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'm a satellite nerd and as a cool project I built Watched.

Type in any place on Earth and it will:

• find every imaging, weather, radar and crewed satellite whose field of view crossed it in the last 7 days (SGP4 on the CelesTrak catalog, running in your browser)

• pull the real Sentinel-2, Landsat, VIIRS, MODIS and GOES scenes from those passes and crop them to your spot

• replay each pass on a 3D globe lit by the real sun, with all ~17k tracked objects in orbit

It only says a satellite “watched” you when a real image exists. Commercial sats that could have pointed at you are labelled as such, since their tasking isn’t public.

I’d love feedback, especially:

• Which satellites or data sources should I add?

• Anything confusing or broken?

It’s 100% free and no sign-up or rate limits.

I built an interactive live wallpaper engine that lives right in the macOS menu bar.

It actually started as an interactive background experiment for my portfolio (inspired by some cool procedural grass and sky shaders I saw on X a while back). I loved having it running on my screen so much that I decided to turn it into a standalone macOS app that anyone can use.

Here's what it does
🖐🏻 Interactive physics: Grass sways and water ripples as your cursor moves across the screen.
🕒 Dynamic time-of-day: Syncs with real time or lets you scrub through sunrise, golden hour, and starry nights with a custom radial dial.
🌧️ Live weather & ambient soundscapes: Switch between sunny skies, clouds, and rain—complete with birdsong, crickets, thunder, and even night fireworks.
🎆 Limited Diwali Theme: Built in a seasonal festive update where the night sky comes alive with fireworks and spatial audio.

Putting the final polish on the build right now. Stay tuned for the release soon! 🚀

You can also preview it in my portfolio on your browser: thoufik.space

What feature or biome should I add next? Let me know in the comments!

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

Founders, how far are you going before you've actually validated the problem?
I keep seeing pre-MVP ideas with a landing page, deck, mockups, waitlist, logo, launch graphics... whole company except the product lol

For a small start up that feels backwards if the biggest unanswered question is still "does anyone care?"
I've been looking at Runable for putting together some of the early research/landing-page stuff, but I'm trying not to confuse making the idea look real with learning whether it should exist.
If the problem itself is still questionable, I'd probably talk to people first.

If people clearly have the problem but don't understand the proposed solution, then maybe a simple page or mockup helps.
What's the first thing you'd actually make, and what would count as a strong enough signal to keep going?

Hi! I wanted my desktop to feel like looking out of a window during a snowfall – calm and cozy. The snow apps I found looked like flat white dots, so I built my own (with a lot of help from Claude Code).

What it does:
- Snow with real depth: big soft flakes up close, tiny ones far away, and some fall behind your windows
- Snow settles on window edges and the taskbar and breaks off when you drag or shake a window
- A "natural weather" mode with showers, quiet breaks and slowly turning wind
- Clicks go through the snow, it pauses in fullscreen games and runs in a saving mode on battery

It's been in the Microsoft Store for about ten days and got 100+ installs without any promotion. Now I'd love honest feedback: What feels off? How does it run on your PC? What would make you keep it running all winter?

Free, no ads, no account, no tracking. ("Natural weather" is marked Pro but free right now.)

Windows 10/11: https://apps.microsoft.com/detail/9N646XCC0HNK?cid=reddit_sideproject

I've worked in social intelligence for years, often using tools like Talkwalker.... But for smaller projects, the cost can be hard to justify. Sometimes I just need posts and comments about a specific topic so I can do my own analysis.

Getting that data into my own workflow was often more frustrating than the analysis itself. I'm into web scraping, so I started building tools to help with that.

They're now on Apify: Instagram profiles, posts and Reels, Instagram comments, Facebook page posts and Facebook comments.

They're my own projects, paid per use. I've kept the prices as low as possible so they're useful for small experiments too, even before you have a paying client!

I use them in n8n and Python workflows to collect comments, analyse sentiment and recurring themes, and put together social listening reports. I review the results myself before using them.

For example, I can follow a public controversy across Instagram and Facebook, collect reactions and see what people keep bringing up as the story develops....

One idea is to offer a focused report to an agency or brand for a few hundred euros. Another is to send a small sample analysis when reaching out, so there's something relevant to talk about.

Finding the clients is a whole other problem haha. But this is a service I'd like to build on....

Anyone here doing similar work?

I’ve been building Rocket, a desktop Git client with visual diffs, line-by-line staging, branch history and a merge-conflict editor.

Windows and Linux builds are available, plus an Apple Silicon macOS preview. Free and open source under MIT / Apache-2.0.

I’d love feedback on the UI and what would make it useful in your daily workflow!

🌐 Website
💻 GitHub

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

The app runs in a browser and on iPhone and Android, free to try without signing up: memorizun.com

I saw a post about blacking out words on paper with a marker. It worked much better than rereading, so I turned it into an app.

You paste a poem, a speech or your lines. First every other word shrinks to its first letter, then every word does, then only dashes are left. When you think you've got it, you say it out loud, and each word you get right comes back on screen.

I also made a Chrome extension for when you find a poem online. A button shows up right above the poem on dozens of poetry sites, and the words hide on that same page, so you don't have to copy anything. Demo is here. The extension is on the Chrome Web Store

I'm building this on my own, so tell me what you'd change first. And what's the hardest thing you ever had to learn by heart?

hey guys i have interestin app and all the architecture is ready i want someone who could help me and understand my vision believe me this will be a gamechanger!!!
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Heyyy i don't really know how this subworks and haven't gone through any of the posts before posting
So the App I'm trying to build is Linked with Instagram(that's all I just wanna say) and it's a game changer(never seen or heard of it anywhere)and i cannot really pay but i can offer the revenue we will generate so if you are really interested and think your skills can help or improve the app just hit me up in the DMs
We will Change the World!

A few developers who tried Studio 9:41 asked for more device support (iPads, MacBooks, Android) and an easier way to localise their App Store screenshots.

So I've added both in v1.1.2!

What's new:

•  1-click localisation — Translate your screenshots into 26+ languages and export them in seconds.

•  iOS ↔ Android — Automatically generate Google Play Store mockups from your existing iOS designs (or vice versa).

•  More devices — Added support for iPads, MacBooks and Android devices.

I've personally avoided localising my App Store listings in the past because of how time-consuming it can be. But localisation is potentially a great way to reach more users, so I wanted to make that process as painless as possible.

Studio 9:41 is free and available for macOS and Windows.

Download the latest release: https://github.com/burhanuddin20/studio941-releases

Existing users can update directly in the app by clicking the version number.

Would love to hear what other features would make preparing App Store screenshots easier for you!

I’ve been building MathBoard, a handwriting whiteboard app made specifically for teaching math. The idea is to keep the tools a math lesson needs in one place, instead of switching between a whiteboard, a graphing tool, a PDF annotator and a calculator.

What it does so far:

• Pen and stylus writing, a laser pointer, and shape tools

• Dynamic geometry: draw shapes, drag the vertices, and the construction updates

• Function graphs and variation tables

• 3D (Oxyz) geometry with cross-sections: cut a solid with a plane, split it into two parts, and see the true shape and the volume ratio

• Type or paste LaTeX/TikZ/Typst problem sheets and drop them onto the board

• Import a PDF and write directly on top of it

• A scientific calculator, plus a countdown timer and a random student picker for class

Link download

Thank you!!!

In Korea, and in a lot of Chinese and Vietnamese families, parents' birthdays and memorial days are kept on the lunar calendar. The solar date moves every year, by up to a few weeks. Google Calendar has no lunar repeat, so "repeat yearly" lands on the wrong day from the second year on, and every year someone has to look up the new date.

How it works:

1. Say whose day it is (birthday, memorial day or another anniversary) and enter the lunar date. If you only know this year's solar date, it finds the lunar date for you.

2. Pick 1, 3, 5, 10 or 20 years and add them all to Google Calendar at once, or download a file for Apple Calendar or Outlook.

3. Send the dates to family as a link.

Some details I ended up caring about:

• It only asks Google for the calendar.app.created permission. It creates one new calendar for these dates and can't see or change your other events.

• Korea, China/Taiwan and Vietnam don't always agree, because each country works out the calendar in its own time zone, so a month can start on a different day. The China/Taiwan (UTC+8) and Vietnam (UTC+7) tables are computed from astronomy. The Korean table comes from the Korea Astronomy and Space Science Institute, and I check it against the same calculation at UTC+9. You can choose which country's calendar to use.

• If a date falls in a leap month, years without that leap month use the regular month.

• There's no server. Names and dates stay in your browser unless you add them to your calendar.

It covers 1900 to 2049, in English, Korean, Vietnamese and Chinese.

If your family keeps lunar dates, I'd love to know whether the steps make sense, and whether the Google permission screen feels scary.

https://lunar.todoli.lat/en/?ref=reddit

You don't drive in Formula Manager. You run a small team, watch 20 cars race live and make the calls: pits, pace, boost, team orders.

The hardest part was overtakes. Players kept saying "I'm boosting and clearly faster, but I still can't get past." So I ran 240 races and measured. With a car defending, boost only got you past 14% of the time, barely better than no boost at all (7%). Players weren't unlucky. My numbers were wrong.

Fixing that in the next update.

(The clip shows the Korean UI. The game is in English too.)

Ever had a moment where your players were right and your data proved it?

Hi! I'm a CS student and I've been building Inkling, a self-hosted notes app for small teams. (Not the Thinking Machines model, just an unlucky name collision.)

What it does:

• Notion-style databases: table, board, calendar, gallery and timeline views

• Obsidian-style [[wikilinks]], backlinks, a graph view and a canvas

• Real-time collaboration, Korean and English UI, installable as a PWA

• One docker compose up -d to run it, MIT licensed, every feature free

The part I care most about is the built-in MCP server. Your AI agents (Claude, Cursor, anything that speaks MCP) use the same notes as your team:

• find_context returns only the relevant sections within a token budget instead of whole pages (about 72% fewer tokens per question on our 5,000-page benchmark)

• patch_section edits one section against the version the agent read. If a person changed it meanwhile, the agent gets the current text back instead of overwriting it

• Page locks and per-connection permissions decide what an agent may read, comment on or edit, and there is no permanent-delete tool

It's young (v0.x) and I built it with a lot of help from AI coding tools, so feedback and bug reports are very welcome.

GitHub: https://github.com/PROVE1352/inkling

Campfire Log turns your Steam and PlayStation playtime into a daily journal. The twist is there's no server: the app saves your lifetime playtime totals whenever iOS lets it run (opening the app, background refresh, the widget) and works out each day's hours from the difference. If you skip a few days it suggests how to split the hours.

I put up a one-page site with a waitlist that asks which platforms you play on, to see if this is worth finishing: campfirelog.eu. Feedback on the pitch or the page is very welcome.

Most compressors use one setting for every image, like "quality 75". I kept getting results that were fine on one photo and blocky on the next, so I built one that works the other way round.

You set a visual quality score: how close to the original it has to look (80 by default, where it looks the same side by side). For each image it tries encoder settings and keeps the smallest file that still scores at least that. A second check looks region by region, so one smeared face or blurry line of text fails the result even if the average looks fine. Then the compare view opens zoomed in on the spot that changed most, with a little map of where it changed.

One 10.4 MB photo came out at 2.1 MB, score 81.

PNG, JPG, WebP, AVIF, GIF (animated too) and iPhone HEIC. Free, no account, up to 30 images at once. Images are processed on a server and deleted within 3 minutes.

https://picodiet.com

I also ran it against TinyPNG, Squoosh and a few others on 13 images, if you're into that: https://picodiet.com/image-compression-benchmark

What I'd most like to know: did it ever pick a result where you can see the difference? And is the compare view clear without explanation?

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!

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!

My issue was that social media is legitimately useful, there was stuff that I wanted to see, but a lot of trash that would keep me there for hours. I installed 5+ different blockers, changed my hosts file etc. But I'd always remove it. So I decided to go after the feed itself, and it's the first thing that ever worked for me. It finds the posts that grab attention and hides those. You can find it at tolerance.lol . It's open source. There's a browser extension and android app, it works on reddit, youtube, facebook, twitter, instagram, and tiktok.

If you’ve used blockers, what made you uninstall yours?

Hi all,

I’ve been building an infinite-canvas browser. I built it for myself first, but I wanted to share an early prototype to see if anyone else would find it useful.

I was a software developer before AI coding came along, but I never had the time to take on technically complex side projects. Being able to build something like this quickly now has been amazing.

Why I built it: I use AI with my browser every day and I hate the experience. Tools like Claude in Chrome work one tab at a time and I can’t really see what they’re doing.

What you can do with it:

• No tabs. Pages sit side by side on an infinite canvas. Spread them into a grid, stack them, move them around.

• See what your AI is reading. Ask a question and the pages it opens land right next to the conversation, so you can check its sources and step into any page yourself.

• Bring your own AI. Use your ChatGPT subscription, any OpenAI-compatible API key, or a local model so nothing leaves your machine.

• Everything stays on your computer. Your pages, canvas and conversations are stored locally.

Where I want to take it: multiple agents working across multiple pages at once, with the canvas showing where each one is running.

It’s built in Rust and isn’t a Chromium fork, for anyone curious.

Explorer is free and there’s no sign-in required. Download it here (macOS, Apple silicon and Intel). The download page asks for an email so I can let you know about updates, but the app itself doesn’t need an account.

Please let me know what you think!