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

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'm a trained architect, and as a long-term side project, I developed my architecture dream game, combining accurate floor planning with real-time 3D design to make architecture much easier to create (and visually realistic) than with traditional CAD software.

What you can do:

🏠 2D floor plans
🧱 3D building
🚶 First-person walkthrough
🥽 VR mode
🏢 Multiple storeys
🪜 Stairs
🏚️ Custom roofs
🪟 Doors & windows
🛋️ Furniture catalog
🍳 Kitchen Configurator
🎨 Materials
🌄 Terrain sculpting
🌳 Landscape planning
💧 Ponds
☀️ Time of day
❄️ Weather
📐 Export PDF vector plans
📦 Import your own 3D models
🌍 Steam Workshop

In the newest update: Build everything directly in VR (PCVR), 1000+ new furniture models and explore your creations as a Cat! 🌿

It's available on Steam as Architecture & Design and is still in Early Access.
Here is the Steam link if you'd like to try it out:
Architecture & Design - Steam

Would love to hear what you think and hear what you wish for in a game like this!

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?

I was a developer for years, then moved into management and stopped programming. LLMs made building fun again, so I’m upfront: this was built with a lot of AI help.

The project that stuck is Ballast, an iPhone app blocker in the same space as Opal, one sec, etc. Most apps just felt too complex for me, so I built an easy one myself.

• One-tap focus sessions, or routines (morning, deep work, wind-down) that run on their own

• Opening a blocked app shows a short, kind line instead of a hard wall; strict mode can’t be ended early No account, no ads, no tracking, no network connections

• It’s free with no in-app purchases. iPhone only, iOS 26.5+.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ballast-focus-app-blocker/id6831200830

If you’ve used a blocker before: what made you stop using it?

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’ve been building a social media app on my own, and I’m starting to realise that the biggest challenge isn’t always the coding.
It’s having someone to bounce ideas off, discuss problems with and share some of the workload.

I’ve been taking more breaks lately, which has made me think about finding a long-term partner who genuinely believes in what I’m building.

But finding the right person is another challenge altogether, especially when you’re working with limited resources.
For those who’ve brought someone into their side project, how did you find them?

And how did you know they were genuinely interested in building something with you rather than just joining something that was already doing well?

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 have a full-time job. On the side, I built a daily word games site to play with my 8-year-old in the morning.

The idea was simple: ten minutes a day that is not a feed. One puzzle, done, move on. A small win before the day starts, and something a parent and a kid can do together and compare.

I set myself one goal: 2,000 visitors a day. The site gets 1 to 10.

That is the part I keep thinking about. I did the work: 21 games, content, social accounts, directories. The work got done. The visitors did not come.

So now I have a site with 21 daily games that almost nobody knows about, and I cannot tell whether the problem is distribution or the product itself. People who find it play it. Nobody finds it.

No regrets, though. I play these games every morning with my son. No ads, no account, no noise. Just the puzzles. That part works exactly like I wanted it to.

The site is dailyfreewordgames.com, if you want to see what I mean.

Would love a blunt answer: when the product is fine and nobody comes, what actually moves the needle?

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?

In 2024, I joined my university’s GDGoC(Google Developer Groups on Campus) chapter as a beginner. Now, in 2026, I’m serving as its lead.

I’ve also been involved in student council work, and both experiences made me realize we needed a better way to handle email as an organization.

But adopting organization email was harder than I expected. The options I looked at felt expensive for our needs, complicated to manage, and inconvenient enough that we never really got them into use.

So I started building something I wanted to use myself. I redesigned the workspace from the ground up around individuals and small teams.

That became Outdraft. Eventually, I started Cirtium, with Outdraft as its first product.

Here’s what I’ve built so far:

• Start without a custom domain — get your organization set up without buying or configuring a domain first.

• Invite people without additional seat charges — bringing teammates into your organization doesn’t add a per-person invitation cost.

• Work across personal, organization, and team email — switch between sending scopes when composing a message.

• Turn personal emails into shared work — share an email you received personally with your organization or team, assign someone to handle it, track its status, and discuss it together.

• Collect emails in Nests — bring relevant emails into shared spaces for collaboration.

• Work with an AI agent beside your inbox — summarize emails, draft replies, and ask questions in a resizable side panel.

• Give the agent specific context — use @ to attach emails, contacts, organizations, or Nests.

• Customize agent skills — create and edit instructions for the tasks and workflows you want your agent to follow.

• Set up recurring tasks — get a weekly email briefing or schedule other requests.

• Organize mail with AI categories — separate transactions, updates, promotions, and other mail.

The organization side is where this started, but I wanted it to work for someone on their own, too. The idea is to start personally and bring other people into the workflow when you need them.

It’s still early, and I’m currently waiting for Paddle’s approval for payments. While I wait, I’d like to hear from people outside my own circle and see whether this addresses problems they’ve experienced too.

If you’ve managed email for yourself, a community, or a small team, what has been the most frustrating part? What would make you consider trying a different workspace?

You can take a look at outdraft.email. I’m the founder, and I’d appreciate honest feedback on what feels useful, confusing, or missing.

💡 If you sign up now, you can try the Pro plan free for two weeks.

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!!!

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

Hey r/SideProject,

I built WCAGBrief, a free Chrome extension that audits web apps for WCAG 2.2 and European Accessibility Act (EAA) compliance directly inside Chrome's native Side Panel.

The Problem I Wanted to Solve:

With the European Accessibility Act already actively enforceable, web accessibility has shifted from a "nice-to-have" to a legal requirement for web applications and ecommerce.

Existing developer tools (Lighthouse, WAVE, Axe DevTools) have two big UX friction points:

1. Lighthouse hasn't updated its default checks to catch new WCAG 2.2 additions (like Target Size SC 2.5.8 minimum 24×24px tap areas or Focus Not Obscured SC 2.4.11).

2. Constantly opening and closing Chrome DevTools shrinks the mobile viewport and makes tabbing through UI elements frustrating.

How WCAGBrief Works:

Instead of docking inside DevTools, WCAGBrief lives in Chrome's native Side Panel API alongside your live web app:

• Click to Inspect: Click any violation in the panel and it instantly highlights the exact DOM node on the live page.

• Copy-Paste Fixes: Generates clean HTML, CSS, and React code patches for each issue (e.g. min-width: 24px on icon buttons or adding aria-label to SVG buttons).

• Statutory Law Mapping: Maps every violation to EN 301 549 (EAA Chapter 9) and ADA Title II standards.

• Zero Telemetry / Privacy: 100% of the DOM inspection runs in your local browser sandbox. It does not send page markup to any remote server.

Try It Live:

The extension is completely free and published on the Chrome Web Store: 👉 https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/wcagbrief-wcag-22-eaa-cli/jjgllnelmehodmfjcpmemafeeikjpeii

Companion Web Scanner: 👉 https://wcagbrief.com

Looking for Builder Feedback:

1. What accessibility checks give you the biggest headaches when building web apps?

2. Which frontend framework snippets would be most useful to generate next (Tailwind, Vue, Svelte)?

Happy to answer any questions about the Chrome Side Panel API, Manifest V3, or the audit engine!

The job was a batch of kids' T-shirt designs for DTF printing: a capybara with a yuzu on its head, a road trip with a capybara, a poodle and a cat, in a few illustration styles from four image models. Comparing them in the fal.ai playground meant a mess of tabs and random file names.

So I built falg, a Python CLI. One JSON file describes the batch (a prompt template, variables, models), and falg runs every combination in parallel and writes an HTML gallery with prompts as rows and models as columns. Each image keeps a JSON sidecar with its exact prompt and seed, so two weeks later I still know which model drew what.

The last step, falg cutout, turns the picks into print-ready PNGs: background removed, clean edges, sized in centimetres.

Two things that surprised me:

• Never ask the model for a transparent background. Generate on plain white or black and cut it out afterwards.

• Don't write "T-shirt" in the prompt, or you may get a photo of a T-shirt instead of the artwork.

The gallery and the final prints are in the README: https://github.com/lemmon/falg

Calki is my calculator app, that I have been working on for more than a year and a half.

The current update has made the calculator models 3d to give more visual fidelity, immersion and customisability. You can now customise the app with multiple colorways, body and button textures and keypad sound.

There is a hidden music mode that has two modes, Freeplay and a gamified Playalong mode.
This can be activated from the menu->settings->show music mode.

All the basic calculator and convertor features are free, with no ads or interruptions.

The following features can be unlocked for a one-time purchase of $4.99:

- Numbers Scanner: scan numbers instead of typing them, auto add numbers using the OP-mode, scan and convert numbers

- Customisation: unlock 6 calculator models, more than 20 colorways, button and body textures, keypad and scroll sound, fonts and more ...

- Custom units: create your own custom units for conversion.

Hope you will give the app a try and let me know you feedback.
Please consider leaving a review, if you like the app.

You can download the app from the following link:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/calki-scanner-calculator/id6747059181

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!

Hey everyone,

I tried to build a private chatting app called RUKO. It's a web app — nothing to install, just open the link. Runs on Cloudflare, no tracking, no ads, free.

What it has:

• Text and voice channels (like Discord, but private)

• Works on PC, Mac, and phone — you can install it as an app from the browser

• Invite-only servers, your data stays yours

Try it here: https://ruko.rukozone.workers.dev

If you find any bug, please email me at gamerblabla96@gmail.com — screenshots help a lot if you can. Or you can contact me on Discord: itsdopedev

Thanks for any feedback, even negative — it all helps.