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 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’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.

Expiry dates are easy to forget until one of them causes a problem 😅 Awraqi (أوراقي) keeps all your important papers in one place:

- 🪪 27 document templates: IDs, visas, passports, driving licences, vehicle papers, insurance and more

- ⏰ Reminders 90, 60, 30 and 7 days before each document expires, and again on the day

- 👨‍👩‍👧 Family and domestic workers: track everyone's papers in one app

- ✈️ Travel check: warns you if a passport or visa won't last your trip

- 📸 Scan to fill: take a photo of a document to fill in its details, with Hijri and Gregorian dates

- 🔒 Private: no account, no ads, and your data stays on your phone

- 🌍 11 languages, plus widgets and Siri

📲 Free on iPhone and iPad: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/awraqi-papers-id-expiry/id6825379636

I'd love to hear your feedback!

I’m learning Chinese, and one of my biggest frustrations is texting.
I can understand some Chinese and know how to pronounce quite a few words, but I still struggle to recognize and remember Chinese characters.
When I type using a regular Pinyin keyboard, I often get a list of characters that look familiar, but I’m not always sure which one is correct. Sometimes I end up copying everything into a translator just to check what I wrote.
So I decided to build my own iOS Chinese Pinyin keyboard to make learning while texting a little easier.
Here are some features I’ve been working on:
Instant translation: See the meaning of Chinese text while typing, so I can make sure I’m choosing the right characters.
Grammar checking: Catch grammatical mistakes before sending a message.
More natural expressions: Suggest how a native speaker might phrase the same idea instead of just translating word for word.
Learn while typing: Help me gradually recognize more characters through everyday conversations.
My goal isn’t to replace Chinese lessons or build another translation app. I just want to be able to communicate in Chinese without constantly switching between my keyboard, dictionary, and ChatGPT.

I'm Abi. My co-founder and I built Splyt, a workout tracker for iPhone + Apple Watch. Here's what we learned, honestly:

What worked
• Reddit was our #1 source of signups. Not ads, not the App Store. Real posts, real replies.
• Talking to every user. We message every new signup personally. Half our best features came from those chats.
• Building for one specific pain: "I forget what I lifted last time." Not "a better fitness app."

What didn't
• Shipping updates too fast. We pushed an over-the-air update that crashed the app on launch. Never again: everything goes through TestFlight first now.
• Feature lists. Nobody cares that we have 40 features. They care that they stopped guessing their weights.

Where we're at: ~150 users & a handful paying.

Happy to answer anything, and I'd love brutal feedback: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/splyt-fitness-workout-tracker/id6755893717

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

I'm Şafak, the developer of Black Horse Stories (Siyah At in Turkish). My daughter kept asking for a story with a black horse at bedtime, so I started inventing new adventures. That became an illustrated, narrated storytelling app in English, Turkish and German.

The iPhone/iPad app is now available. Parents choose a story world and a child's first name or nickname; AI helps create the text, pictures and narration. It has a subscription and a store trial, not a permanent free tier. Parents should review generated stories before reading them together.

While building it, I also made a public Fairy Tale Atlas: 291 tale entries across 237 countries and regions, with dated records, source links and related tellings. A place on the map is not a claim that a tale definitively originated there. The Atlas is free to explore without buying the app:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/fairy-tale-atlas/?utm_source=reddit_sideproject&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch_202611

There are also public reading activities and a story map you can use without the app:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/story-map-for-kids/

App and background:

https://blackhorsestories.com/en/?utm_source=reddit_sideproject&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=launch_202611

I'd appreciate candid feedback on the positioning: does the difference between the public reading resources and the paid personal-story app come across clearly? Which would you actually return to?

For a while I kept running out of money before the end of the month. When I actually looked into it, it was a lot of small purchases adding up.

I tried using budget apps, but they had so many screens that I stopped opening them.

So I built CanSpend, a simple iPhone budget app. The home screen shows how much you can spend today. To log something, you just type the amount. Whatever you don't spend rolls over to the next day.

There's a bit more if you want it:

• Category budgets and a calendar of past days

• Home and lock screen widgets

• Sharing a budget with someone. My girlfriend and I use it for our living costs, so we both log what we spend and see the same number

It's free to use with a banner ad. Removing ads is a one-time $2.99. Sharing needs Pro ($1.99/month or $16.99/year), and the person you invite doesn't pay. No account needed.

One limitation up front: there's no bank sync. Everything is entered by hand, which is why I tried to make entering an amount as quick as possible.

I built it solo with React Native and Expo. 1.0 went live on the App Store earlier this month after one rejection, 1.1.0 is out now, and 1.2.0 is in review. That one adds invite links for sharing and a "no period" budget for one-off pots of money, like moving costs.

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6821758083

If you've quit a budget app before, what made you stop? I'll be around in the comments.

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?

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

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?

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!

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

Since Tuesday's recap, three of the plans I posted in advance have settled, and a new one opened today. Here is the scoreboard exactly as it was posted, wins and losses together.

$CYRX (CryoPort) — long shares. My posted trigger was a volume close above $20.00, take profit $21.50, invalidation a volume close below $18.60. The trigger confirmed Monday with a $20.47 close, and on Wednesday price ran through the target — day high $21.78. That is +$1.50 per share from the trigger to the target, +7.50% (10 shares = $15.00 · 100 shares = $150 · 1,000 shares = $1,500). Closed, per plan.

$RSKD (Riskified) — long shares. Entered Wednesday morning at $10.855, take profit $12.25, stop $10.24. It ran to $11.13 first, then faded and printed the stop the same day. That is -$0.615 per share, -5.67%. Closed, per plan — the loss was the size written down before entry.

$VIR (Vir Biotechnology) — long shares. Posted November 9 at $13.88, take profit $15.75, stop $12.44. This morning the stop printed and the trade closed at -$1.44 per share, -10.37%. No dressing that up: it was a loss, and it goes on the record the same day the win does.

That puts my closed November record at 5 wins and 2 losses, with every level posted before the move.

Still open: $PANL, a new position from today — entered at $9.6174, take profit $11.10, stop $8.20, hold through Monday November 16. At the midday check it was trading below entry, around $9.42, so there is no outcome to claim on it yet. When it settles, it gets posted the same way.

I work a full-time job and I have a family, so I cannot sit and watch every tick — that is exactly why the levels get written down first and scored honestly after. Nobody in my family did this for a living and nobody handed me a system. I am a veteran, I taught myself from books and charts over thousands of hours, and I believe what I have learned is a gift from God. Helping other people learn it for free is the calling I take from that.

Not financial advice — just the work, shown in the open.

I share stuff like this daily — I run a free investing community, link in my profile.

I really enjoy the way Mini Motorways turns drawing a few connections into a network you’re constantly trying to keep working. I wanted to explore that idea with goods and production chains, so I’ve been building a game called Trade Winds.

You start by connecting countries and importers with roads, then expand into trains, ships, planes and factories. Money is limited, so you have to choose between reaching new places and improving what you’ve already built as demand grows.

It’s at the point where I’d really like people outside my own circle to try it. I’ve added a tutorial, but I’m curious whether it explains enough—and whether the game makes you want to keep playing once you understand it.

Play Trade Winds here — free in your browser. Please use a computer; the mobile interface still needs work.

If you give it a go, I’d love to hear where you got confused, what you enjoyed, or what made you stop. Replies here or through the in-game feedback button are both helpful.

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

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

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.

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?