Alternatives
Products that do what Cobalt, an SDK to build apps for Kobo eReaders does
Hey HN, I built an SDK to help me create apps I wanted on my Kobo. My Kobo device has a single core <1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, much less than a Raspberry Pi, but the eInk display and larger battery life opens up a lot of use cases. I have since used it to build an approval sidekick for my Mac's Claude code and codex, a Hacker News Client for Kobo, a Gutenberg reader, an RSS search and reader and more. All the code is in the repo. If you have a different device than mine (Clara BW) would love for you to test it on your device and submit a PR to enable this for more device profiles. Thanks.
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- 5IB
You know that old TI calculator you used in high school, then put in a box and forgot about? Have you ever wished you had an operating system for your calculator with preemptive multitasking, dynamic memory management, a tree filesystem conforming to the FHS, and all the comforts of Unix? Well, good news: that's totally a thing that exists. I've been working on my kernel for about three and a half years now and I'm looking for new contributors to help out. It's written entirely in z80 assembly, and it's both challenging and fun to work on. There's an IRC channel for contributors or people…
2014
- 6CA
A recent HackerNews comment - “For one programmer's hourly cost, you could run 4000 CPU cores continuously. Can there really be no practical way to apply thousands of cores to boosting the programmer's productivity?” https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19339467 This is what we have come up with. The current productivity tools - Slack, Asana, Trello, Facebook Workplace, etc. - are great, but lack direct access to your code. Building a tool directly around the code makes it more powerful for software developers: CoDiff. https://codiff.com The foundation of CoDiff is a…
2019
- 7HN
I made a Hacker News reader for iOS with React Native and Redux. It was mostly for me to learn more about React Native, but I'm really happy with the result. Let me know what you think! I'm hoping to add a lot more features, the first being a settings page with some color settings and dark mode. App: https://appsto.re/us/czg7hb.i Code: https://github.com/seanyesmunt/hackernews
2017
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A fast, native app for local coding agents. Amp, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenCode, Grok, and Pi — one timeline, entirely on your machine.
21d ago · waku.sh
- 9EM
Yesterday I decided I wanted to experiment with different ways of reading HN. After considering a few options, I settled on a Mac app and spent a couple of hours planning/sketching on paper. This morning I fired up Xcode and spent 4 hours hacking away and I must say I'm liking how it's looking. Since the project is in its very early stages, I though that it could be a very good time to get some feedback. I've posted a few screenshots at http://imgur.com/a/rCbVN and uploaded a binary at http://abra.rm-fr.net/~fiam/HackerNews.zip If you have some free time, give a try and let me know what you…
2011
- 10MI
Hi! Recently I've launched - mybfio.io - platform for software reviews with social network aspect. Prehistory Many great system are already in place that allow people to search and rate software products, including the site I am publishing this post on. However I have always felt that those systems are not specifically centered around product/software development lifecycle (releases, real users feedback over a product entire lifetime, so on) and often too broad or not designed specifically for that type of work, which is ok. Why? As an opensource author I would like to have constant…
2021
- 11MA
Hey HN community, I'm Sebastian, a Product Manager/Designer/Maker. I'd like for anyone with an idea to build and validate something quickly. I got into the #nocode thing earlier last year and wanted to see what's possible with the tools out there today. Over the last few months, I spent a lot of late nights and weekends on my side project. I'm very proud to present the result today. Meet Memoly (https://memoly.app). It's built entirely without code. To achieve my goal, I used this tech stack: Adalo, Zapier, Airtable, and Carrd. Memoly is available for iOS and Android. I…
2020
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Hey everyone, I have spend some of my free time of the last year and a half working on a cool project: Readbo ( http://readbo.com ). I loved using Google Reader, but I always thought it wasn't being updated quickly enough, and wanted some new features. So I decided to create something that would be better than Google Reader and at the same time make Google Reader users happy. Readbo is an RSS reader, but it also has filters to filter out what you don't want to see. You can also aggregate Twitter and Facebook. I personally love this feature. Even if you don't use RSS reader's, having Facebook…
2012
- 13WM
Hi HN, I’ve spent the last decade building hardware products like humanoid robots, 3D printers, and self-driving tractors. I needed a tool to navigate technical documents faster, so I created one with friends. This tool helps with component search, cross-referencing, comparison, and debugging. We’d love your feedback, whether you find it useful or not. Thank you! Try it here: www.convergelab.ai
2024 · convergelab.ai
- 14IM
This is a personal project I've been working on and off for the past few years. It's a set of tools that have allowed me to prototype quickly small (and increasingly bigger) kernels, and create userspace programs to interact with them. Supports riscv64, amd64 and i386. The intel port has been tested and used on real hardware, from big dual-socket Xeon machines to an old X220. It is all C, I have plan to make rust bindings for the kernel library. But again, they're plans at this stage. Porting to new architectures is relatively simple, a basic port to riscv took me a couple of weeks of…
2024 · github.com
- 15ME
I read Markdown all day, mostly Claude .md, and other AI outputs. Every app I have tried felt janky or too much work to just read an md file. I just wanted to open a .md file and read it the way Preview opens a PDF. So I built Kite, a Markdown reader for Mac. It has QuickLook just like Preview and I have baked in features that help people reading lot's of AI markdowns. It one-time purchase, no subscription. I put it on TestFlight so you can try it before paying anything. I would really like this crowd to try to break it. Tell me which files render wrong,what feels off, what is missing.…
Jun 2026 · kitemarkdown.com
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I've been an early adopter of speed reading tools. I have tried to maximize my use of speed reading tools for browsing. But, I travel a lot and I couldn't find any such free app for my iPhone. So, I built one for iOS - 1000 WPM (http://1000wpm.in) I have received positive feedback from users and people are finding it useful. I just hope that you guys will find it useful too. Here are some promo codes for HN early adopters. 3H4ELR6AFYYX W3HE9WHYT3FX ME9HN3TWF9WM YAKEAY67HYML 6MHLXNXMKR46 JJH4T9Y7AXL9 T9EAY9YRYFKL W4JXTPWL4HTR LJ4RMWFJ3WL9 P7Y3XR4YN7LH Feedback/comments are…
2014
- 17IM
Hey Hacker News, I'm the maker of Kopage, a free & self-hosted Website Builder. While working on new, cool features (AI, of course), it would be great to hear some HN feedback :) Thanks, Simon
2024 · kopage.com
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Just a small project I've been working on for the past few months. It has full read support (ask HN, best, comments) as well as search and the ability to post comments. Posting stories and Share Invocation are on the way with the next update. It's built using Python and qml, with the BlackBerry-py project Python entry point (https://bitbucket.org/microcode/blackberry-py) providing access to the builtin python interpreter on BB10. The app is completely free, and can be found here on BlackBerry World:…
2014
- 19IM
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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I wrote a macOS app for reading Hacker News stories and polls and recently released version 3.0 with new features. It is written in Swift and uses AppKit framework. It is a Mac-first app which is built for the macOS design language. It looks and feels and works like a proper macOS app made with love and care. It is not a port of an iOS nor an iPadOS app nor anything else. I am quite proud of it and I hope you can appreciate it too. So, I recently updated it to version 3.0 with new features such as tracking stories by marking it as (un)read, (un)favourite and (un)hidden. There is also folder…
2022 · apps.apple.com
- 21IB
hi all, i just released Kanba, a self-hostable, open source project management tool built for developers and small teams who prefer to own their tools. - no vendor lock-in - fully local data (via Supabase or your own backend) - MIT licensed - lightweight, minimal UI. think Trello, but open and yours tech stack: React + Tailwind + Supabase github link on comments would love feedback or ideas. contributions welcome!
2025
- 22IV
The Epilog Zing lasers were 50w desktop industrial lasers from circa 2010. They never had support outside of windows. This was based off of LibLaserCut which is a Java project that reverse engineered these machine's protocols. This is a CUPS driver implemented in Swift and C. Maybe this is a small example of AI doing something positive, like breathing new life into old machines :)
Dec 2025 · github.com
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Hi HN, I built Reviewskits because of a recurring frustration I faced while working for a web agency in Switzerland. Our designers created beautiful, pixel-perfect layouts, but when it came to testimonials, we were stuck with rigid, pre-made widgets from tools like Senja or Trustpilot. Hacking them with CSS to match our UI was a nightmare. When we looked at their API pricing to build our own components for 100+ clients, the cost was astronomical ($90 to $300+/mo). Later, as an indie dev building my own SaaS, I simply couldn’t afford those prices. So I built Reviewskits: High…
Apr 2026 · reviewskits.com
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KCC (a.k.a. Kindle Comic Converter) is a comic and manga converter for ebook readers. - ciromattia/kcc
6d ago · github.com
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