Alternatives
Products that do what I built an app to organize fragmented learning does
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…
- 1AF
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
- 2IS
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
- 3RN
Hey! Just launched my new project. The cmaps platform was created after a long period of research and development in the field of education. It's known that human thinking is not linear, but rather associative. Without realizing it, we are constantly making connections between the things we learn. I believe that the best way to learn is to make these connections explicit. Instead of studying and taking notes in a linear fashion, we should be able to create a map of the concepts we are learning. This way, we can see the big picture and understand how everything is connected. I can say that…
2023 · cmaps.io
- 4FFetchnotes▲17
We just launched our startup tonight! It's called Fetchnotes, and it's a note-taking application for short notes like books to read, shopping lists and ideas. Check out our website at www.fetchnotes.com. We're on the web, Android, iPhone, Mac, Windows and Ubuntu — and you can even text or email in your notes. We were just covered in TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch/IBfr9C), and we'd love for you to check it out and give us your feedback. You can send it to me (Alex Schiff) and my co-founder (Chase Lee) at [email protected], or use our UserVoice forum at fetchnotes.uservoice.com. Also, we're…
2012
- 5TA
Hey! I just launched TimeSlate.app — a completely free web app to help students stay focused and organized with zero friction. No accounts, no ads, no subscription What it does: - Pomodoro Timer - Task Manager – Tag tasks by subject, assign priorities, track progress. - Subjects - Revision Timetable – Block out your day visually with subject-based time blocks. - Dashboard – See time spent, tasks completed, Pomodoros per subject/day. It’s built for students, self-learners, or really anyone trying to structure deep work time without distractions. Why I made this: Every productivity app I…
2025 · timeslate.app
- 6AA
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
- 7AS
I have always dreamed of learning Swift and creating apps for iOS, but I never found the motivation to do so. I was scared by the complexity and the learning curve of programming with UIKit and Storyboard. I thought they were too complicated and too boring for me. But then I discovered SwiftUI, the new framework for building user interfaces for Apple platforms. I was captivated by its simplicity and elegance. I watched some videos and read some articles about it and I was blown away by what it could do. I decided to give it a shot and see if I could learn it and make something with it. I set…
2023 · apps.apple.com
- 8BA
I am a product designer by profession, and recently, I ventured into coding and started developing applications. Today, I'm excited to share a project I've been passionately working on. The concept is a voice-activated journal: just voice-record your thoughts, and the app will transcribe them into text. I built this to help those like me who struggle to build a journaling habit. Also has features that encourage habbit building like a streak/tracker and a threshold marker encouraging you to record a minimum amount. I used OpneAI Whisper to power the transcriptions which means you can…
2023 · main.d35lo6kdqvpjht.amplifyapp.com
- 9IB
Hello HN! I got pretty overwhelmed with Notion, Trello, etc. (Even though they are great tools!) as an indie dev, so I built an app that is simpler to use and perfectly suited for an indie like me :) You can basically divide your projects into multiple milestones (a milestone could be e.g. a new version), and the milestones can have multiple tasks that are either todo, in progress, or done. The progress for each milestone is calculated with those tasks, and you can also prioritize and categorize the tasks using tags (E.g. for me, #ph turns into "High Priority", and #pm into "Medium…
2024 · apps.apple.com
- 10IS
YouTube learning has no structure—your learnings are scattered across random playlists, you're just passively watching without retention, and there's no one to ask when you don't understand something. I built Notetube to solves this by combining organizational tools with AI to create an actual learning system: Organizational layer: Create structured collections by topic/course/skill, track your learning progress with visual dashboards, and set achievable learning goals AI layer: Auto-generated comprehensive notes (3000+ words for 1 hours video) and summaries from any video, key…
2025 · notetubeai.com
- 11OI
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
- 12IM
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
- 13TO
Tl;dr: I built an alternative iOS/macOS app to Anki/Quizlet for learning vocabulary. You can write, collect and review example sentences with which you learn words more effectively than by just reviewing their definitions. A few years ago I wanted to improve my writing. As part of the learning process, I also wanted to expand my vocabulary. I’d highlight unknown words as I was reading books, and I’d saved them to flashcard apps. I’d reviewed them daily and for a long time I thought I was making good progress: during reviews, I’d usually guess correctly the meaning of words. My…
2022
- 14IC
Hi Everyone, I created a mobile app called Accumoo, and I would appreciate it if y'all can have a look, download and give me a favorable review. Lots of blood, sweat, tears and love went into this app, and I hope you LOVE it as much as I do - it's the app I always needed and wanted. Anyhow, I've been a Rails developer and Software Engineer for a long time, and this is my first stab at a mobile app. It's a "habit tracker" app on steroids that's just fun to use - syncs across devices, local-first architecture - and an easter egg game for good measure. Help a disabled vet out and give it a go.…
Jan 2026 · apps.apple.com
- 15WN
I've built an app that serves simple purpose of quickly collaborating on ideas and creating action items during meetings without barrier of signup and onboarding overload.
2023 · subito.so
- 16A2
Hi y'all! I am full stack web developer, and recently I started to mess around with Swift. I've been having a lot of fun and I actually build little Countdown app ( I know, how original..), but I just wanted to share it with the world!
2024
- 17BY
I've just published my app and I would love to have more feedback on it. I got the idea when I was busy moving around several projects during my last semester. And I always don't know which project I should work on next. Even worse, whenever I'm busy with something, I no longer have time to "read book", "go jogging" etc. That's when I thought it would be great if there is an app that keeps track of all the tasks that you want to do and habits that you want to make. And here it is! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sKVr0k9Hax0…
2014
- 18
Hey HN, Over the past 6 months, I've been working on a Spanish language learning app that generates stories for you with your target words. For the last 2, I've been reading with it most mornings and it's really helped me grow my vocab. It generates short stories built around your target words you are learning, and uses vocabulary you already know for the majority of the story (around 95%). As you read along you click any word you don't know and it puts them into a spaced repetition system (SRS) to appear in future generated stories. It does need an account to work. I have a short…
12d ago · readplusone.com
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