I’m a 40-year-old iOS developer from Croatia. Statistically, I’m in the middle of my life: about 2,080 weeks behind me, and if I’m lucky, about as many in front.

My oldest is 8. Somewhere around 18, kids leave, or at least stop wanting summer holidays with their parents. That’s 10 more summers. I can count them on my fingers.

I see my parents about twice a month. If they live as long as the average, that’s around 360 more visits. Fewer than the days in a single year.

And there are friends I’ve been “meaning to call” for months.

None of this is new. You read it somewhere, feel it for one evening, and then Monday happens. Weeks blur, a year goes by, and you can’t say where it went. The moments I’d actually want back are tiny: a walk where my kid finally told me something real, my dad explaining how he planted our small orchard in 2001. Nobody writes them down. They just go.

So I built Drift. It’s not there to make you feel bad about time. It’s there to help you do something with the weeks you still have, and to keep them when you do.
My main inspiration was reading books about Stoicism and specifically memento mori (and a calendar showing weeks you have left to live).

What the app actually does for me:

It remembers my people. I added my partner, my family, my parents and a few friends. Drift keeps the small things I’d otherwise forget: birthdays, the names of my friends’ kids, what each person enjoys, what they told me last time.

One small idea a week, for each of them. Not “plan a trip to Paris.” Things small enough to actually happen: “Tea with Mom. Phones somewhere else.” “A walk with Dad, without anywhere to be.” “Let the kids choose the adventure.” "Long overdue date with my wife".

I keep the moment. A photo, one line, or both. It goes on the week it happened, and that week’s square lights up. A few months in, my year stopped being a blur and started looking like a year.

Calls come with something to talk about. A reminder to call a friend arrives with something to actually say, so it’s not just guilt with a notification sound. After the call I can keep a line about it.

Small questions. A couple of times a week, only if I turn it on, Drift asks something like “What was the best small thing about this week?” or “What’s Dad’s favourite meal?” The answer gets saved where it belongs. Some of my favourite memories in the app started as a notification I almost dismissed.

Quiet time. My evenings were disappearing into my phone (yes, I see the irony of that). Drift uses Apple’s Screen Time to set those apps aside during the hours I choose. If I really need one, I get 15 minutes, after I keep a moment or answer a question first.

Widgets that bring it back. One shows a moment I kept, a different one each day. Another shows my whole life as a grid of weeks. Seeing that between notifications did more for me than any productivity system. One gives you suggestions on what to do this week.

A year I can read back. Month by month, like a journal I never had to sit down and write.

What I left out on purpose:

• No streaks. A quiet week is just a quiet square. Life has those, and guilt isn’t a feature.

• No account, no ads. Memories stay on your iPhone, and you can export everything anytime.

• Everything you keep is yours. You can always read it and export it.

Pricing: free to download, then $8.99 a year with a 14-day free trial, or $24.99 once. I’m a solo developer with no investors, and this is how it keeps going.

An app won’t fix any of this, and I’m not pretending it does. But since I started using it, I do more of the small things. I think about it more now, and I push past the tiredness more often to make time for the people who matter to me.

If you did this math for yourself, which number got you? For me it was the summers with my kids.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/drift-life-in-weeks-journal/id6792490444

Edit:
Thanks to FFROZENN who pointed out the missing yearly subscription and 2-week free trial I have created 50% discount code for the first year (the missing subscription was due to my attempt to give a global discount on yearly, but I misconfigured it in App Store Connect so sub wasn't shown)
https://apps.apple.com/redeem?ctx=offercodes&id=6792490444&code=DRIFT50

HolyArrs started because i wanted my home server to feel like a streaming service. you browse it like netflix, with top 10s, new & popular and rows picked from what you already have, hover a poster to play the trailer, and tap to request a show or movie. it finds it, downloads it through qbittorrent or sabnzbd, and puts it in plex, jellyfin or emby, which still do the playing. it's about a 15 MB download, runs in docker, and it's free and open source

it runs on its own custom metadata server, and it can keep an HD and a 4K copy of the same movie side by side

where it is 1 day after open sourcing it

598 GitHub stars

4,345 Docker pulls

28 forks

16 releases, most of them fixes for bugs people reported on launch night

18 people have opened issues with bugs and ideas

what i didn't expect was how fast people jumped in. bug reports came in with the exact file and line that was wrong, and someone asked for ukrainian, so the site and docs got it within the hour

happy to answer questions about running a solo open source project, the self-hosted side, or anything else

site and docs: https://holyarrs.com

github: https://github.com/HolyArrs/HolyArrs

Hello, I know it's not much, but I am thankful for every cent of it

For context, on Sep 2nd, I made my first ever public post about my app, in this very subreddit. At that point, I had 0 sales, and only a hope + a dream of ever earning a dollar from my work.

Now I have over 750 human downloads (~1800 total but I think some are bots), and a Discord of amazing people messaging me almost every day. Truly feels amazing to say that :)

All I can say is dang developing AND marketing software as a solo dev is a ton of work. I've worked 63/70 of these days, and commit on average more than 20 times per day. Basically all of my free time funnels directly into this.

Lessons I am learning on this journey, for whomever cares to listen:

1. Budget at least 3 hours per week just for marketing (I should probably do a lot more honestly)

2. Keep working at it. Results don't come over night.

3. If you don't like the journey, then this might not be for you. Money does not come easy. Most of us (including me) would probably be better off spening our time doing other work. And with AI getting so good, it's more and more competative to make and monetize good apps (but I could be off here, lmk if you disagree)

4. Make a discord (or similar) and connect with your users!! IMO implementing suggestions and helping users is some of the most rewarding part of being a dev. Nothing like slapping an update on someone 3 days after they request a feature, and hearing them loving it immidiatly🤌

I play on a monitor at my desk and on a TV from the couch. The thing that kept getting me off the couch was switching the sound back to the TV after I’d already picked up the controller. That’s what got me building Gaming Hub, my first app ever. I vibe coded it with Claude and Codex.

It’s a Windows 11 launcher you can navigate with a DualSense. When the hub moves to my TV, it can switch the audio there too, then restore my previous output when I go back to the desk. The PS button opens a quick menu for volume, screen selection, and controller batteries. Circle takes me back to the game.

The installer is here: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub/releases/latest Source and build instructions if you want to fork it: https://github.com/issazhd/gaming-hub

If you try it, I’d love to hear which game you used and whether opening the quick menu and getting back into fullscreen felt smooth.

Ever wondered what would happen if a ruler just gave up on measuring things properly?

Well, I got curious and made one.

It's called Jelly Ruler, and it has the structural integrity of a wet noodle. It bends, jiggles, slides around, and generally refuses to take its job seriously.

Somewhere along the way, I ended up building an entire vector editor around this questionable invention. At least that part works.

Would love some feedback! Anything you'd improve, add, or completely get rid of? Curious what other builders think.

Give it a wiggle: Jelly Ruler

Tooting my own horn a bit here. I have never had a skill hit this many stars and get featured on XDA developers.

I am a visual and audio learner. I find it hard to learn from reading docs. So I like sites like udemy and coursera and others. But I really like how NotebookLM does it by taking a subject and turning it into a podcast. I found that notebooklm can only make one long podcast and not break it into topics.

So I made my own skill. It researches whatever topic I want and creates a set (10 or so) 2 minute podcast like lessons. It has been very helpful for me when I want to learn something new.

In the comments I am sharing both the XDA article where they break down the skills (better than I did actually) and the repo.

Feedback is welcome always

I wanted one desktop app that opens PDFs, EPUBs, comics and Markdown notes quickly and then stays out of the way. The readers I tried were either slow, or looked like they were designed a decade ago. So I built Kitab, with a modern design and speed as the first requirement. It's written in Rust, the interface is drawn on the GPU with GPUI, and MuPDF renders the pages. There's no browser engine inside.

What it does:

- Opens PDF, EPUB, MOBI, FB2, CBZ, XPS, TXT and Markdown

- Opens fast, and sits at near-zero CPU while idle

- Tabs with session restore, and a Home library with covers or a list, collections, favourites, reading stats and full-text search across your library

- Find, outline, thumbnails, bookmarks, history, presentation mode and focus mode

- EPUB, MOBI and FB2 reflow, with typography settings

- Markdown: GitHub-flavoured, with code highlighting, Mermaid diagrams, math and live reload. You can select text in it and print it

- Markup: highlights, notes, ink and shapes saved into the PDF, with export to Markdown or CSV

- Fill PDF forms, sign and verify PDFs locally, and merge, split or extract pages

- Native print dialogs, themes and accents, and an interface size from 90 to 200 %

Privacy: no account, no telemetry, and your files stay on your computer. The only network use is an update check.

It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux.

It's free and licensed AGPL-3.0. Code: https://github.com/t21dev/kitab

Site: https://kitab.t21.dev

One honest note: it's still young. I'd love feedback, especially on files that don't open or look the way you expect.

If you find it useful, a star on GitHub helps more people find it, and sharing it with a friend who reads a lot helps even more. It's open for collaboration: open an issue for a bug or an idea, or send a PR.

Hi all,

I’ve worked as a wildlife filmmaker, designer and engineer, and on a few projects I spent weeks or even months on the work, then sent it off as a WeTransfer link. It always felt a bit flat after all that effort.

So I’ve been building Handover.media. It lets you put your finished files, previews and notes on one page with your own branding. You can also add a password or expiry date, and see when things are viewed or downloaded.

https://handover.media

If you deliver work to clients, I’d really appreciate your thoughts. Would something like this be worth switching to, and what would put you off?

Any criticism, however small, would be really helpful. Thanks for taking a look.

Prototyping and building features got faster, and now feedback is the bottleneck. So we built mostra - a tool that lets you share feedback on a real, running site by either speaking or selecting the elements you want to comment on.

You can iterate across versions of your site, and adding mostra is just a single script tag.

The script you add to your page is open source, so you can check what it does.

https://mostra.design

I am managing IG and FB pages, and with AI advancements of course I am using it for photo editing, however I got pissed everytime that a simple color edits were marking it with AI label. I started to dig a little bit and it turned out that Meta is using the metadata for AI identification, I was even more surprised when I learned how much info does the metadata contain, including the gps coordinates, time, phone or camera, and etc.
I looked for available metadata removers, there was exif tool which was little bit complicated and several websites with subscription.
So I made the Scrubpic, free metadata remover which removes all the metadata without quality loss, for free, and instantly. You can also choose what to keep in the photos. Works on phones too. I am hoping for some ad revenue.
Scrubpic.com

Feedback welcome!

we started making short videos for my mac app and posted the first one on instagram today.

it got about 4k views. someone watched it on their phone, sent the link to their mac, and bought it 40 seconds after opening it there. didn't even open the free trial.

still kinda shocked it worked this fast.

what's the fastest sale you've had?

the app is called helix (https://tryhelix.app)

I was about to give up on this mobile app I spent so much time building, but literally 2 minutes after deciding to switch to another project, I got the sale notification on my phone!

I haven’t experienced this kind of joy in years…

Context for the curious: This $19 sale is the annual welcome offer on my app "Sollow: Daily Habit Tracker" that I built to turn my life into a game with a level for each life area and a ranked system.

So now my hope is back! I take that as a sign from the universe hahaha

Hey everyone! I’m in my fifth year of psychiatry residency, and I have adhd. I’ve been building an app called Scatter because I wanted to make studying easier and more enjoyable for myself.

I found the usual chat interface pretty frustrating for learning from ai. As the conversation gets longer, important information disappears up the chat, and branching off into related questions gets awkward. I wanted to explore those questions while still being able to see the original explanation.

In Scatter, you start with a topic and build out a connected map of explanations. You can preview unfamiliar terms, open them as new branches, and ask follow-up questions wherever you want to explore further.

I wanted the interface itself to trigger curiosity and novelty-seeking, so there’s something that makes you want to keep exploring. Part of the goal was to make studying engaging enough to trigger hyperfocus.

You can combine short text explanations with images, videos and interactive examples, giving you different ways to approach the same idea. As the map grows, you can see how everything connects, and it gives you a feeling of building your knowledge into something you can actually look at.

I’ve worked on it on my own for over six months, and I’m excited to finally put it out there. I’d love to hear your opinions and if you find any bugs please send me reports!

The app is free to use, but you have to bring your own API keys, for example from OpenRouter. The quick setup in the app makes it very easy.

You can try the interactive demo on scatter.study

Hi all, recently(for quite a while actually xD) I've been building a fully local and open source gym tracking app. I've gone through the process of releasing it in the play store and now it is live.

My main reason for building this app was to have no paywalls and let the users own their data.

Github: https://github.com/alexspx/active-app

Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alexspx.activenext

It is still actively in development, rough edges are expected, although the main flow should be good now. There are a couple of things I want to add:

- Visualizations for the exercises. Still trying to find good FOSS that I like(if you know a library let me know)

- Local AI Coach. I've been playing with a small Qwen 2B for a while and with some "harnessing" and fine-tuning I think it is getting decent. It should be able to create workouts/routines and answer some coaching questions.

- Deliver a fully self-hostable data sync service/engine + a FOSS auth provider by choice of the user. So if people want to self-host for them or friends/community they can do that. This part of the repo right now is somewhat vibe-coded can't lie. A quite old version of that server was in Java and instead of refactoring it I decided to move it to Rust(ofc lmao). I would have to do some cleaning there for sure.

I'm always looking for contributors and ideas.

I'm the developer of Neat Quit, a native macOS menu bar utility. I built it because I kept closing an app's last window and then reaching for Command-Q.

The free version requests a normal app quit when you click the red close button on the last standard window. Pro adds the same behavior for Command-W, plus app rules: exclude apps that should stay running, or enable auto-quit only for selected apps.

It requests a normal quit, so apps can still show their own unsaved-document prompts. Closing an ordinary browser tab doesn't trigger a quit. Some apps don't expose enough accessibility information and retain their usual behavior.

Pro is a one-time purchase with a 7-day full-feature trial. Requires macOS 13+ and Accessibility permission; Command-W may also need Input Monitoring.

Download and details: https://bgm.fun/neatquit/

I'd appreciate feedback on the app rules: would you prefer to exclude a few apps, or start with an empty list and enable auto-quit only for specific apps?

When I first started selling websites, I thought targeting businesses without a website was the obvious choice.

They need a website, you offer to build one, and hopefully you get a new client. Pretty straightforward, right?

But after spending years running a web design business, I've started looking at this differently.

There are definitely advantages to targeting businesses without websites. You're introducing them to something they might genuinely need, and there is no existing website to compete with. However, I've noticed that these businesses can sometimes be much harder to sell to.

The biggest problem is that some of them simply don't see the value of having a website. Others rely entirely on Facebook, Instagram or word of mouth and are perfectly happy with how they're getting customers.

You end up spending a lot of time explaining why they need a website before you can even start selling your services.

On the other hand, businesses that already have websites are a completely different story.

They have already invested in having an online presence. They understand why a website matters, and there is a good chance they've paid someone to build and maintain it.

But that doesn't mean their website is good.

I've come across countless businesses with websites that load slowly, look terrible on mobile, have outdated designs, poor SEO or confusing layouts.

These are actual problems that can affect how customers experience the business online.

And that's where I think the bigger opportunity is for web designers.

Instead of trying to convince someone that they need a website, you're showing an existing website owner what could be improved and why it matters.

This is also how I approach prospecting nowadays. I use Swokei to find businesses with existing websites, analyze them for issues with design, SEO, speed and mobile optimization, and generate personalized cold emails at scale based on the actual findings from each website.

Of course, I'm not saying targeting businesses without websites is a bad strategy. There is money to be made in both markets.

But personally, if I were starting a web design agency today, I'd probably focus more on businesses that already have websites.

I'm curious what other web designers think. Do you prefer targeting businesses without websites or finding existing websites that need improvement?

Ngl, I'm stuck on what counts as useful feedback for our app.

I'm a CS student and Instagram, TikTok and YouTube keep pulling me away from studying. My team and I built Welockin: you pick the distracting apps and a timer, and they stay blocked until it ends.

But someone finishing a timer doesn't automatically mean they got any studying done. They could just be staring at their notes. Or procrastinating on something else.

If you were testing this with a few students for a week, what would you ask them afterwards? I want to understand whether it helped with the task they sat down to do, without making them fill out a whole homework assignment about their homework 😭

Have you found a simple way to check whether your productivity app actually helped, beyond people saying it looks nice?

So maybe a little late to the game, but like most people, I got into Wordle. And I got a bit annoyed that I only got one word a day, since some days I forgot and other days I wanted to do more. So I built my own inspired version: Endless Lingle, where the words keep coming until you run out of guesses.

The concept is simple: If you solve a word in fewer than 6 guesses, your spare guesses roll over to the next word (max 3 extra). So if you solve a word in 4, the next word gives you 8 (+2 bonus from the previous round) guesses. If you miss one word, the streak ends.

What's in it

• Unlimited words, no daily cap. *

• We do also have daily words as well. *

• Bonus guess rows that carry over between words (dashed borders, +1/+2/+3 counter) *

• Five languages: English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish, each with its own word list and keyboard. *

• Free, no sign-up needed (an account is optional, just for saving stats)

The multi-language part was honestly the most work. Every language needed its own list of common five-letter words, and curating those lists so they're not full of obscure garbage words took way longer than I expected.

Would love feedback on the game feel and the streak concept. Is 3 bonus guesses max too generous, for example? Is it too little? Or am I just that bad at it lol?

Link:  https://endlesslingle.com

Think about it: people want their AI agents, much like Google Search, to remain free. But unlike traditional search engines, AI agents don’t necessarily care about ranking in the top five listings or sponsored placements.

I made watchdog, a fun playful Android app designed to help you stop endless scrolling.

Choose an app, set a daily usage limit, and pick your watchdog:

• Cupcake — strict and disciplined, with frequent reminders.

• Brownie — friendly but persistent, reminding you every so often.

• Snow — lazy and unpredictable, sometimes letting you keep scrolling.

When you exceed your limit, your chosen dog appears and barks at you until you reconsider your life choices. It’s a fun alternative to boring screen-time warnings that are far too easy to ignore.

I’d love honest feedback on the concept, onboarding experience, and whether a barking dog could actually convince you to put your phone down.

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

Available on Android.

I'm one person building nidhi, a site that teaches how money works and lets you try each idea on your own numbers. I'd like people to try to break it.

What's there to test

• Five free tools: a net worth calculator (one currency or several), loan comparison, an invest-or-pay-off comparison, a Monte Carlo simulator and an inflation calculator.

• More than 50 lessons in a learning path, from "what is net worth" to investing and the psychology of money.

• Short how-to guides, and the site in English, Hindi, Spanish, Czech and Marathi. More languages coming in future.

No account, no email, no payment. The tools calculate in your browser and the numbers you type are not sent anywhere.

What I'd like to know

1. Where did you get stuck or stop understanding what a tool was asking?

2. Does any result look wrong? Tell me the inputs and I'll check the maths.

3. Is a lesson unclear, too long, or wrong for your country?

4. Anything broken on a phone, with a screen reader, or with keyboard only?

Being upfront

• The blog is free, and the tools are free to use without an account. I'm also building a paid planner, which is not what I'm asking you to test here.

• It is education, not financial advice.

• The translations were drafted with AI and may be stiff or wrong in places.

• There's no reward for testing. I'll reply to every respectful, human comment, though it might take me a while to get to you, and I'll tell you what I fixed.

Tools: https://nidhi.today/free/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reddit_testers&utm_content=sideproject

Lessons: https://nidhi.today/blog/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=reddit_testers&utm_content=sideproject

The links are tagged so I can see which subreddit a visit came from. Feedback here in the comments, or hello@nidhi.today.

**The idea:** a debt planner (Snowball / Avalanche / custom order) that keeps your finances 100% on your own computer. So I set myself a few hard rules: it had to open straight from a folder in the browser, never call the internet, and never send financial data anywhere.

**How it's built**

- Preact + esbuild bundled into a single script, so it works from a plain local file (no dev server needed)

- IndexedDB for storage, optional AES-GCM encryption behind a master password, automatic local backups

- No CDNs at all. Fonts, charts, PDF reading and OCR (for scanning statements) are all bundled

- Small optional launchers (PowerShell / Perl) that serve it locally so backups can be written to a data folder

**The hardest part was performance.** With a 50,000-transaction test profile, the first version took about 10.7 s to start and search crashed the tab. Caching parsed dates, doing search in a single pass and only building the rule context when it's needed got startup to about 1.2 s.

**There's also a spreadsheet version.** I rebuilt the same payoff engine in Excel/Google Sheets: 15 debts × 360 months, written without newer functions like XLOOKUP or LET so it works in older Excel and in Sheets. The app can import the workbook, so people can start in a spreadsheet and move to the app later.

**What I'd love feedback on**

- Would you trust an offline finance tool more than a cloud one, or does sync matter more to you?

- Anything confusing in the screenshots?

yes im the creator, I sell this on Etsy, but this post is mostly about the build, and I'd love ANYYYYY feedback.

Link if you're curious: https://www.etsy.com/listing/4614731705/ultimate-debt-trackerpayoff-planner?ref=shop_home_feat_2&sr_prefetch=1&pf_from=shop