Alternatives
Products that do what Instant object recognition does
About three months ago, ipplex, a technology startup I work with released a real-time Money Reader app for Blind users that has been recognized by major publications and blogs, and has a 5 star rating in the app store. You can see a quick in office demo of it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvfDnGMPrkI I wasn't active on HN then, but I thought the community may enjoy seeing some very early real world applications of real time object recognition. We are working on bringing this to all kinds of objects as well as landmarks, and incorporating some really interesting things to make this…
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I'm giving away some Promo Codes here as well, just as a thank you to the HN community. Would love your feedback.
2012 · itunes.apple.com
- 6EM
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
- 7EA
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
- 8ER
Over the holidays I went looking for a reading app for my 4-year-old daughter. The top app in this space charges $500/month. Since that's a bit much to pay for an app, I figured I could vibe code something better in a few days, so I tried. The app uses DISTAR phonics, which is a method from the 60s by Siegfried Engelmann. The core idea is simple: teach sounds before letter names, then blend sounds into words, then words into sentences. There's a specific sequence that builds on itself. On top of that I added spaced repetition, same algorithm as Anki. Cards come back at increasing…
Apr 2026 · github.com
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Recently, I found myself having to read the book "C++ primer" and I just couldn't do it. Maybe my attention span is too little now with Claude and Codex, maybe I'm lazy... but I just couldn't get myself to focus. While reading, I needed something to do. I wanted to talk to the text, I wanted to leave notes, I wanted to use to use my keyboard to quickly flip through pages. The only good available option on a Mac was "Preview" and it was ok, but definitely not there. So I built Quincy primarily for myself. With it you can - "Talk" to the page you're reading, create a quiz about the page, and…
Jun 2026 · tryquincy.live
- 10IM
Hi HN, I recently got the AnkiMobile app for iOS for Mandarin. It was buggy and feature-lacking in my opinion, so I made a nice looking Anki-compatible alternative app, with more features. It uses a tuned FSRS5 algorithm and supports image occlusion out of the box. You can import your existing Anki decks into it or create a new one. Pretty quick to add cards with the image feature. I'm using it right now and will add more to it so let me know what you think. FYI, it has a one-off purchase of $14.99 to unlock it for lifetime (no taksies backsies) after a test period of seven days.
Dec 2025 · apps.apple.com
- 11IM
I launched an iOS app that lets you scan documents as quickly as your camera takes photos, all wrapped in the skeuomorphic style of iOS 6.0. It was a fun indie project. Hope some of you will enjoy it! :)
2025 · apps.apple.com
- 12IB
I recently built an iOS app called Settld: Group Restaurant Finder that helps friends decide where to meet by finding restaurants that are roughly equally far from everyone’s location, and displaying information about them. We’ve all been in chaotic group chats where no one can agree on where to eat — this app cuts through that by calculating a “sweet spot” for the group. For 2 people, it’s the midpoint. For 3 people, it’s the circumcenter. For 4–6 people, it uses a minimum enclosing circle approach (Welzl’s algorithm). It then shows the top 15 nearby options so there’s no more “where do we…
2025 · settld.space
- 13IM
Hi all, i made an iOS HN reader, so i can read HN nicely on my iphone while pushing my daughter on the swing (she likes going on the swing for a good hour on saturdays... go figure). Anyway i figured i'd open source it and show it here: http://splinter.com.au/hacker-news-reader https://github.com/chrishulbert/HackerNewsReader And its on the app store if you couldn't be bothered firing up xcode: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hacker-news-reader/id457519010?ls=1&mt=8 Anyway, hopefully someone out there can learn something looking at the code. There seems to be a dearth of example code /…
2011
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Hey, I've made a pdf reader with ai assistance, you can quickly ask questions about the text and the images, and it will have context about all of your reading material so you can ask questions freely, try it now, I'm in open beta to find bug and get feedback. upcoming features: - Highlighting - Highlighting with Notes - Bibliography - Automatic Reference file opening - Improved UX and robustness currenlty alot of bugs so please let me know if you found any. feedback appreciated
2025 · pdf-hub.com
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http://dripi.com I thought I'd share my winning entry to the Google I/O last call competition with ya'll. Took me about 9 hours, which seems like a lot looking at it now (my only excuse is that it took place after 12am). I truly did not expect to be one of the winners. My guess is that the YouTube API category had fewer entries than others. Feel free to let me know what you think! This was the challenge: Wouldn’t it be nice if you could create a video mash-up by chaining player invocations that work for both Flash and HTML5 videos ? Well, with the JavaScript API to the <iframe> embed…
2011
- 16WM
Hi HN! Last year, my friend and I decided to build an app for splitting payments with friends. We were on a group vacation and trying to split a bunch of bills every day, but Splitwise's clunky UX and ads kept getting in the way. So we decided to build an app for ourselves that's simpler and just does what we need. We built Quicksplit as a side project - as always, building it took longer than we initially expected :) It's ad-free and always will be. You can add payments in different currencies, add friends (without them needing the app), and manage tabs for vacations, events, or living…
2024 · quicksplit.io
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Hey guys, I am think of building an open-source version of Perplexity to let devs play around with it. But with all the existing tools available what features would you want? Anything specific? What is missing? Currently working on - 1. Streaming text 2. Citations sources 3. Image and file upload 4. Chat history and storage 5. Temperature and custom instructions If you are in marketing or growth can anyone help me with what to focus on while building such an app? Also here is a very first version. Probably will break and most of the buttons also don’t work, built it in 3 days using Bing and…
2024 · omniplex.vercel.app
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The vision plugin for OpenCode that truly understands images. Inspect, read, and reason about any screenshot or picture with deeper understanding than any other plugin — fully local, private, and free. Normally, it takes 300ms to analyse one image on my laptop, which is pretty fast for a local vision model. I use moondream2 as my vision model, you can set your custom model like moondream3.1 if you have a good GPU (for comparison I have currently have an RTX 3050). It works cross-platform. Just follow the README. If you like my work, you leave me a tip as an act for supporting open source!!…
23d ago · github.com
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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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This is a first draft of an app that I am working on that is the "anti blinkist (the book summarization app)". I call it Augre (aug-ur - short for augmented reader) and the whole idea is that I want to immerse more, not less in a book. I want to dive deeper into the text, chat with others who are reading the book and get into delicious discussions. It's still early but here are a couple of features: 1. A really solid cross platform epub reader 2. Left sidebar which augments the reading experience with tables, images, maps (and other artifacts coming soon) 3. Book chat where you can chat with…
2025
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Initial reddit post: https://redd.it/6x8ajd Follow-up post: https://redd.it/6yyh0d Message me if you'd like to try out the beta on TestFlight! - Kosta
2017
- 22JZ
I’ve posted here before about Julie, an open-source desktop AI assistant I’ve been building in public. The OSS version is local-first and powerful, but it assumes you’re comfortable bringing your own models or API keys. A lot of people told me the same thing: “I just want to install it and have it work.” So I built Julie Zero. Julie Zero is the premium tier that works straight out of the box. No API keys, no setup. Install it and start using it immediately. What Julie Zero does: Sees your screen and understands what you’re looking at in real time Helps across apps by clicking, typing,…
Jan 2026 · github.com
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Hey yall, I built this for my makerspace. We wanted to let each other borrow things, but also didn't want to put up a big shiny sign saying "hey everyone, my garage has a super fancy oscilloscope just sitting there" and also didn't want to necessarily always need to say yes to everything. However, when I show it to people, they've been suggesting using it for other things like board games, or wedding equipment, etc. I'm still trying to find PMF, so please let me know what you think! For the stack, it's all Elixir + LiveView which is really nice, and then Fly.io, Fly's MPG, Tigris Data,…
25d ago · toolpool.garden
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Frames is a simple app for analog film photographers to log shot details like camera, lens, film stock, exposure settings, and notes while shooting. Later, it can embed this metadata into scanned JPEGs to keep the technical and creative context of each frame. The iPhone app lets you record notes in the field, and the companion Mac app helps attach metadata to your digital scans. There's no cloud storage — everything stays local. The iPhone app is free, and the Mac app has a 7-day trial. I built Frames because I wanted a lightweight, privacy-first tool to bridge the gap between analog…
2025 · withframes.com
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