Alternatives
Products that do what Lynk – Real-time and daily app updates via websockets (macOS, no SDKs) does
Hi hackers! I'm a self-taught solo teenage dev ever wanted to show what you're doing right now on the internet? well I've been wanting to for a while, so I built Lynk, a lightweight macOS app that tracks your active apps, window titles, and daily usage in real time, and broadcasts that data over WebSockets. Oh and it also updates whenever you switch apps to connected clients! No SDKs, no APIs — just local tracking + a websocket endpoint you can ping from any language. GitHub: https://github.com/shaileshsaravanan/lynk
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Hey HN! I’ve written a bunch of WebSocket servers over the years to do simple things like state synchronization, WebRTC signaling, and notifying a client when a backend job was run. I realized that if I had a simple way to create a private, temporary, mini-redis that the client could talk to directly, it would save a lot of time. So we created DriftDB. In addition to the open source server that you can run yourself, we also provide https://jamsocket.live where you can use an instance we host on Cloudflare’s edge (~13ms round trip latency from my home in NY). You may have seen my…
2023 · driftdb.com
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2016 · socketcluster.io
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Hi all, I'm excited to announce Stratoshark, a sibling application to Wireshark that lets you capture and analyze process activity (system calls) and log messages in the same way that Wireshark lets you capture and analyze network packets. If you would like to try it out you can download installers for Windows and macOS and source code for all platforms at https://stratoshark.org. AMA: I'm the goofball whose name is at the top of the "About" box in both applications, and I'll be happy to answer any questions you might have.
2025 · stratoshark.org
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Hey HN! I built a native macOS desktop client for Hacker News and I'm open-sourcing it under the MIT license. GitHub: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News Download (signed & notarized DMG, macOS 14.0+): https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News/releases Screenshots: https://github.com/IronsideXXVI/Hacker-News#screenshots I spend a lot of time reading HN — I wanted something that felt like a proper Mac app: a sidebar for browsing stories, an integrated reader for articles, and comment threading — all in one window.…
Feb 2026 · github.com
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Hi HN, I'm opening up the beta for IndigoStack. It's a native macOS app which provides a fresh take on how to run all the services you need for local web development. I've been building it for myself as a Laravel & Drupal developer and I'm now looking to get some beta testers on board! Check it out, and don't forget to sign up to the forums to give us your feedback! https://indigostack.app My motivation: Like many developers I've developed a love-hate relationship with the existing options for local development on a Mac. If they're virtualised, you'll often get... * high CPU usage…
2022 · indigostack.app
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2014 · zzzz.io
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2011 · logio.org
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2016 · github.com
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Hi HN - I’m the developer of PingStalker, a macOS utility I built to see what’s really happening on the LAN/WLAN. I live in the CLI, but when it came to discovery and monitoring, I found it limiting. So I built a GUI that brings my favorite tools together in one place. PingStalker started because I wanted to know if something on the network was scanning my machine. I also wanted quick access to core details—external IP, Wi-Fi data, and local topology. Then I wanted more: fast, reliable scans using ARP tables and ICMP. As a Wi-Fi engineer, I couldn’t stop there. I kept adding ways to…
Nov 2025 · pingstalker.com
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Hi HN, I’m Marc, founder of Zynk, an application being built by a small bootstrapped team. Zynk is a cross‑platform file transfer + messaging app designed around two things: reliability (auto‑resume) and privacy (end‑to‑end encryption). The project started because I felt it's still a pain to move files and folders across a Linux laptops, a Mac workstation, my phone, countless other devices, and to others. Some existing solutions don't cross ecosystems, cloud drives are slow/inefficient/fragile for big transfers, and a lot of tools fall over when you sleep a laptop or switch…
Dec 2025
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2018 · bonhardcomputing.com
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2011 · blog.leftronic.com
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Hey guys and gals! I'm learning Go at the moment and LOVING it. I was hoping to get constructive feedback on a project I'm working on - goatee - which is a notification server that utilizes Redis pub/sub and WebSockets. It's fairly bare-bones at the moment but I'm hoping to add in a lot more features as time goes on such as queueing and WebSocket channel subscriptions (via Go Socketio possibly).
2014 · github.com
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Hey HN, For years, my local development setup has been a fragile mess of tools that never quite played nicely together. On my mac, it was a constant battle with Homebrew services starting (or not starting) on boot, conflicting PHP and Node versions managed by `asdf` or `nvm`, and a collection of `docker-compose.yml` files that I'd copy-paste and tweak for every single project. The cognitive load was just too high. Setting up SSL was another chore involving `mkcert`. Sharing a quick demo with a colleague meant firing up ngrok. And if I wanted to run two projects that needed different versions…
Oct 2025 · servbay.com
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Hey everyone, I want to share a tool, UptimeLog, that helps track internet connections and identify patterns of disconnections and durations, all presented on a calendar heatmap (which I find to be a cool way to visualize different patterns and more). Originally, it started as a quick hack for Linux, allowing me to analyze patterns of periodic internet disconnections over time. However, I have since ported it to macOS, enabling cross-platform compatibility via making the monitoring dashboard accessible through a web page locally.
2023 · uptimelog.app
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Hey! Alexis and Tobi here. We built a native macOS client for ChatGPT API that is free to use (macOS Ventura). https://www.jamgpt.app/ We built and fine-tuned it to scratch our own specific text-processing itches, so we just wanted to share this with the community. If you work with a lot of text or code like we do, check it out. Its core features include: - Instantly talk to ChatGPT from anywhere on your Mac by pressing a keyboard shortcut. - Avoid typing out repetitive prompts by saving prompts and accessing them quickly. - Just download and start typing as you would with…
2023
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2019 · pingstack.io
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2016 · github.com
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At my day job, we have a daily async stand-up. We have to message a slack bot how many hours we have worked on a given task that day and overall. The format is: > Task: "Task Name" | Worked: 5h Total: 16h > Description: Finished implementation of feature. I don't complain. Most fully remote jobs come with a version of this, but doing it manually got tedious. So, I needed a simple app that would track this. I am not usually a fan of "vibe coded" apps, but this was an ideal candidate for it, since it's not production code. Most LLMs solve the problem by creating a single HTML file with forms…
2025 · htmlsync.io
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Hi HN, I built Verani, an experimental realtime SDK for Cloudflare Actors (Durable Objects). The goal is to bring a familiar, event-based DX (rooms, emit, channels, lifecycle hooks) to Cloudflare Durable Objects, while handling hibernation correctly. It focuses on - Socket.io-like semantics on top of Durable Objects - Proper Actor hibernation handling (WebSockets survive, state is restored) - Typed API with explicit tradeoffs. It’s early and experimental, but functional. I built it mainly to explore DX and state management patterns on Cloudflare Actors, and I’d love feedback from people…
Dec 2025 · github.com
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