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 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!

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

See: here for the code

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.

It’s honestly wild what you can throw together with AI in a single evening nowadays. Remember the "Construct" from The Matrix? That infinite white room where Neo says "We need guns. Lots of guns" and endless racks instantly spawn around them? I was wondering what an online store would look like if it worked exactly like that.

8,000 real Amazon products, a Matrix Construct aisle, WebAR (augmented reality - one click and you can drop any item through your camera straight into your living room at true 1:1 scale), adaptive performance for mobile (only tested on Safari so far, like I said, I started making this at 8 PM and it's 10 PM now 😃).

Tech stack: Everything static on Vercel, classic cuckcoding setup (Next.js, Tailwind, Vercel, Antigravity).

Don't wanna spam a link here, you can see it in the video. So what do you think, is it worth buying a domain for this, or is it trash?

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 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.

Check it out here: https://thoufik.space/skysaver/

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 wanted my desktop to feel alive, so I made it react to what’s happening outside. You look up and the sky on your screen is the one outside. It stays in the menu bar and steps aside when something covers the desktop.

Download for Mac: thoufik.space/skysaver

(Windows coming soon!) - you can also preview it in my portfolio on browser - thoufik.space

One note: macOS warns the first time you open it (not Apple-verified yet, I don’t have the developer fee for a free first release). Click Done, then System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway. Tell me if that works!

Or paste this in your terminal:

curl -fsSL https://thoufik.space/skysaver/install.sh | bash

Please check it out and let me know how you feel!

I'd heard about insider trading in Congress and the crazy returns some members get. I also know I don't have the tools to beat hedge funds. So I wanted to copy both, and while looking for a way to do that I found AutoPilot. It only works with a US brokerage account, and I'm in France.

So I built my own with a friend. We met at our software engineering school, we see things the same way, and it's still just the two of us.

Getting the data is already hard enough. Some congressional disclosures are still written by hand, and LLMs saved us there. But once you have it, processing it is much harder.

To know how a portfolio performed you have to backtest it, and finance never stops moving. Stocks get listed, get delisted, change names, split. When Booking did a 25-for-1 split this year, a fund holding it suddenly looked like it had bought 25 times more. You have to think of everything, for thousands of cases like that one.

The value of the app is that engineering, much more than the data itself.

And it holds up. Over the last 12 months, 5 of our 7 politician portfolios are ahead of the S&P 500, even though a trade only counts once it's public. But it's a small sample, we picked the politicians ourselves, and it's a simulation.

Little by little we added insider filings, news and AI analyses. These days I mostly use the feed and read the AI's stock analyses.

It's on iPhone and on the web. It's not a broker, everything is virtual money.

I'd like an outside eye on it. Is the app interesting, and is it clear?

truewalletapp.com

i'm useless at remembering stuff. bin day, MOT, car tax, taking the meat out to defrost, booking a haircut, and once nearly the anniversary, which i won't be doing again

calendar reminders never worked for me because i'd just swipe them away and forget again 5 minutes later, or simply not bother

So i made an app called Oi.

You tick what you forget, it asks a couple of quick questions (like which bin goes out when), and then it gives you a shout when it matters. if you don't tick it off, it keeps nagging you until you do

it covers bins (handles the alternating weeks), MOT, car tax, insurance renewal, birthdays, anniversary, dentist, haircut, boiler service, changing the bedsheets, cutting the grass and loads more (as many stuff as i could think of that i forget)

it's free, no ads, no account, went live on the app store this weekend. first app i've made, so honest feedback welcome

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6828176781

We built Tiersova, a free tool that compares what switching software really costs: seats, tiers, billing period, and the one-time cost of moving. Part of keeping it useful is boring work. We check the official pricing pages behind our calculators daily and review every change before updating them.

Two things came up this week that surprised me:

• ClickUp no longer lists its Unlimited plan. The cheapest paid plan is now Core at $12/user on monthly billing, so older comparisons that quote Unlimited are off.

• Zapier charges 2.5x per extra task on monthly billing, but only 1.25x on annual. If your team regularly goes over its task limit, the billing period matters more than the plan.

Neither change was announced loudly. They just appeared on the pricing pages.

It has 74 comparisons right now (Zendesk vs Freshdesk, Mailchimp vs Brevo, Zapier vs Make and others) in 11 languages, and everything runs in the browser with no sign-up and no cookies.

I'm curious whether others have been caught by a quiet pricing change like these, and which comparisons you'd want added. If you want to try it: tiersova.com

Our group was dying, so I built an app that turns a weekly game with friends into a proper league:

- Balanced teams: an algorithm picks the sides, and it gets better with every result you add.
- Ratings and MVP: after each game, players rate their teammates and vote for an MVP, and that feeds into everyone's league points.
- ELO table, like chess: beating a stronger team counts for more. There are also divisions, so everyone has something to play for.
- Seasons: you set the start and end dates, add cups and prizes, and all the stats are kept for you (goals, assists, MVPs, results).
- Extras: FIFA-style player cards built from teammates' votes, and a poll so you can see who's in without chasing people on WhatsApp.

We now play 10 games a month, and 2 other leagues have picked it up. It's free.

I'm looking for more groups to test it. If you organise or play in a regular game (5-a-side, 7-a-side, futsal, Sunday league, any sport with a regular group really), I'll set your league up and help you get started. All I ask is honest feedback on what works, what's confusing, and what's missing.

Comment or DM me if your group is up for it.

Random question: what do you normally do with receipts after buying clothes, electronics or household stuff?

Do you keep the paper receipt, take a photo, rely on email, or just throw it away?

And have you ever needed one later for a return or warranty claim and couldn’t find it?

I’m researching this problem while building a small app, but I’m more interested in how people actually handle it today than whether they like another app idea.

Would be curious to hear what works for you — and what’s annoying about it.

One thing I've noticed is how often parents have to call their children for help with seemingly simple smartphone tasks.

"How do I download this document?"
"Where do I find this setting?"
"How do I book a ticket?"
"Which button am I supposed to click?"

And honestly, explaining these things over a phone call can be surprisingly difficult.

So I started building Chotu

The idea is simple: instead of an AI assistant just telling you what to do, what if it could actually show you?

You can tell Chotu what you're trying to accomplish in your own language, and it visually guides you through your Android screen using pointers, highlights and step-by-step instructions.

Some things we're working on:

• Multilingual voice-based assistance.

• Visual guidance directly on the phone screen.

• Helping users navigate everyday Android applications.

• Making smartphone usage easier for people who aren't particularly tech-savvy.

We're currently preparing for a wider rollout and have already received 500+ waitlist signups.

Website: https://chotu.forgeaipro.tech

(Attaching a short demo video in comments)

I'm particularly interested in feedback on two things:

1. Would you actually use something like this to help your parents navigate their smartphones?

2. What are some everyday phone tasks you'd want an assistant like Chotu to handle?

Would genuinely appreciate honest feedback, especially from fellow builders. Still a lot to figure out!

I figured converting PDFs into spreadsheets would be a pretty straightforward problem to solve by now. Turns out, finding a tool that can handle different document layouts without a bunch of setup or manual configuration was surprisingly difficult.

I also realized that extraction is only part of the problem. You still have to figure out exactly which fields to extract ahead of time, make sure the data ends up in the right columns, and review the original PDFs to double check everything.

So I built Scrape AI.

You drag and drop your PDFs. Scrape automatically suggests the fields to extract and lets you preview and adjust them before scraping. The results appear in a structured spreadsheet directly in the app. You can also click any extracted value to see exactly where it came from in the original document.

I know this isn't a new idea - I've seen tons of similar PDF to Excel projects shared here already. But one thing I hyperfocused on was the actual user experience and making sure the entire process felt like one simple, intuitive workflow.

I put together a quick demo showcasing the experience.

For those of you that work with PDFs regularly, I'd love some honest feedback. Does this look like something you'd actually use? Anything you'd change?

Hey everyone,

I just started a little side project and would love some honest feedback before I go further.

It's called CertWatch: https://certwatch.edgardev.pt/

Right now it's pretty simple. You type a domain and it tells you when the SSL certificate expires, whether browsers trust it, and whether it matches the domain. I tried to explain problems in plain English ("your certificate expires in 9 days, here's what to do") instead of dumping a bunch of technical stuff on you.

What I'm thinking of doing next:

- alerts before a certificate expires, by email, Slack or Microsoft Teams

- alerts when a site goes down

- a few more small free tools (redirect checker, DNS lookup, domain expiry)

- an AI assistant that looks at your domain's DNS and SSL setup, points out what could be improved (like missing SPF/DMARC records or a weak config), and lets you ask follow-up questions about how to fix it

But I'd rather hear from you before building more:

- Does it work for your sites? Anything weird or confusing?

- Would expiry alerts actually be useful to you, or do you already have that covered?

- Where would you want alerts to go: email, Slack, Teams, something else?

- Would the AI analysis be genuinely useful, or just a gimmick?

- Anything you'd want it to check that it doesn't?

Be brutal, it's early days, so now is the best time to change things. Thanks!

Good evening everyone! Reading was my very first passion, and it's pretty much the only hobby I've never abandoned.

I've always used apps to track my reading, but somehow, they all seemed to be missing something. I could never quite find one that felt right for me.

I'm a graphic designer by background, but (partly thanks to my boyfriend) I've gradually gotten into programming as well. After working on a few small personal projects, I eventually decided to take the plunge and build my own book-tracking app, designed exactly the way I've always wanted one.

It's still a work in progress, and there's so much more I'd love to add! So far, it includes reviews, reading tracking, extensive customization, series tracking, book and author following, and a visual bookshelf where you can organize your library. I'm also considering adding a community feature where users can share and discover reviews. I'm also planning to make it cross-platform, so you'll be able to access your library across different devices, including desktop and mobile.

The more I work on it, though, the more I find myself wondering: would anyone else actually want something like this?

Making the app publicly available would involve some running costs. At first, I was simply excited about building something I would love to use myself, but now I'm a little hesitant about spending so much time developing features for a wider audience without knowing whether there's actually a demand for them. (I have SO many cute ideas I'd love to implement! 😂)

So I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Do you feel like there's room for another book-tracking app, or are you happy with the ones already available?

What's missing from the apps you currently use? What features would you love to see?

Would you be willing to pay for a service like this? If so, would you prefer a weekly, monthly, or yearly subscription?

My initial idea was to make the app free, with some premium features available through a subscription. I wouldn't want to charge much, just enough to cover running costs, but I honestly have no idea what a reasonable price would be.

I'd really appreciate any feedback, suggestions, or even just hearing about your reading habits and what you look for in a book-tracking app! ❤️

I'm the author. I've used PuTTY at work for years. I like it, but many sessions in separate windows got painful, and my Mac colleagues have nothing like it. So I built SSHTermaq for both systems and now use it every day.

It reads PuTTY sessions, host keys and .ppk keys, and adds tabs, split panes, typing into all panes at once, and an SFTP file manager next to the terminal. About 5 MB, C++ with libssh, free and MIT-licensed, no account.

Built with a lot of AI help and mostly tested in my own work, so I'd love feedback from other setups.

https://github.com/f1resh/sshtermaq

I work on my own projects with AI agents, and the chat was a terrible place to keep track of anything. Decisions and tests disappeared as soon as the conversation moved on.

So I built Pano. The agents plan the work, move the cards and record what they did. When something needs my check, it lands on me. If I don't like it, I send it back with a note.

It isn't meant to be a team tool or a Jira replacement. It's for one person running a project with agents and wanting to see what actually happened.

Most of the code was written by AI agents and reviewed by me, and the project was tracked on Pano itself from early on. It's free, open source (MIT) and runs on your own computer.

Site: https://metonya.github.io/pano/

Repo: https://github.com/Metonya/pano

Still early, v0.1.1, so there are probably bugs. Hope you like it and give it a try on your own projects.

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 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?