Alternatives
Products that do what Homer – A tool to build interactive textbooks does
Hi HN, my name is Rahul Sarathy and I built Homer (https://usehomer.app), a tool to allow creators to build more interactive digital textbooks. Right now the software supports image based scrollytelling with a roadmap to add interactive components such as annotations, animations, backlinks, and more. You can check out a demo of an interactive history book here: https://usehomer.app/demo Here's another short example of how a personal finance related book could look like: https://usehomer.app/rahul/8 If you're interested in checking out the UI used…
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Hello HN, Over the last 12 months, I have been building https://learnawesome.org This idea came from Danny Hillis' 2012 talk at OSCON, which itself was inspired from Neal Stepehenson's _The Diamond Age : A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer_ The dream is to build a tool that matches the right learning material to the right student at the right time. Wikipedia is great, but it doesn't do a good job of leveraging the rich variety of learning resources that exist on the Web. Same applies to GoodReads - which is focused only on books, whereas these days we actually learn from videos,…
2020
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I wanted to share a project that I've been working on designed to help young kids go from reading single words to reading whole books. My husband and I started spending a lot of time teaching our 5-year-old (Alex) to read because our school district is exclusively doing remote learning and I was skeptical that he could learn to read over Zoom. We used flashcards (which Alex found boring) and then combined them into sentences (which Alex found interesting). But the sentence approach requires a lot of arranging pieces of paper and remembering which words you are working on. So I developed…
2020
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I'm a long time lurker that recently quit my job to work on my own projects, a lot due to the inspiration from Hacker News. Now I have published my first serious project, an app for learning how to write Japanese characters. It's the app I always wanted but couldn't find when I was studying. It tries to be simple to use, you just start the quiz and go with the flow. There's no need to plan and manage your studies, and it uses spaced repetition for better retention. There's a promo page with more details up at http://www.kanjibyhand.com. It's only for Android so far. The free version includes…
2012
- 19IB
I’ve been working on something called Davia — a platform for creating interactive documents. These are “living documents”: each page is self-contained, combining editable content, interactive components, and data. You can read them, edit them, and actually interact with them — more like mini-apps than static docs. Here’s what makes it interesting: The interactive components are pieces of code generated on the fly, so you’re not limited to a fixed set of blocks like in Notion. You can create infinitely flexible functionality right inside a doc. Technically, an interactive page is an ensemble…
Sep 2025 · old.reddit.com
- 20LO
Hi HN, Over past few months, some of us had been collecting links to learning resources (courses, interactive explorables, books, podcasts, apps, forums, livestreams etc) in a GitHub repository of markdown files. Since we also wanted to have features like advanced search ("Show me podcasts on machine learning which are entertaining and less than 40 minutes long"), we felt the need for an app. Give it a try: https://learnawesome.org You can think of LearnAwesome.org as a GoodReads-equivalent tool generalized to links to ALL media (not just books). Some features you might like: -…
2019
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Hey HN, I built a PDF reader that can generate interactive visualizations right inside the document. The goal is to reduce the “intuition gap” when reading dense papers: select a concept, click Visualize, and it tries to produce a solid visual interactive app where you can rotate/zoom/step through (not just a text explanation). Upload any PDF, select text, click Visualize. Demo (no signup): https://zerodistract.com/try/pdf/67cdee74-810b-4f1b-af7d-010... Product link: https://zerodistract.com I’d love feedback, especially on what feels useful vs.…
Feb 2026 · zerodistract.com
- 22IB
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
- 23IR
I’ve been frustrated with PDFs and found arXiv HTML lacking, so I built a fully interactive paper reader. Features: • Hover references, citations, equations • Light/dark mode • Auto-generated dependency graphs for definitions/lemmas/theorems • Table of contents that syncs with scroll • Highlighting + annotations • “Copy raw LaTeX” anywhere Featured paper: Video models are zero-shot learners and reasoners (Veo 3) https://www.sciencestack.ai/arxiv/2509.20328v2
Nov 2025 · sciencestack.ai
- 24AI
Hi HN! I'd like to share Aha Icon, a simple tool I built for creating text-based favicons and icons. Like many recent stories, I'm a coding newbie who built this with the help of Cursor AI. The project started when I was making favicons for my other websites. While there are many tools available, I noticed they often lack precise control over text positioning - especially vertical centering. This inspired me to create my own solution. What began as a simple project evolved into a comprehensive tool with various customization options: Key Features: • Single/multi-line text support •…
2025 · ahaicon.com
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