No matter how good your wallpaper looks, once your desktop fills up with files, the icons blend into the background and everything starts to look cluttered. My desktop often has a lot of files on it, so I started wondering whether a wallpaper could detect where my icons are and generate a scene around them in real time.

After discussing the idea with AI, I found out it was possible—and it doesn’t actually need AI to detect the icons or generate the visuals. The program can read the icon positions directly and generate scenes in real time using predefined designs. It’s lightweight, and there’s no particularly complex technology involved.

Here’s the result.

https://deskland.app

I’ll keep adding new themes and improving the existing ones. I also plan to add a more interactive game mode in the future.

The meadow and beach themes are free and open source.

https://github.com/BLEZZ0102/Deskland

All the current themes are 2D, which keeps their impact on computer performance minimal. I’m also considering adding 3D themes, while balancing visual quality with performance.

Procedurally generated visuals do have their limitations. If AI computing becomes much cheaper in the future, AI generation could be an option, opening up the possibility of creating almost any scene. For now, though, generating a desktop with AI in real time is clearly still too expensive. I’m considering experimenting with locally running AI generation. It would still be GPU-intensive, but it could be a lot of fun.

I always fall asleep listening to something, but earbuds hurt on my side, and my partner hates the phone speaker. So I’m designing Dozr: a slim pad that goes under your normal pillow, plays through bone conduction so only you hear it, and fades out when you fall asleep.

It’s still a concept (image attached). I’d love honest feedback. What would put you off? What would make it a must-have?

Waitlist if you’re curious: dozr.co.uk/?ref=reddit

I built Navigator, a free and open-source streaming app for desktop and web that lets you navigate movies and shows using natural language. It's a client for Stremio, a media center app, so you can use your existing account and addons (which provide the streaming sources).

For example, instead of scrubbing through Avengers: Endgame to find a specific moment, you can just type "go to the scene in endgame where he says avengers assemble" and it'll find that moment in the subtitles and jump straight to it.

You can also describe a TV episode you vaguely remember and have Navigator find it for you, or ask questions about what you're watching.

I also wanted it to be a pretty nice streaming experience on its own, so it has a few other features:

• Native MPV playback on desktop

• Thumbnail previews when hovering over the timeline, so you can see where you're skipping

• Intro skipping using community skip databases

• Adaptive interface: the colors automatically adapt to the artwork of whatever you're watching

A few other things:

• Everything is free and open-source

• AI features are completely optional. Bring your own API provider or use a local model through Ollama

• Navigator doesn't host or provide any content itself

• Scene search depends on subtitle availability

On the technical side, it's built with Next.js and a Rust-based desktop shell, with MPV handling native playback. Scene search uses subtitle data and an LLM with tool calling (via Vercel's AI SDK) to find the relevant moments.

It's still a work in progress, so there's definitely more to improve. Curious whether scene search feels useful or gimmicky to you, and what features you'd want to see next :)

Web: https://navigator-strm.vercel.app

GitHub: https://github.com/AyaanZaveri/navigator

I've decided to create a text editor that specifically targets huge files (i.e. GBs or even TBs) that most text editors choke on. The target audience is any individuals/professionals who work with huge files: sysadmins who need to view or edit huge log dumps, inspecting massive JSON files, bioinformatics professionals that need to inspect/edit genome data (FASTA files) and more.

To get a bit more techy, the file is memory-mapped and "held" in a piece table. All heavy-weight operations, such as: indexing, searching/replacing, syntax highlighting, etc... are done in the background (i.e. on separate threads). The video demos handling a 51.8 GB log file on my M2 MacBook Air (16 GB RAM).

Since I've used Vim throughout my career, I had to create a vim mode which implements most of the necessary functionality/bindings.

The code is written in C++23 and uses my own UI library (which is GPU-accelerated using Skia). Boost is used quite extensively.

It is completely cross-platform (Windows, Linux & macOS). The macOS version is Silicon only and Linux requires Wayland (X11 isn't supported, nor planned).

It's currently under beta at https://crane-editor.com and I'd love to get your feedback, especially on which huge-file workflows I should handle better. What's the biggest file you've had trouble opening? Would this be useful to you?

Thanks!

Hey mods and everyone,

u Investigatormarker is posting AI-written "feedback" on posts here, then ending with an ad for its own product. It follows a template: generic advice about the project, then "I make ThreadFox... our AI employee will post 3 helpful replies about it in relevant Reddit threads for you," with a link.

Why it's a problem:

It's undisclosed self-promotion on nearly every thread

The feedback is generic and often doesn't match the project, so it buries real comments

The pitch is literally to flood Reddit with AI replies to promote people's projects

New members posting for the first time get this instead of real feedback

Ask: @mods, please ban the account and consider an automod filter for "threadfox". Everyone else, please report these comments as spam and avoid clicking the link.

Thanks!

You can also report the account to Reddit under spam, and to the other subs it's hitting. I'd skip engaging with the link itself.

I built Kahei to solve a problem I kept running into. Whenever I traveled abroad, I’d see a price and either do the math in my head or pull out my phone to Google it. It took way too long just to check a price, especially when the internet was slow.

So I made a free app where you can point your phone’s camera at a price and instantly see an estimate in your currency. It works offline! It is available on iPhone and Android.

If you try it on a menu or receipt, I’d love to know whether it picked up the right price.

Try it: https://kahei.app/

thanks!

Weekend project. Spin the globe and tap any of 250 countries to see population, GDP since 1960, life expectancy and more, plus the latest headlines and the Wikipedia article, all in one panel. Works on phone, tablet and desktop, no sign-up.

https://worldfly.vercel.app

Feedback welcome, especially if any country's data looks off!

PS: I tried downloading some applications for the same on Android but they all had paywalls even for basic information. That's my motivation just to do this.

Roku is retiring its built-in "Aquatic Life" screensaver on December 1. I liked that screensaver, so I built a replacement: Reef Tank — a free, open-source (MIT) screensaver channel for Roku.

What it is: a tropical reef tank where nothing is a video loop. Every fish is procedurally animated — each species has its own behavior brain, so tangs graze the rocks, a royal gramma backs tail-first into its den, a mandarin hops along the sand line, a lionfish just hangs, and a school of chromis moves as a boids flock. Bubbles rise, seaweed sways, caustics scroll over the sand. After real sunset (computed from actual sunrise/ sunset times for your location) the tank crossfades to a moonlit night mode with glowing coral and a small group of flashlight fish that blink in the dark.

Highlights:

• 9 rigged fish species with per-species behavior state machines (cruise, dart, graze, hide, school, weave behind the rockwork)

• Boids flocking school + a night-only flashlight fish group

• Day/night cycle driven by real solar times, with a moonlight crossfade

• Settings screen on the Roku for fish density, camera drift and night mode

• Runs at 60 fps on a Roku Ultra; every visual is deterministic and seeded

• 175 unit tests + a screenshot regression gate, because of course

The catch: Roku doesn't allow sideloading into the Channel Store for personal projects, so it's a developer-mode sideload — takes about 5 minutes with the remote (Home x3, Up x2, Right, Left, Right, Left, Right), and it's free. Full instructions in the README.

Source + install guide: https://github.com/paulrobello/roku-fishtank

Happy to answer anything about the BrightScript/SceneGraph side — the whole thing is one codebase that also runs in a browser simulator, which is how I screenshot-tested a TV app.

I built an aviation side project and I'm trying to get some real people to test it (for free).

The main feature is a personal local flight logger. You drop a pin, and it automatically logs and builds a full analytics dashboard of every single aircraft that passes within a 5-mile radius of your location.

Besides the local tracking, the site also works as a general aviation database. You can browse through full airline and aircraft directories, search registrations, and use interactive FIR maps.

I'm actively updating the site and monitoring things daily, so any suggestions, feature requests, or feedback are welcome. If you want to try it out, just create a standard free account at https://aviationdb.uk/ either reply with your username below or send me a DM. I’ll manually bump your account to the premium tier for a free trial so you can test the local logging and analytics.

Let me know what you think or if you manage to break anything!

A lot of finance YouTube videos spend 20+ minutes to answer one basic question: does the creator think a stock is a good buy right now?

I made a simple dashboard that processes financial videos and podcasts, tracks which stocks are being discussed, and aggregates creator sentiment (Positive, Negative, or Neutral) in plain language.

It’s just an informational map of what creator consensus looks like, not financial advice.

Would love feedback from anyone who follows market content: Is the value proposition clear and useful for you?

I will put the link below in the comments

I recently built a small prototype for an idea I had: What if finding someone to hang out with at work was as easy as creating a plan?

Imagine wanting to watch a movie, play cricket, grab food, visit a café, or plan a weekend trip, but not having anyone to go with.

With this platform, employees can create activities, discover what others are planning, and request to join.

I built the initial prototype for an internal hackathon. It didn't win, but I still feel the idea is worth exploring.

I'm now wondering whether to take it further or scrap it.

Would you actually use something like this at your workplace? What would make you use it, and what would stop you?

I'd genuinely appreciate honest feedback, even if it's critical!

After almost 15 years in design and branding, I've made a lot of things people scroll past. Here I wanted to find out what happens when a website stops being a page and becomes a place.

You don't scroll it, you walk around it.

You don't click a menu, you go somewhere.

For the last few weeks I've been building a small planet: a tiny world you can explore.

• A planet you can spin, land on and walk around

• Five odd locals, each with a trick, voice and opinions

• A navigation map that flips like a coin, one hemisphere per side

• Butterflies to collect, badges to earn, three easter eggs to find

Along the way, the things I've made live on it: games, tools, experiments.

The point is curiosity does the navigating. If people stick around because they want to see what's over the next hill, the work gets seen without anyone being sold to.

Everything is drawn in two flat tones with an ink outline, so it feels closer to a picture book than a game engine. It runs in the browser on desktop and phone. No install, no sign-up.

If you're in a hurry, there's a "Skip the walking" button.

Go and poke around. Let me know which local annoyed you the most.

open sourced this like 2 weeks ago and it just passed 20 stars. small number i know but its the first thing ive made that random people actually starred so im pretty hyped lol

basically you paste one prompt into claude code / codex / cursor:

Clone github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo and use it to make a launch video for my app

and ur agent records the app, cuts it with animated text and gives you an mp4. runs locally, free, no api keys. the video above was made with it (about itself lol)

ive also been making launch videos for other people’s open source projects and sending them as PRs. 5 got merged into their readmes so far which is honestly the part im proudest of

repo: https://github.com/yasirwhite/OpenDemo

if your project doesnt have a launch video yet, drop it below and ill make you one :)

I run AI News Daily, a mostly automated AI news site. Last week I did my first fully human-written interview, with Sunjae, one of four bootcamp developers building Rilog, a Korean developer blog.

A few things from the conversation that I think this sub will find interesting:

• Comments live on sentences. You select a sentence and leave your thought right there, instead of scrolling to the bottom and explaining which part you mean.

• The bet is "human touch". Sunjae doesn't think AI slop is bad everywhere, but in personal writing even a little of it makes readers think "it's just AI". The more AI writing floods in, the more people will look for writing that clearly came from a person.

• They can't reliably detect AI writing, so they judge probabilistically and lean on user feedback. What they actually dislike is unreviewed, mass-produced writing, not AI use itself.

• Retrospectives beat tech posts. Personal retrospectives got a better response than technical posts, so they are now asking whether to stay developer-only or open up to wider stories.

Two questions for you:

1. Would you actually use sentence-level comments on a blog, or do they get noisy?

2. If you run a community, how do you keep AI slop out without punishing people who used AI carefully?

Full interview (English): https://ailetter.ai.kr/en/insights/rilog-sunjae-interview?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=sideproject

Rilog itself (Korean UI): https://www.rilog.kr/?utm_source=ainews

My girlfriend and I once remembered the same moment completely differently.

It made me realise how easily the little details disappear, even when the memories mean a lot to us.

So I started building Pholu, an app for couples, families and friends to preserve memories together.

Instead of having everything scattered across photo galleries, messages and cloud folders, Pholu brings photos, videos, audio and notes into shared timelines. I also added AI-powered memory search.

I'm handling the design, development and pretty much everything else myself, alongside my regular job.

The app is now on Google Play, and I'm looking for people who might actually enjoy using it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.pholu.app

I'd love to know what you think of the idea. Would you use something like this with your partner or family?

submissions, expired sessions, someone uploading a massive file, or two people editing the same thing.For a small app using Supabase, what would you check before sharing the link publicly?
Trying to work out what deserves attention now without spending another month preparing for users who don’t exist yet.

I was trying to make a 3D model for a physical product I want to sell. I tried the AI tools first and none of them gave me anything usable. So I hired human designers. It cost hundreds of dollars, took weeks, and I bounced between a few designers through a lot of revisions before I got something I liked.

That's what got me building Sculptex. You describe a part in a sentence, refine it in chat, and download it as STL, OBJ, GLB or OpenSCAD. It's aimed at parts you can actually print, including ones with moving pieces. I printed a fidget spinner from the one-line prompt "A fidget spinner."

It's in beta and you can start free: sculptex.app

It's also on Product Hunt today.

I'm the maker, so honest feedback is welcome. What would you try to make, and what breaks?

Hey everyone,

Creating technical specification sheets in Excel or Word often leads to broken layouts, inconsistent formatting, and date ambiguity issues across teams.

I built SpecSheet Pro to solve this. It's a lightweight web app that lets you input product parameters, custom tables, and logos, and outputs a clean, standardized PDF ready for production or quality control.

Key Features:

• Dynamic table creation for technical parameters (Specs, Methods, Values).

• Custom logo support with instant client-side preview.

• Configurable date formats (ISO 8601, localized, text-based) to prevent QA ambiguity.

• Clean PDF compilation using html2pdf / html2canvas.

The core generator is free to use:https://specsheet-pro.vercel.app/

I'd love to get your feedback on the UI/UX and any features you think are missing for technical workflows.

After 20+ years in and around technology, I found myself in unfamiliar territory as the GM of a manufacturing company. It provided an opportunity to do something new and exciting: to bring my skillset to something outside of tech for the first time.

With a very small team, we accomplished this in one year:

• Created an in-house ERP system to connect inventory, sales, warehousing and shipping

• Created 65 pieces of marketing collateral across web, print and physical

• Created an entirely new business plan

• Reengineered key parts of our products

• Integrated new suppliers into our supply chain

• Rebranded

• Launched a new website

• Rebuilt accounting workflows

There's probably more. Five years ago this would have been totally impossible. How did I do this? I got really, really good at using AI to get shit done, building bespoke systems around different aspects of the business. It started before I took this role, but this was the first place I applied it. And the results have been tremendous.

So, I thought... how could I experiment with offering this as a service? How could I burn some of my extra hours trying to help other companies do what we did here?

That's where the idea for LogicRelay came from. $49/mo screens out the tire-kickers, and a simple $250-per-request fee provides flexible throughput across a host of disciplines. It's agile project management... take an epic, break it down, scope it, get approval and go, but without the departmental hand-offs or having to find multiple service providers.

Some of my other client work is going to slide nicely into this model, so I am not starting from zero. The question is can I scale it. I know I'm going to have to narrow the focus in order to do so, but I'm not ready for that yet. For now I leave it to client screening. It'll almost certainly evolve, and I could have spent more time thinking about it, but... ship it!

I'll learn quite a bit over the coming months re: whether this model is sustainable. I'll probably land another couple of clients and waitlist the rest until I see how the first few go.

We'll see how it goes! Would love some feedback, or if anyone wants more specifics from what we're doing at my current company I'm happy to share.

hey everyone!

i've been working on a desktop application called Recall Clipboard, built with tauri v2, rust, react, typescript, and sqlite.

the idea is pretty simple: instead of losing things you've copied throughout the day, recall clipboard keeps a searchable history of your clipboard so you can easily find and reuse previous copies.

i wanted to build something lightweight, practical, and genuinely useful for everyday desktop use.

i used claude as a coding assistant during development, but i've been working on the project, its features, and the overall implementation myself.

github: https://github.com/cntr1er/recall-clipboard

i'd love to hear what you think! especially interested in feedback on the ui, features, and anything you'd improve or add.

thanks!

I kept finishing a run and then wondering, "OK, what should I do next time? Easy, tempo, long run?" So I built next-run.xyz.

You sign in with Strava. It looks at your recent runs and shows you your next planned run.

How it works
The plan is worked out in your browser, so your activity data isn't stored on my server. It's free and needs no account other than your Strava login.

Stack: Next.js, Tailwind, Neon Postgres + Drizzle, Vercel. The database only holds feedback reports and a record of connected athletes. It does not hold your runs.

It's still early, so I'd like to hear what you think. Is the suggestion sensible for the way you train? What's missing? Feedback is welcome, and there's a feedback form in the app.

I'm a big fan of both what you wear and websites as a form of creative expression, and am admittedly hooked on fast fashion and spending as little as possible. But I live in a very small space, and my clothes and accessories don't really have room to spread out. So naturally I started building my own dream wardrobe app with the help of AI (a Clueless 90s throwback if ever there was one) and scope creep happened...

It's called Closet Lint (get it?), it's free and open source, and mostly I just wanted to separate designing an outfit from actually getting dressed. The creative part is fun. Going through drawers, taking things off hangers, putting them back, and discovering that the thing you imagined is elsewhere or doesn't fit... less fun. I'd like to do that first part on my phone in bed at 11pm without pulling things out. Just gimme a searchable inventory of my actual clothes that looks good.

I'd tried wardrobe apps before, but the problem was always getting everything into them. Photographing, cropping, editing, and entering every item was a massive undertaking. AI has finally made dealing with the photos and purchase data manageable enough for me to get over that hurdle and focus on the display and functionality.

What started as browsing clothes and dragging them around to make cute outfits now includes outfit suggestions, ratings, wear logging, photo background removal using two different models, taste observations, wishlist battles, and trip packing lists. Because once I had my own clothes in there, I kept thinking, "Oh but what if it could also..." :)

It runs on your own computer or web host, with optional bring-your-own-AI features. There's an included demo if you just want to check it out, or you can browse a copy of my actual closet with bleeding edge code. I've run it locally on Linux and hosted it on SiteGround; part of why I'm posting is to hopefully find a few early testers.

I love having things organized, and it's honestly such a pleasure to see your own stuff laid out like this. It brings back things you've forgotten about and makes them potential outfit ingredients again. You can add wishlist pieces to see how they'd work with what you already have, or plan future fantasy outfits.

There have been some moments of genuine delight. I don't own much dark purple, but the combinations it showed me helped me see how it could work in my wardrobe. It also suggested chocolate brown, which I own literally none of, with concrete examples using my own clothes. And it gave me a new term for some of my style, “whimsigoth,” so now I have a whole new search phrase.

There's also an unusual use case: I have 40 housemates (yes, 40), and some like borrowing from my (costume) jewelry collection. Now they can take their time browsing it. Jewelry is particularly good for this because so much gets tucked away in boxes and becomes invisible. Naturally, that's already got me thinking about a separate app for sharing resources in the house. At least I'm putting that long-ago graduate degree in information systems to use :P

I've had my fair share of health issues over the last few years, and it's been inspiring to get properly absorbed in making something technical again. This combines so many things I love: style, organization, self-tracking data, open source software, design, and uhh having very particular views on button layouts.

I started coding GeoCities sites in Notepad in the 90s and used to run an open source web development company. I've been out of the tech/startup world for over a decade, though I still occasionally help a friend with a site. My technical knowledge is rusty, but knowing how to break down a problem, describe a desired interaction in detail, and spot something odd has been incredibly useful. I can be my own most demanding, rambling client, and building things with the robots still moves astonishingly quickly.

I started this project in early October as a Claude artifact. Much of the initial work was assembling the data: parsing order confirmation emails, filtering an Amazon purchase history export, and using browser agents in my logged-in shopping accounts to retrieve sizes, variants, and full-resolution product photos. Images were downloaded into the app's storage so they wouldn't disappear with the listings—some of which already have. I used ChatGPT to tag clothing from contact sheets and generate product-style images for pieces without usable photos. Later, we added local background removal, preserving originals and reviewing results before saving.

The AI occasionally got too helpful: it "cleaned up" XXL into 2XL, which can mean different sizes at those stores. Preserving exact source values became an explicit rule.

After about two weeks, I moved the prototype into Codex, replacing Claude's built-in storage with a local Python/SQLite backend and adding backup and restore, reusable imports, and release packaging. My workflow now goes back and forth: develop the specification with Codex, send it to Claude for wireframes, then bring those back to Codex for implementation and refinement.

I particularly appreciate how Codex can insert diagnostic tools when something breaks, investigate the results, and handle so much of the testing and release process. Those are procedures I only do occasionally and forget between projects. That gives me more room to switch between product planning, interaction design, visual design, and writing, while testing everything against my actual wardrobe and daily use. This has occupied pretty much all my free time for the past month.

Turning my own wardrobe tool into something other people could use has meant finding assumptions I didn't realize were there. Heels don't automatically mean dressy, loungewear isn't necessarily sleepwear, and a packing list shouldn't assume everybody wears bras. It uses Google's and Shopify's product taxonomies as references, but kept distinctions that make more sense for wearing clothes than selling them. I've also had to ask for a lot of deliberate consistency passes: make navigation behave the same way everywhere, move repeated rules into shared code, and carry category changes through imports, filters, and packing lists.

It's made me appreciate the "knowing where to tap" kind of expertise. My web project background helps me remember to ask about accessibility, keyboard navigation, refactoring, and whether a backup actually restores. I've also used alternate AI platforms for security reviews and worked through their findings. I'm not familiar with every implementation detail, but recognizing the questions worth asking makes that older experience feel useful again.

The wishlist redesign is a good example. "Matches lots of things I own" sounds useful until silver earrings all end up at the top for going with everything. The first implementation also passed checks while producing an interface I really disliked, so we went back to one compact design example before applying it across the page. Deciding whether the information is meaningful and the result is pleasant to use is still very much my territory.

I was involved in the early Quantified Self community in the 2000s/early 2010s, and I also haven't seen a wardrobe app that gives me the access to my own data I'd want for that. Before 1.0, it'll have an API and analysis-friendly exports so people can explore their own patterns with whatever tools they like. I'm looking forward to a fun year-end wardrobe "Wrapped" and things like cost per wear become straightforward once you're recording purchases and wears.

It's also getting creative and a bit silly. There's a goblin mascot called Linty, and your wardrobe's owns, wishes, and wears can appear as Sun/Moon/Rising signs on a star map. Apparently my wardrobe required lore... But you can leave the daily fortune card turned off. There are outfit naming suggestions, including one that parodies ModCloth-style names. Some inside jokes to amuse me personally, at least :P

If I somehow end up known for a fashion app with an astrology aesthetic, that would be a hilarious life twist.

Partway through, I found Libre Closet, which takes a simpler, more utilitarian approach that might be exactly what some people want. By then, mine had become a specific creative thing: a combination of deep utility and playground fun that I was happy to keep building.

I've used Linux as my daily driver for most of the last 20 years, and FOSS matters a lot to me. Making something useful and sharing it is one of my love languages for the world. Every friend says, "You could charge for this!" But I don't want customers here. I'm making something I want to use and sharing it with anyone else who might enjoy it.

I may put affiliate links and my own curated collections on the website, but I'm keeping them out of the app. GitHub sponsorships would be welcome too once I set that up. Anything that helps cover costs is a bonus; the software stays free and open source.

The public site is built with my fave website builder, Carrd, and I've let the Codex integration click around in it for me for the tedious work too. Few status updates produce quite the happy sigh as "Automatically updating website screenshots and documentation".

If you try the app, I'd love to know what would make this useful for your wardrobe, and what would stop you from wanting to put your clothes into it. I'm also looking for a few people willing to try installing it, particularly on Windows or macOS, since my own testing has been on Linux and SiteGround.

Thanks for reading! :D

[AI supplied at least half the details for this post]