Alternatives
Products that do what 4 Rings for Mac - A study of one. does
A mixed methods academic article about you.
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Almost one year ago I asked HN if anybody is interested to make a Web app to make reading and finding scientific papers smarter [http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1664648]. No one did, at least no one did what "I" think is the best way to approach this problem. A a few month ago I decided to do it myself.<p>Meet JournalClub iPad app (absolutely free), http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/journalclub/id443819334? I have a recommendation engine in the pipeline that I would introduce in the next update (hopefully in a month or so). I really appreciate any comments, feedbacks.
2011
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Personal productivity. Offline-first. E2E encryption.
Dec 2025
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I'm trying to get the motivation up to actually finish building out a "real" product, and I found myself needing a "win" to keep my momentum up. So, I hacked out a little one sentence journal app last night. I experimented with a few UI things (e.g.., the autosaving of the sentence for today and so on), so it was a good learning experience also. You can check it out at: http://osod.im
2012
- 9IM
Hello all, I made a small transcription app for your Mac based on OpenAI’s Whisper. Would love some feedback. My plan is to make it easy to load weights from any fine-tuned whisper model to enable specialized dictation for any subfield. It’s still early in development. Thanks!
2023 · twitter.com
- 10IB
Hi HN, I built an app to solve a problem I kept running into: I’d read great articles or watch insightful YouTube videos, but within a few days, I’d forget most of what I learned. Taking detailed notes felt like a chore, and I'd rarely revisit them anyway. To solve my own problem, I built Curio. It's an iOS app designed for low-effort capture and active recall. How it works: 1. Share any article or YouTube link to the app. 2. It automatically extracts key ideas as bullet points and links them back to the original context (the specific paragraph or timestamp). 3. The app then generates…
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 11AA
I built this app in less than 4 hours over a busy and noisy weekend to help me stay focused while studying, during my college days. Since then I have been maintaining this open source project. Its been quite a fruitful and enjoyable ride. Hope you all like it :)
2023 · github.com
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Hi all, I find literature searches to be slow and despite all the tools nowadays, it is difficult to map out vast areas of research and then connect my ideas to what I’m trying to do (e.g. writing a review, learning something new, planning a new project, assignments, etc). Some of my peers and teachers also found this to be a problem so I built this MVP app to help people not only leverage AI search capabilities but also go on to connect their ideas, map out research projects, cite various results and organise their “stream of consciousness” as they work. I’d love to get some feedback on it…
2025 · hexle.ai
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2020 · apps.apple.com
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The app is a simple Form builder for collaborative private group tasks. It includes some sample Templates useful for a family. For e.g., Shopping List, Family Radar, Travel Journal, Football Scorecard, Weight Tracker, etc. The user can create such Forms or customize existing ones with the Builder. My idea was rejected by YC last year, but I went ahead a built it anyway. Let me know your thoughts. Check the website at http://ellarum.com AppStore link: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/family-matters-from-ellarum/id514754911?mt=8 I have made the app free (otherwise $1.99) for a day to let…
2012
- 15IM
Hi HN! In the last couple of weeks I've been working on Cranki: Cranki = Crosswords + Anki. (It's a stupid name tbh, haha) I like doing crosswords in Spanish (to learn vocab) but none of the apps out there allowed me to use my own list of words that I come across. So I built one instead. It's entirely client-side. No server, no database, no accounts, etc. Your words and stats are stored in local storage. I built this for myself but let me know if you like it!
Apr 2026 · cranki.app
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Hey folks, I wanted to share my latest project, which is a book that I wrote and self-published. The book is called Behind the Ivy Curtain: A Data Driven Guide to Elite College Admissions, and the link is http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B013YFIQ30. Let me give you some backstory. I went to a fun high school but it was really easy and fun and I was a pretty big slacker. Around sophomore spring I decided I wanted to leave Florida, and the best way to do that was to get a scholarship to a good school. I had no idea how to do that so I spent a bunch of time reading…
2015
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2020 · octo-ring.com
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I made my first macOS utility app that ships with a bundled Gemma 4 model, specifically the Gemma E4B one. It made my app DMG have 5.3 GB in size, but I think it is a small size for the power that this free local model can provide. It runs fine on CPU, but can also run on Apple Silicon GPU, although I did not notice any performance improvements with GPU (tested on a M5 chip). I think these local lightweight and multimodal models will open multiple possibilities for new software tools where privacy is essential.
May 2026 · snapname.app
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Hi Everyone, (I know this is a repost, but I had some dns issues with my last submission) I created this as a small project last weekend (started on _whyday) just to flex some ruby muscle, learn some stuff about sinatra, oauth and the twitter api and also get into the spirit of the day. So what it does is use your twitter followers and random people on twitter to answer your questions (bearing in mind that the syntax has to result in a yes or no question). So In effect they may or may-not know anything about you, so you just vote yes or no (kinda like facemash or hot-or-not but for…
2011
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I'm building out Kerns, as an AI environment for research. You can seed a space with a topic and multiple source documents, and complete your research completely in one space. There's interactive mindmaps for exploration, podcast mode, powerful source readers with original plus chapter level summaries that let you zoom into source on demand, a powerful chat agent that lets you control context and cite refs, and AI assisted note taking. My goal is to have one place to do research on any topic which minimizes manual context engineering, and jumping around between chat/notes/readers.…
Nov 2025 · kerns.ai
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i built a heart rate zone training app for runners. ios + apple watch. custom zones, real-time haptics, post-run graphs. all the “smart” stuff you’d expect. but i never talked to a single runner before building it. not even myself lol. started as a thesis → kept building → added features → added a paywall (€4/month!) → launched it → and yeah… no one cared. zero feedback. zero users. just code in the void. i recently made the whole thing free. not trying to “sell” anything now — just seeing if it’s actually useful, and listening this time. curious how others handle this. ever build…
2025 · basamasa.github.io
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Around 3 months ago, we were thinking why none of the iPhone apps running an LLM are built as a full harness (as in inference + agentic loop + context management + tools + MCP servers and etc.). It became more interesting when we noticed even the new Siri is not fully on device (and not available in EU for that matter). Having built a few agentic products around a custom harness in the past, we thought this shouldn't be that hard. well, we underestimated how "dumb" a 4B model can be, especially when it comes to tool calling. :D We tried 8 different models and we settled on Qwen 3.5 4B and we…
18d ago · orvena.app
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https://itunes.apple.com/dk/app/id880331892 One of those side projects that turned out fun, but have absolutely no idea on how to get people using it. (we keep sharing it on our social networks, and got close to a 100 downloads) Funny story about the name is that we made up a name before we knew what the app was going to be. It was just a fun exercise we indulged in at the pub, a bunch of laughs over silly app names for imaginary projects.
2014
- 24IB
As a high school student, I love LLMs and the execution of Apple's Appel Intelligence Writing Tools, but was disappointed that nothing like that existed for Windows. So, I created Writing Tools, a better than Apple Intelligence open-source alternative that works system-wide on Windows! Key features: - Uses Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash model for superior AI-assisted writing (much better than the tiny 2B parameter Apple Intelligence model) - Works in any application with a customizable hotkey - Proofreads, rewrites, summarizes, and more - Free and privacy-focused (your API key stays local, no…
2024 · github.com
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