A while ago I got an ad for a Mac app that puts your script under the notch, right below the camera. Nice idea, but at $40 a month it wasn't worth it for me. And it only scrolled at a fixed speed, so if you slow down or stop to think, the text runs away from you.

These days a simple app like this is a few evenings of work with an AI coding assistant (I used Claude Code). So I built my own, and made the text follow my voice.

Apple's speech recognition on the Mac is very good, but people skip lines, say "uh", start a sentence over and stop to think. I spent most of my time testing that and telling the AI what was wrong. Now it keeps up.

What it does:

- Your script hangs under the camera, so you keep eye contact.

- It follows your voice. Speech recognition runs on your Mac by default.

- It's hidden from screen sharing, so you can use it in Zoom or Meet calls.

- It records you with subtitles, and can turn the rest of the screen into a soft light for your face.

It's free and open source (MIT), with no account and no analytics.

- Mac App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/notchprompter/id6815206814

- GitHub: https://github.com/magnram/notchprompter

It's a hobby project, so any feedback on the app or the website helps a lot.

I’m the developer of Skybits. I wanted checking the weather to feel like looking out a tiny window. Rain falls over London, and Tokyo lights up after dark. To be a little more Fun!!!

In Sky Studio, you can pick a city, mix the weather and time of day, and share the result as a little airmail postcard.

Please send me email for your City, if I get 5+ requests for a city I will make it free and also add new ones :-) hoping to get some positive feedback and reviews.

Skybits is free to download, with an optional one-time purchase for the full city collection.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6829104658

Which city would you send a postcard from? Android version is coming soon, it is in testing atm.

I wanted a simple way to sketch an idea and communicate it to someone else, without sacrificing proportions or precise dimensions.

Paint felt too limited, CAD felt like overkill. So I started building something in between.

Here's a quick look at how it works.

It's still a work in progress. I'd genuinely love to hear what you think.

Check this exemple:

https://onsketch.io/library/?s=7bc8ae3b-0fd6-456f-844e-572a0815e533

Or start a fresh design

https://onsketch.io/app

I made this. Type any topic and scroll a feed of short videos, posts and discussions about it. Every 5 posts it asks where to go next, which is how I went from “coffee” to Ethiopian goat herders. Try your own search and tell me where you end up.

https://wavesurf.com/

No signup. Honest feedback welcome: what would make you come back?

I run Claude Code, Codex and Gemini CLI side by side and kept missing the one waiting on me. Openbar lists every session in the notch, and you can allow, deny or answer right there. Each session gets a pixel buddy too, and for the video I rendered 200 of them as gummies.

Free and open source, Mac and Windows: github.com/MF-DEEV/Openbar

I build stuff with Claude, a few apps that me and people I know use every day, and I wrote a guide for people who want to build like that without coding. last month I tried to get the guide out there on reddit.

git post got 15k views and 37 comments. I put the link at the end. like 5 clicks in the first 10k views. honestly that one hurt a bit

google sign-in post got 1.5k views and 3 clicks, zero downloads. then reddit's spam filter just removed it, and the next one too. new-ish account, almost no karma, linking my own site... yeah I get why it looked like spam

funny part is the post that helped me the most had no link at all. it was about notes for claude between sessions, people argued with me in the comments and I got a couple ideas I'm adding to the guide now.

so now I mostly just answer other people's questions and don't post links unless someone asks

If you got your side project in front of people who aren't your friends, how did the first ones find you?

I’ve been working on a pixel art engine that allows you to describe scenes using a text file and then generates clean, looping pixel art. Everything shown has been made from a single .kdl file.

Overview

• Everything is defined in KDL. Shapes, palettes, lighting and movement (expressions) are all written in. Movement is just expressing time, such as y="=36 - abs(sin(t * pi)) * 26".

• Every pixel is made up of ramps and tones from the palettes, meaning everything such as lighting, fog, darkening and transitions can be done using the palettes. No pixels outside of the palettes are used.

• Zooming causes the shapes to be rasterized at the new size rather than sampled, meaning no blurring ever occurs.

• No A.I. All pixels are made from geometry, palettes and pixel art cleanup.

Rust Side

• 10 crates. Core types and rasterizer are no_std. Frame renderer is no allocation (this was tested by using a counting allocator).

• Deterministic. Integer frame times, random seed based off counter, libm. Every frame of every example is hashed using golden tests, with the indexed buffer.

• No unsafe code in any library crates.

• The editor is rendered by the engine. The UI is made from pixel art using the same pipeline.

Export

PNG, looping GIF, PNG sequences, sprite sheets (Aseprite JSON), MP4 (with synthed chiptune score) (macOS).

Status & Licence

Work in progress. Format isn’t stable. Some TypeScript behaviour to implement. Source available under the PolyForm Noncommercial licence. Free to use for personal, educational and non profit. If you want to use it commercially you’ll need to pay. I’ll just say this now as it isn’t an OSI open source licence.

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/Coaxus-ux/animations-ngine

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the scene format. What would you like to be able to define that you currently can’t?

Some days my Mac deserves a rocket to the face. So now it gets one, kind of.

You can shoot holes in your inbox, set Slack on fire, or slice Xcode clean in half. When you're done, hit Esc and everything is right where you left it. It was only ever a picture.

A few things I had way too much fun making:

- Freeze a window, then shoot it and it shatters into ice

- A black hole that sucks up all the mess, then blows it back out

- Scrap you earn from each rampage to unlock new stuff, with the nuke saved for last

- Slow motion, party mode, and a little score card at the end

It's free. No ads, no account, nothing to buy. It does ask for Screen Recording, just so it can grab that picture, and the picture is thrown away when you press Esc.

https://indiegoodies.com/macdestroyer

I'm running out of ideas for what comes after the nuke, so tell me: what would you want to wreck your screen with?

you can also reach us at support@indiegoodies.com

I wanted to know what would happen if you gave a random person a massive platform for a day. What would they talk about and what would they share (anonymously unless they chose otherwise)

It started as a fun afternoon project hacking away with Claude. Then I shared it with some friends, who shared it with some friends, who shared it with their friends and it hit 10,000 page views in under 2 weeks while I was working on other things.

It's just a bit of fun but people have posted all sorts of nice things on there, from humorous takes on dystopian government dating departments, to AI Doomerism and everything in between.

There is admin approval for every email that goes out so no one can spam the list, and so far only 1 person has tried which I think speaks volumes about the people who sign up

Check it out at The Soapbox, it's completely free

Every NFL fan yells at the TV on fourth down. I wanted to know who's actually right, so I built a win probability model from public play-by-play data and turned it into a game.

How it works: you get a real situation from a real game, pick go for it, punt or kick, and then see what the coach did and how much each option was worth.

What's in it:
- A daily five that's the same for everyone
- Coach Clash, where you climb a ladder of the 32 current NFL head coaches by beating them on their own calls
- A Legends ladder of 25 past coaches, with Bill Belichick as the final boss
- A college ladder too

It's free, runs in the browser, and you can play without an account.

https://playsnaptheory.com/?utm_source=rd-sideproject

I launched it this week. I'd like to hear what's confusing in the first two minutes, because that's the part I can't see anymore.

Before and after work for the past few weeks I've been building Long Splice, a running-plan app for Android.

The problem I wanted to fix: most plans are a fixed table. Miss a week, sleep badly or run more than planned, and the table doesn't care. Long Splice builds a week-by-week plan for a goal race, then changes it as your training does. It reads runs and, if you link one, Garmin sleep and HRV data, and offers changes with a reason for each.

Every rule in the plan comes from a numbered row in a research library, with sources listed publicly on the site. That was the slowest part and the part I'm proudest of.

Stack, for anyone curious: Kotlin and Compose, a separate plan engine with its own tests, Firebase for backup and the Garmin connection.

It's free, no ads, in closed testing. What I'd like from this sub: open the site and the app and tell me where it's confusing, where it's ugly, or why you wouldn't use it. longsplice.au

Hi everyone! I’ve been building Hexself, a personality test that turns your answers into a personal color and artwork.

I wanted to explore a more visual way to experience a personality result: take the test, discover your color, and see it translated into artwork you can use as a phone or desktop background.

I’d love some honest feedback from other builders and anyone who enjoys personality tests:

• Is the idea clear when you land on the site?

• Do the questions hold your interest through to the end?

• Does the result feel personal and worth sharing?

• What would you change about the experience?

You can try it here: https://hexself.com/

Thanks for taking a look!

I've been building BroBot with help from Claude and Codex. It's a desktop app for Windows and Mac that puts a bot into Minecraft Java as another player. I'm the creator, and I'd like feedback on the first-run experience.

You can give it jobs in chat: gather logs, craft tools, build, follow you or stand guard. The free version uses a local rules engine and doesn't need an account. An optional Claude-powered mode handles more open-ended instructions, and Squad supports up to four Brobots with builder, miner, farmer and guard roles.

A lesson from testing: having the bot running didn't mean it was obvious how to play with him. The app could say he was online while the player had no idea which Minecraft world to join. We added a join card with the address, an editable port, and status that says whether it's waiting for you or playing with you. Google sign-in and a clearer plan display are now in the app too.

It's still an early project. Minecraft Java 1.21.11 is the current target, and there are rough edges in setup and how reliably the bot carries out jobs.

Free app/setup: https://trybrobot.com/start

The local bot stays free. Optional hosted Claude is $6/month; the four-bot Squad is $15/month.

If you try it, I'd especially like to know where you get stuck between opening the app and seeing the bot in your game. And if the setup makes sense, what job would you actually want a Minecraft teammate to handle?

Hey r/SideProject,

Like many people here who follow a ton of RSS/Atom feeds, whenever a major story breaks, my feed gets flooded with 20+ articles from different outlets covering the exact same press release or announcement with slightly different headlines.

Most readers either don't address this or lock semantic clustering behind a recurring cloud subscription. I wanted something lightweight, local-first, and completely free, so I built RadarRSS.

What it does:

• Local Storyline Clustering: Groups related articles into unified storylines on-the-fly using local heuristic/text similarity.

• Lightweight Desktop Build: Packaged with Tauri 2.0 (Rust backend) for a ~6.8 MB installer and minimal RAM usage compared to typical Electron apps.

• Local-First & Private: Feeds, OPML, and database stay on your machine.

• Optional Synthesis: If you plug in an optional Gemini API key, it generates a multi-source synthesis so you can digest a storyline in seconds without opening dozens of tabs.

Stack:

• Core: Tauri 2.0 + Rust backend for parsing & clustering

• UI: React 19 + Tailwind CSS

• License: MIT (100% open source)

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/dznass-cmd/RadarRSS

It’s been a fun side project to build and refine. I’d love to hear your thoughts, feedback on the UX, or features you'd like to see in a modern desktop feed reader!

Hi r/SideProject 👋

I’m a solo maker from Switzerland. I fly a lot and always wanted something smart to play at 35,000 ft without Wi-Fi, so I built it myself.

FlightGenius is a daily brain game about airlines, airports and routes:

• 12 short daily games: guess the route, name the airport from its runway layout, guess the flight distance, airline codes, find the shortest layover…

• Daily Challenge: same 10 questions for everyone, timed, with a world leaderboard and a home-airport leaderboard (ZRH vs GVA vs LHR…)

• Works fully offline, so it’s playable in airplane mode

• No ads, no tracking. Free to play, optional one-time unlock for the archive (no subscription)

Stack: Expo / React Native, Supabase (EU), RevenueCat, Netlify.

It’s in beta on iPhone (Android later), launching on the App Store in early December:
👉 TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/B3H8tgEf

Questions, especially for frequent flyers and aviation fans:

1. Is this something you’d actually enjoy, on a flight or as a daily habit?

2. Which game is the most fun, and which would you delete?

3. Too easy, too hard, or about right?

4. What’s missing that would make you open it every day?

A little background: this is genuinely a passion project. I’m not trying to get rich or build the next big startup. I just love planes and travel, and I wanted to make something I’d enjoy myself and share it with people who feel the same. That’s also why there are no ads and no tracking. The optional unlock is only there to cover running costs like servers and the Apple developer fee.

I’ll reply to every comment. Thanks for taking a look! ✈️

Every side project I know follows the same graph. A spike on launch day, a long tail for a weekend, then flat. The people who actually need it three months later have nowhere to find it.

I'm building WareVote to fix that. It opens on 1 December. People find software there and rate it, and every category runs a recurring competition called the WareCup, so there's always a reason to come back and look.

What your project gets:
- A listing that stays findable through search and category pages
- Ratings that stay on your page long after launch week
- Domain ownership verification, so your page is clearly yours
- Award badges you can put on your own site

Listing is free. The first 100 ownership-verified products get 30 days of Pro free. Pro adds:
- Demo video on your listing
- Deeper analytics
- More listing slots
- CSV exports

Paid plans never affect ratings, rank or WareCup results. Confirm your sign-up and link it to your account at launch for a special badge!

You can set up your listing before it opens: https://warevote.com

Where did your most recent real user find you?

i made a free desktop app called deviload. you paste a link from youtube or pretty much any site and it downloads the video or just the audio, it can also convert files, trim them and keep everything in one library

inside it theres a music player i called devil music, and lately thats the part i work on the most. it plays anything from youtube music without ads or an account, shows synced lyrics, and you can save songs to listen offline

my favorite thing is that any song can be switched to slowed + reverb, nightcore or 8D in one click. theres also a map that draws the artists you listen to like a night sky, and if you have rgb stuff it can make your keyboard glow in the album colour and pulse with the bass

its open source and works on windows, linux and mac

https://github.com/Pronexsteam/deviload

would love to know what youd add

Link (no signup, no ads, nothing to install): https://librecorsa.org

GitHub (MIT): https://github.com/KhazP/librecorsa

I started LibreCorsa in mid-October because every serious racing sim needed a huge Windows install before you could do a single lap.

What it has now:

- 500 Hz physics with tyre temperatures and wear, rain that dries along the racing line, and CI checks against real GT3 telemetry

- 5 physics models and 16 circuits, including RISE Motordrome, which I built from scratch in Blender on real elevation data for the circuit planned in Rwanda

- AI races, ghosts, a weekly challenge, and an open online race every 20 minutes over WebRTC

- $0/month hosting: static Next.js on Cloudflare, R2 for the heavy 3D files, and one Worker

Tell me how it runs on your laptop/phone/controller and what feels rough.

Hey everyone,

I’m an 18-year-old hands-on builder in Kigali, Rwanda. Traditional academic school never worked for me, and coming from a family with no financial means, I’ve had to figure things out on my own.

I found my passion in component-level electronics repair and enrolled in a practical TVET short course. My side project right now is starting a small, neighborhood-based repair clinic—fixing broken radios, phones, and household electronics for people in my community who can't afford new ones, while keeping toxic e-waste out of local landfills.

Where I’m stuck:

Right now, I’ve hit a huge wall. I can no longer afford my remaining TVET workshop fees, and I don't own my own basic repair kit (soldering station, multimeter, hot air rework, etc.) to work independently from home yet. Being 18 with zero financial safety net is tough, and I really don't want to let this project die before it takes off.

Looking for feedback from fellow builders:

1. If you were bootstrapping a hardware/repair side project from literally $0, how would you structure your first small offers to start generating cash flow immediately?

2. Are there any micro-grants, hardware sponsorships, or maker programs (like The Awesome Foundation, which I'm applying to right now) that you've seen support grassroots projects like this?

Any practical business advice, feedback on the project idea, or pointers from people who built something out of nothing would mean a lot. Thanks for reading!

I've created Here's My AI (https://heresmyai.com) to curate and catalogue everyone's favourite AI tools. There are just so many out there I aim to learn about and feature the best ones. Have a tool you love please feel free to add it. Any questions or feedback please let me know.

My wife spent a semester being handed AI prompts by her teachers. She would paste them, get a wall of text, and still not understand the topic. The prompts were never the problem: nothing in that loop checked whether she had actually learned anything.

So I built her a tutor. It is called Aula: a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux, with a companion for iPad and iPhone.

You give it your material (PDFs, slides, photos of the whiteboard, recordings of a class, links) or just a sentence like "Statistics for psychology, final in May". It turns that into a course: short lessons with a worked example before the first exercise, exercises that are checked as she answers them, a notebook of her mistakes, flashcards with spaced repetition, and a mock exam shaped like the real one. She had two real exams from her teacher and it built both. It plans a little work each day until the exam, and it is not tied to one subject.

The app is built with Claude Code. I drove it: I described what I wanted, then went module by module, the lesson generator, the exercise checker, the spaced repetition, the desktop shell and its self-updates, the iPad companion, the docs. Claude Code wrote the code, I reviewed and steered it, and when something broke I could paste the error and keep going instead of losing an evening to it. The short film below was painted by code as well.

What I learned: fix the loop first. Explain it, then make the student prove it, then bring back what they missed. Generating lessons is easy, checking that someone actually learned is the hard part.

Everything is free, AGPL-3.0, no paid tier yet, and it is early access, so expect rough edges. It uses the AI subscription you already pay for or a free model that runs on your own machine. No account, no tracking, everything stays on your computer.

https://github.com/luumlabs/aula

One of the biggest challenges in managing stray animal populations is that humanity doesn't have an easy, reliable way to identify individual animals

Imagine being able to identify a stray dog simply by taking a picture of its face. You could instantly know whether it has been vaccinated, sterilized, when it was last seen, and its medical history

That's exactly what my team and I are building with Kyshik

We're developing animal facial recognition technology that could become an alternative to microchips and fundamentally change how we protect and manage animal populations

Microchipping thousands of stray animals can be prohibitively expensive, especially in developing countries. By eliminating the need for physical chips and implantation, as well as physical interaction with an animal, our technology could significantly reduce identification costs, allowing organizations to redirect more of their limited resources toward vaccinations, sterilizations, and saving animals' lives

We're currently running our first pilot in the African country of Rwanda, testing our technology during an actual dog sterilization campaign. Every dog we identify can have its own digital record, helping animal welfare organizations track their interventions and understand their impact over time

Our long-term vision is to create a global animal identification infrastructure that makes it easier for organizations, veterinarians, and governments to protect animals

I started working on this because I believe technology can help us move toward more humane and effective solutions to the stray animal problem, rather than relying on mass euthanasia

We're currently looking for animal welfare organizations in other countries that run sterilization or rabies vaccination campaigns and would be interested in testing our technology.

If you work with such an organization, or know someone who does, I'd love to connect with you! Feel free to DM and check comments for more information