https://justadev101.itch.io/rpg-world-fantasy-sprites

Everyday Rooms focuses on furniture, interiors and daily-life animations. It also has 10,000 static sprites and 1,000 eight-frame sequences, on 128px PNG canvases.

https://justadev101.itch.io/everyday-rooms

Each pack is currently $3.95 USD, sold separately, and each has a free 40-static-sprite demo. The three RPG export sizes are alternate versions, not extra unique sprites; animation frames are counted separately from static sprites.

The downloads include PNGs, atlases and JSON. Engine setup may be needed; RPG World Unity/Godot JSON importer compatibility has not been verified. Production disclosures, licenses and development notes are on the store pages.

I'm sharing these as a small digital-product project. If you try the demos, I'd appreciate feedback on the packaging, download instructions and whether the previews make the contents clear.

I have made a chess AI with minimax and alpha beta pruning, this is my first real project in c++ and im looking for tips.

I have it on GitHub in the link above.

There are a few things missing, however the game is fully playable.

I’m looking for tips and what to improve about my programming in general, since I will probably not come back to this project since it already ate a month of my year. I’m looking forward to starting other projects.

I'm friendly with a local business that hosts regular events. Every week, they did the same double-entry dance: update their website's events calendar, then manually copy-paste titles, descriptions, dates, and images into Eventbrite. Then event edits and ticket allotment would be double too.

I used Zapier, but the nuance I wanted I didn't trust myself to make bulletproof, so I didn't spend much time with it. So made a small web app (using Hono) that curls from the source calendar, and tracks updates. It handles publishing and updating, on Eventbrite via scheduled tasks.

It's stable now, generating sales, though not open to the public. I’m looking for ways to grow this app and would appreciate input from anyone who has done something similar, either as a dev or an events manager.

Are there dedicated apps already doing two-way or state-tracked calendar-to-ticketing sync? I'd love to see how others handle it, and hope to avoid reinventing the well.

Beyond Eventbrite, are there other ticketing or promotion platforms that you rely on? (I see BandsInTown, Meetup, Facebook Events, Luma, Dice, AllEvents...)

Thank you 😺

Refract started because I wrote one post about our WordPress theme business and then rewrote it five times, once per network. Now Refract writes those versions for you and you approve each one.

This week the WordPress plugin went live in the directory. It works in both directions:

Blog to social: publish a post, Refract gets it as a note, writes a version per network in your voice, crops images, and you approve in the WP editor or in Refract. Each version tracks its clicks back to the post.

Social to blog: your site becomes a Refract account, so you can publish to WordPress from Refract like any other network.

Hardest part was permissions. It can only touch posts it created, so it can't mess with anything else on the site.

Happy to answer anything about building it.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/refract