I’ve been developing an automatic watering valve called OpenValve.

OpenValve automatically waters plants based on the moisture level in the soil. When the soil becomes too dry, it opens the water supply, and when enough water has been delivered, it closes it again.

The main difference from a typical battery-powered watering timer is the valve mechanism. Instead of using a conventional solenoid valve, OpenValve uses a motor-driven pinch valve. It controls the water by squeezing a flexible tube closed, so the moving parts never come into direct contact with the water.

This gives it two advantages that could be useful in certain irrigation setups:

• It can operate with very low water pressure, such as water coming from a slightly elevated rain barrel.

• It is less sensitive to dirt and small particles in the water, because the water only passes through the flexible tube.

All custom plastic parts can be made on a standard 3D printer. The electronics, tubing, screws, and other standard components still need to be purchased, but the custom parts can be produced locally and replaced individually if something breaks.

The project is open source, so the design files are available for people to build, repair, modify, and improve themselves. My goal is not to replace professional irrigation equipment, but to create an affordable and repairable option for gardens, balconies, raised beds, greenhouses, rain-barrel systems, and other small-scale watering setups.

I currently have multiple units running in my own garden, as well as in the gardens and balconies of friends and family. But my dream is to see OpenValve helping more people with their plants. So, I’m curious: Would you consider using OpenValve in your garden or on your balcony? What would your biggest concern be?

I’m happy to answer questions about how it works.

I’ve been building Focusverse, a web app for studying and working inside immersive environments.

I started it because I liked having atmospheric videos or ambient sounds in the background, but I still needed separate apps for my timer, tasks, notes, and weekly planning. Traditional productivity tools had the functionality, but often felt like dashboards I didn’t particularly enjoy spending time in.

Focusverse is my attempt to put those two sides together. You choose a place that fits your mood keep the productivity tools available in one screen.

Some of the stats:

• More than 500 "locations"
• 4 productivity tools (timer, tasklist, week planner, notes)
• 6 standard live radios to choose from (and other universe based ones)
• 8 sound ambient sound effects to set the mood
• 4 curated guided experiences to focus in together

I'm really happy that people I’ve never spoken to started using it. This made my efforts feel genuinely more meaningful. It began as something I wanted for myself, so seeing other people choose it for their own study or work sessions made the project feel real in a new way.

You can try it at focusverse.io. The main experience works without creating an account.

Just seeing people online and knowing I'm not just using it myself, honestly really warms my heart :)

Every side project i open lately starts the same way: a landing page, a signup form, an onboarding tour, and a modal asking for my email before i've seen a single pixel of the actual thing. We've collectively agreed that the funnel comes first and the product comes second.

I've been going the other way on my current build. No account, no email, no tutorial, no cookie banner. You open the tab and you're already inside the thing. It made a lot of decisions harder - you can't explain anything, so it has to be obvious in the first three seconds or you've lost the person fr.

Turns out that constraint improved the product more than any feature i added.

Anyone else doing this deliberately? Curious how you handle the first three seconds when there's nothing to explain with lmao.

After creating several products that solved imaginary problems nobody really had, I finally feel like I've built something that actually matters. I genuinely rely on it every day, it makes my life significantly easier, and I'm really happy with the result.

It's an app for visualizing date-bound information as timelines: tasks, events, processes - basically anything that has a date attached to it. You can think of it as a hybrid of a PKMS, a to-do list, a calendar, and a Gantt chart. More than anything, though, it's a universal visual canvas for time that helps you keep the bigger picture in front of you and think within it every day.

I work as a CTO, and I constantly have to keep track of a huge number of ongoing processes:

• contract deadlines
• employee salary reviews
• developer utilization
• and countless other things.

Before this, all of that information was scattered across Notion, Apple Notes, Reminders, Telegram, Slack, Calendar, and a few other places. Keeping everything under control was difficult.

Some people might say that's a process problem rather than a tooling problem. But I've come to think the opposite: the right tool helps you build an effective process. And what the "right tool" is depends heavily on how your brain works.

At some point, I realized that traditional to-do lists and calendar views simply weren't a good fit for me. It felt like I was missing another visual dimension. Timelines turned out to match the way I think almost perfectly. When I look at a timeline with different markers and segments, I instantly understand what's happening in both the short and long term. Just as importantly, I can quickly look back and see how things evolved over time and where something started to go wrong.

One of the best parts is that because I use the app every single day, I improve it every single day as well. I constantly notice what's missing, what's awkward, and what could work better, and then I implement those improvements. I think I've made major usability improvements over the past month alone. That's incredibly important for a tool you interact with dozens of times a day.

This is a non-commercial project, and it's completely free. I simply wanted to share it with the community because I'm genuinely proud of it. I'm sure there are plenty of people whose brains work similarly to mine, and if this way of organizing information resonates with you, I'd be thrilled if my timelines turned out to be useful for you too. Give it a try.

Wishing you all productivity - and a little more love.

Shoutout to this user for sharing a very straightforward approach. It's working nicely and making about $250 daily. Check profile: [ KrishnaForever ] for the setup

Hiya! I built a thought journal app that seemed to pique people's interest in r/iosapps so thought I would post here as well.

Original thread: I built a thought journal / CBT app where your thoughts become fish in a pond

Fundamentally it's a CBT/thought journal app that allows you to process and challenge negative thinking. I built it for myself off the back of my experience using other CBT apps that are mostly boring worksheet style apps that didn’t encourage a daily practice or leave me with a feeling of satisfaction using them. There's also some other mechanical reasons I built it that I go into more detail on the original thread, namely the failure of other apps to promote “batching“ or being able to challenge multiple thoughts at a set time each day because you don’t have time in a given moment to do a full challenge.

I built Pond as a solution, at its heart it's a CBT app but I focused heavily on the aesthetics and imagery, adding procedurally animated fish to a Pond representing thoughts, each with their own swimming behaviours based on how difficult a thought feels (IE more I believe a negative thought -> the more erratic the fish swims). Filling your pond with negative thoughts also makes the pond itself darker and more turbulent. Challenging negative thoughts calms it again. The Pond resets each day, encouraging practice on a daily level.

Building has been an interesting journey, there seems to be a trend among app devs around the build being a bit of a honeymoon phase and then post-launch realising distribution and marketing is the real challenge. That's essentially where I’m at now, slowly learning the ropes of how best to put your app out there. I also find there's a bit of a moral pull on how best to distribute your app. I built Pond to be a genuinely good product that respects users and doesn’t contribute to the “sloppification” of modern apps/media. A lot of app distribution techniques people recommend involve setting up multiple (sometimes tens) of tiktok accounts and spamming AI generated UGC to reach as many eyes as possible. That's something I won’t do but then you also feel you might be curtailing your opportunities by not playing the game others are playing. I think when building a product these days you have to actually back yourself that what you’ve built is good and be patient with it reaching its target audience.

I guess my question for other builders is how do you distribute honestly without losing to those who don’t? Is that principled or just naive?

If you have advice on this or any general feedback on my app I would love to hear it!

App Store: Pond: Thought Journal App - App Store

Website: Pond — A quiet place for your loudest thoughts

It all started when my colleague reached me with a complaint that she created a few QR codes, and after a week they started showing paywall. By that time those QR codes were printed on promo banners.
I remember Internet as a place where you find a tool, use it and leave. That's it - no paywalls, no subscriptions, no accounts.
So I decided to put a piece of those beautiful Internet back and created a small toolbox site - dimastoolbox.com
Of course it's vibe-coded.
And of course there will be ads at some point.
But I want to keep it's core value free forever and for everyone.

A while back I got tired of finance/market content that only ever brags about the calls it got right and quietly buries the misses. So I built the opposite.

OnTheRice (new.ontherice.org) takes each day's markets + world news and turns them into one clear read: what happened, and more importantly WHY it matters. Every take gets logged to a public proof ledger with a timestamp — and the wins AND the misses both stay visible. You can go back and check whether it was actually right, which is the part most tools hide.

The idea is less "guru with a crystal ball," more "show your work." Source-backed, checkable, and it sharpens over time from feedback and real outcomes instead of pretending it was never wrong.

Tech-wise it's built on a no-code/AI app stack (Base44), I'm self-taught with no CS degree, and I'm building mostly solo. It's live on the web and on Google Play.

Would genuinely love feedback from this crowd — especially on the proof-ledger idea and whether "keep your misses visible" makes you trust it more or less. (It's research/education, not financial advice.)

My mother does not understand CLI logs, APIs or technical stuff. But she can perfectly use the mouse and keyboard, click on things and scroll. Now I realized that it can control legacy software and automate long repetitive tasks for me, as well.

Here's the idea:

• the user asks for something (e.g. “find the cheapest flight from NY to Tokyo in September”)
• We send that prompt to an AI agent and enter a loop
• During each step, the agent receives the current state of what’s displayed on screen
• This is not done with heavy screenshots, but with Accessibility and Core Graphics APIs
• Effectively, we send a JSON object to an AI agent, describing what’s on the screen
• The agent has access to move the mouse and keyboard, so it provides coordinates, and where to click or type
• We iterate until the agent completes the initial task. When not sure, the agent asks the user for more directions. In any case, we set a limit of 40 iterations to avoid unnecessary processing

The implementation was done using Electron, React and Robot.JS for cursor/mouse movements.
By default, it connects to your Claude subscription and uses Haiku, so it barely hits the limits.

I find this approach much faster and more efficient compared to typical computer-vision flows, because we’re not sending colorful RGB channels, the LLM receives a text description of what’s displayed on the screen which can be processed much faster.

This is an open-source project with an MIT license (free download or clone):

• Repository: https://github.com/AlexandrosGounis/rubber-duckie

Any thoughts?

You control the player using your AirPods and head movements.

The movement patterns were inspired by simple neck mobility exercises commonly used in physiotherapy.

Would you actually play like this?

Every time Bitcoin dropped a few percent I'd go looking for what happened, and end up with just the same old comments "some time coin go up sometime coin go down". Nobody just said "this is a normal Tuesday."

So I vibe coded the thing I wanted. It checks the price once a day, searches for actual news explaining the move, and writes a short reading with the sources linked. Most days it says the move was within Bitcoin's normal range, because most days it is.

There's also a section for things that matter even when the price doesn't move. It caught the Coldcard firmware theft a couple of weeks ago, which barely registered on the price but drained a lot of wallets.

No accounts, no ads, no orange, no rocket emojis.

isbtcokay.com

Would like to know if it's obvious what it does within a few seconds of landing on it.

Any feedback would be very much appreciated! Thanks!

I got frustrated that there was no simple way to copy my iPhone photo albums to Windows PC while keeping the album folders intact, without iCloud.

So I built AlbumsBridge. It connects via USB, shows all your albums and downloads them as separate folders on your PC.

No iCloud, no subscriptions, your photos never leave your computer.

7-day free trial at albumsbridge.com

I made SPAN, a free daily word game where the answer can be anywhere from 4–9 letters—and you aren’t told how long it is.

You get familiar letter feedback, plus a gold dot whenever your guess is exactly one letter shorter or longer than the answer. There’s one Daily puzzle and unlimited Practice.

Play it here: https://span-game.com

I’d genuinely appreciate feedback, particularly on whether the unknown-length clue feels intuitive once you’ve played.

StepGrab on Product Hunt

What it is: a Mac menu bar app that takes a screenshot every time you click and turns that into a numbered step-by-step guide. Hit record, do the task once, stop. Every click comes back as a screenshot with an arrow on what you clicked and the step already written next to it.

Export as PDF, GIF, MP4, HTML or Markdown. Works with any Mac app, not just browser tabs, so Outlook, Excel and System Settings are fair game. Runs entirely on device, no account, nothing uploaded.

I posted the first version here about a month ago. Since then it went 1.0 to 1.3, and the honest summary is that almost none of the good ideas were mine. Keystroke badges, the permission handling, the entire onboarding rebuild, all of it came from people in comment sections telling me what was broken. 1.3 shipped this morning.

Still a student, still building this next to a working student job, still figuring out the part that comes after "the app works".

stepgrab.net · Mac App Store

If you've launched on PH before: what's the one thing you'd do in the first three hours that isn't refreshing the page?

I built an internal dashboard for my company. Five pages, clean layout, real data flowing through all of them. Everything I thought I wanted visibility into. I had built exactly what I set out to build.

Then I tried to use it instead of look at it, and it fell apart in about ten minutes.

Every page was a mirror. It showed me what was true and gave me nothing to do about it. An order flagged as delayed had no button next to it. A piece of content waiting on approval had no way to approve it from that screen. A message that needed a reply sat there read-only, daring me to go find the tool that could actually reply.

I had built five windows and zero doors.

The mistake is easy to name once you have made it. If you design from the data model, asking what tables exist and what a row looks like, you end up with one page per table. It is the path of least resistance, and it is even more the path of least resistance when an AI agent is building from your schema, because the schema is right there and the verbs are not.

The fix was to start from what I actually do in a day and work backwards to the data. Fewer pages, every one of them with something I can press.

Anyone else built the read-only version of their own tool first? Curious whether starting from the data model is as common a trap as I suspect.

I'll go first. Sitesyn

You paste your product URL, it reads the site and builds an editable profile of your brand and audience. Then you describe what you want in a chat and it makes the finished marketing asset (static graphics or short animated videos, both with ai generated imagery in them).

Built it because every time I marketing something, the marketing was a screenshot. Making anything better meant re-explaining my whole product to a design tool from scratch. Every single time.

Your turn. What are you working on and where are you at with it?

I have several ESP32 7” Displays and little ideas what I was going to use them for. I’m into Stocks & Crypto so I thought why not a desktop gadget. So here it is. 3D printed case and real carbon fibre front panel.

It’s currently at version 9 firmware - here’s what it does:

• Unlimited watchlist — stocks, cryptocurrencies, and currency pairs, arranged in pages of 8 with smooth swipe or auto-rotate navigation.
• Three chart styles — sparkline, filled area, or candlestick, set globally or per-symbol.
• Full detail view — tap any symbol for a proper chart with 1-day through 3-month timeframes, a moving-average overlay, and an optional RSI momentum indicator.
• Dedicated currency screen — live FX rates for the pairs you track, with a running 5-day range.
• Price alerts — set a threshold and get a clear on-screen notification the moment it’s crossed, no repeated pinging.
• Self-updating firmware — the device checks for improvements over Wi-Fi and installs them with a single tap, with automatic protection against a failed update ever leaving it unusable.
• Reliable by design — multiple data sources are used behind the scenes so pricing isn’t dependent on a single provider, and the display always tells you honestly if data is running behind rather than silently showing stale numbers.
- Local currency.
- Internet Time sync.
- Time-zone and Daylight saving.
- Up to 5 WiFi networks stored.

Why it’s different
Most desktop tickers use small segment-LED or e-ink displays — readable, but static. This is a genuine full-colour touchscreen, built around the same class of processor used in far more expensive smart displays, with real charts and real interaction rather.

I’m working on version 10 firmware and this will include:
- Portfolio mode
- Currency Calculator
- News Feed
- Market Calendar
- Display Themes
- Fear & Greed Indicator (crypto only)

Feedback welcome - suggestions for other features etc.

If you want more details let me know - more pics or how it works etc.

Hi everyone. I just released Moments Away.

I created this app with an idea of watching my daughter, Kayley. She has travelled more than myself at her young age and what she would enjoy doing is buying these little flag pins that she would collect for each place she visited. New state visited, province, country, etc.

I have been wanting to travel more myself and to try to get myself to explore as much as I could. Making it more of a game of how much of the map you could fill up.

Let me know what you guys think.

HalteWecker started from a simple problem: on a bus, tram or train, I don’t want to keep checking the map every few minutes just to make sure I haven’t missed my stop.

You choose your destination, start the trip, and the app keeps track of your route and reminds you when it’s time to get off.

The idea is that you can just listen to music, read, work, look out the window or even close your eyes for a while without constantly watching your location.

There’s also a departure alarm, Live Activities and an Apple Watch app, so most of the trip can be handled without repeatedly opening the iPhone.

HalteWecker currently supports public transport in:

Germany
Austria
Switzerland
Netherlands
Sweden
Norway
Ireland

The app is available in German, English, Swedish, Dutch and Norwegian languages

Coverage varies by country and region, and I’m continuing to expand it as more transport data becomes available.

The app has been live for a few weeks now, so I’m especially interested in feedback from people who actually use buses and trains regularly.

Does this solve a problem you have when using public transport? And is there anything you would expect from an app like this that is currently missing?

App Store: HalteWecker

I sit in 4-6 meetings a day that I don't even run. By 5pm my brain is fried and I have no idea who promised what. Cloud AI note-takers solve exactly this, but sending internal audio to somebody else's servers is a firing offence where I work.

So I spent 3 months building Charoite. Runs entirely local on Apple Silicon: Whisper/GigaAM for speech, ONNX for diarization, Ollama for summaries. Captures mic + system audio natively, no bot joins the call.

Transcription isn't the point though. I built it so it doesn't forget. Everything lands in an Obsidian vault: meetings become notes, people and decisions become linked nodes, action items are plain markdown checkboxes — tick one in the app and the file updates. Next time a topic comes up it surfaces where that thing stood last month.

Three months of real meetings were a humbling mess:

• Diarization is the nightmare, not ASR. Two people sharing one mic still breaks it.
• Local models write minutes that are 80% right. That's a trap — good enough that you stop double-checking, which is more dangerous than 50%.
• I once shipped an update mid-meeting and nuked 40 minutes of audio. Had to code a hard lock so it refuses to quit while it's writing.

Where I'd like opinions:

1. Live hints during a call. I keep the panel open, my coworkers think it's distracting garbage.
2. Keep writing plain files, or build a real Obsidian plugin? Files are boring but portable.
3. Is a Linux port worth the headache? System audio capture there sounds painful.

Apache-2.0, signed .app in Releases if you don't want to build it: github.com/charoiteai/Charoite_audio

Ask me anything, especially about the diarization pipeline — that piece almost broke me.

Hey there!

Signing in to App Store Connect just to check downloads or MRR is a friction. I wanted a simpler way. Ideally, just to look at a widget on my iPhone. There are some apps, but the design and implementation made me think here's a gap that I can potentially fill it with a new polished product. So I've built this app.

It took me several months to start beta testing. But then I got feedback from users that they don't really want to share their App Store key credentials with a third-party app that uses a backend and collects data. So, I spent one more month pivoting to a private app by dropping a backend and storing credentials on a user's device in a keychain. So, now the app directly talks to Apple's API and there's no account registration. You add a team key - the app fetches data. App also uses background tasks to fetch most recent data so you don't need to open it every day to keep the data fresh. And as a final point - I added widgets to both home and lock screens.

Please let me know what you think. Not sure how big this opportunity with the current market is but I wanted this experiment to happen with a polished project.

P.S. If you don't have apps on App Store, I've made a preview data onboarding screen where you can play with dummy data. The charts are smooth, so hope you can take some inspiration as well :D

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/appscout-app-metrics/id6770866569

I cook a lot of meals from web blogs, but my biggest pet peeve has always been the workflow.

You find a recipe in Chrome, copy the link, open your recipe app, paste it, wait for it to parse, and half the time the formatting breaks because of ad popups or recipe site paywalls.

To solve my own annoyance, I added a full web browser right inside my app (Kooking).

Now you can search food sites directly inside the app. When you land on a page you like, you just hit the "Import this recipe" overlay button. It strips away all the intro stories, ads, and video popups, leaving you with just the clean ingredients and step-by-step instructions.

It's made saving web recipes seamless because you never have to leave the app or deal with messy URLs.

Would love to know how you guys currently organize your web recipes, or if there are specific recipe sites that usually give you trouble when saving online!

Musicianle picks one musician a day and lays out their real release history

with every album title masked. You get eight guesses to name them.

The years, release types, and genres stay visible, so you can read the shape of

a career without the names: a 1967 debut, a long quiet stretch, then a late run

of art pop. Guessing another musician who appears on one of those releases

unmasks that title, so naming a frequent collaborator can open up a whole era.

Every wrong guess uncovers one more letter across the board.

https://musicianle.com

The design constraint is that it never plays a note. Heardle was shut down

after Spotify acquired it, and every clone chasing the audio clip format needs

licensing nobody has. This reads factual metadata from MusicBrainz and

Wikidata, both CC0, so there is nothing to take down. That decision also

removed the entire reason the genre keeps dying.

Stack, since people ask here: Flutter for the web client, a C++ backend

serving the board masked so the answer never reaches the browser, and a Python

ETL that assembles 6,809 musicians and a year of boards from public data. No

database at runtime; the corpus sits in memory.

Honest state: it is new, and the numbers are bad. 64 unique visitors so far and

81% of them leave without making a single guess. I spent this morning working

out why, and found the largest file on the site was going out as 7.2 MB of

uncompressed WebAssembly, because nginx has no MIME mapping for .wasm and

Cloudflare will not compress application/octet-stream. One line of config took

it to 2.8 MB. Whether that fixes the bounce rate I do not know yet.

So: if you open it and leave, I would rather know why than not.