Does anyone feel the same way?

Alright, I am posting this in hopes that some of the developers in here find it useful and they incorporate it into their apps so that I can use some of them!!!

I work as an occupational therapist, particularly in brain injury rehab and I do a lot of cognitive remediation work (ie helping folks improve cognitive deficits post-injury). A big thing I teach most of my clients is about the "cognitive triangle".

When thinking about these apps being our "second brain", I began thinking about how using this model is also helpful for these apps as well:

Level 1
First - the information needs to easily go IN to your brain (ie attention). You are never going to be able to work with information that isn't in there. (an example I often give is that you will never remember where your car is parked in a big parking lot if you didn't pay attention to it. You can't remember something that was never in your brain to begin with). This would show up as widgets, quick add hotkeys, etc that allow you to quickly and accurately store the info

Level 2
Next, you have to be able to retrieve that information easily. Once it's stored in your brain, you have to be able to easily find it and pull it out when/as needed. This would probably show up as folders, tags, labels etc

Level 3
Lastly, once you have that information pulled out, this is when you use it - ie do complex processes with it. Prioritize it, act on it, reflect on it, share it, etc. This would look like an eisenhower matrix, kanban boards, filters, time blocking features, etc

The problem is that, just like our brains, we need to be able to do all three of these functions to actually be able to be productive. If you focus only on one level it won't really be that useful. Obviously starting at level 1 is important (as without that you will never be able to do level 2 and 3), but you still need all three to be able to functionally do all of the things you're trying do.

What I've found with YEARS of searching in productivity apps is that there is not one app that does all three well.

• I love Amazing Marvin in the ways that I can manipulate the information I save in there (level 3) to plan my day and choose my priorities, but getting the information in there is a PAIN (ie. level 1 sucks)
• I love google keep as it's so easy to enter information in quickly on my android, but it lacks the ability to really easily find and USE the information (ie level 1 is good, but level 2 and 3 is not great)
• I so badly want to use capacities, but every time I've tried I've had to stop because getting it in there is a pain, as well as using it to find stuff while on mobile (level 3 is great, but level 1 and 2 are not)
• Obsidian is what I'm using now, but it is slooooooow to build to get it to do all three. I've been building my vault slowly over the last few months and still only on level 2.

I don't have the time or capacity to build my own app, but I am sharing this here in hopes that others who are working on apps would find this useful and maybe think about this when designing an app. If you are thinking about this or found it useful, let me know. I am still searching for my app, and maybe yours will be it??

Also, I've thought about, at times, making a big spreadsheet of all the big apps that are out there and ranking how well they are able to do all three of these functions. Would be an interesting comparison I think.

Edit: If you reply with a suggestion of an app, please include what platforms it on (iOS, android etc) and if it is your app. My biggest pet peeve on this and other subreddits is other people promoting their own apps but not disclosing that they made it. An easy google search can show us if it is.

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TL;DR: Workbuddy gives pretty good output if you are mainly using it for work related tasks, very light coding, and don't want a 100k bill at the end of the month.

Context: I work for a pretty boutique marketing agency that's trying to catch up in this world of Al. Being the most tech-savvy person in the team, my boss asked me to provide a few options for Al subscriptions that can actually help us do work more efficiently.

I've been a Claude user for a long time but boss is looking for something more affordable, since getting Claude pro for the whole company would cost around $1200 per month for the size of our team.

Workbuddy:

• I fast output

• I was able to pull out the important details that meets my usage scenario (without explicitly asking for it)

• I but the slide show template design is pretty outdated not modern enough

• I there's no web version so have to download the app to use

Claude:

• I very clean and aesthetic design, almost ready for presentation

• I consistent formatting

• I but left out many details I'd love to see (but I could easily add those back in with follow up prompts)

I’m building a habit game that combines ideas from Mini Habits with Stardew Valley style gameplay.

I built it because I’m frustrated with the habit trackers in the App Store. They’re all good at logging habits, but none of them actually help me develop habits the right way.

This is still an MVP, and there’s a lot of major work to be done, but the basic functionality and gameplay are in place. Right now it’s only a web app, but it will definitely become a mobile app in the future.

If you’re interested in the technical side, I built it using Flutter and the Flame engine.

If you would like, try it out and roast it as hard as you can 😅

Sign up link is here: https://tinyvillehabit.com

or you can just skip all that and jump straight into the app, use this link: https://app.tinyvillehabit.com/#/hooray-you-are-officially-invited-to-tiny-ville

I track my habits on the HabitHook app. Firstly, it allows you to create a circle with whom you can connect, either your friends or anyone from the public feed of HabitHook.

I've been using the app since last year. This feature is one of the best for me to date because I know who's doing better than me, plus how much they're helping the community as well.

I'm sharing my experience, because other habit tracker seems just personal this one is collaborative, kinda like Strava for habits.

me: "just one more video bro"

my screen time: 27 hours this week 💀

I got tired of privacy-violating trackers so I built my own:

✅ 100% local (no accounts, no servers, no data leaving your machine)

✅ Nice popup with total time, donut chart, daily timeline + week view

✅ Brutal insights like "you opened twitter 47 times today idiot"

✅ Dark mode because we're all nocturnal anyway

Screenshot of my own shame this week (YouTube still carrying the team):

If you're also living in browser jail, try it:

https://github.com/HariNayan/Screen-Time-Tracker-Chrome-Extension

(30 seconds to install - load unpacked)

Be honest... how cooked are you? Drop your worst site in the comments 🪦

I've been working on an expense tracker called Spardose and it's at the point where I need other people to use it.

It's manual entry. You type what you spent, you see your balance change. Nothing connects to your bank. I tried a few apps that wanted my bank login and I just didn't want to do that, plus half of them buried the only thing I cared about, which is how much money I have left this month.

What it does:

• Expenses and income with your own categories
• Monthly budgets per category
• Savings goals
• Recurring entries, so you don't retype rent every month
• A breakdown of where your money actually went
• Multiple currencies and languages
• Dark mode
• Export your data whenever

If you want to try it:

Android is in closed testing. Drop me the Gmail you use on the Play Store and I'll add you.

iPhone has no App Store version yet, but it works in the browser: https://www.spardose.app/login
Open it in Safari, hit Share, then Add to Home Screen. You get an icon and it opens fullscreen so it feels like a normal app.

I'm mostly after honest reactions. If it's slow somewhere, or you open it and don't get what you're supposed to do, that's what I want to hear.

Keeping my calendar up to date has always felt more manual than it should be.

I built EventFlow, an Android app that extracts calendar events from photos, screenshots, flyers, messages, and typed text, with voice input coming next.

The GIF shows what I think is the most useful workflow: taking an image, extracting the events, and opening them directly in Android Calendar for review before saving.

I'm mainly interested in honest feedback rather than downloads.

Would something like this become part of your workflow, or would you still create calendar events manually?

The app is completely free during closed testing.

If you'd like to try it, EventFlow is currently in Google Play Closed Testing.

1. Join the testing group

https://groups.google.com/a/norsula.com/g/eventflow

2. Become a tester (web)

https://play.google.com/apps/testing/eventflow.norsula.com

3. Install from Google Play (Android devices)

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=eventflow.norsula.com

Im looking for apps (app store or play store idc) that can help you learn about topics like humanities something on the go.

Ty

Tabitabs is an App+Extension that I created after months of been unable to find a tool that would assist me not only in saving information but also in working more efficiently with everything I had open in my browser every day.

Thank you for taking the time to watch the video; I will be grateful for your comments; Feel free to try it, and provide feedback or ideas so I can continue going forward with this project and reach many people who maybe is looking for something like this.

I really enjoy the Habit Tracker app - the UI is really nice and I love that it’s free! The one thing missing for me is the ability to add friends so that we can see each other’s progress on our own goals and support each other. It seems like you can only have shared habits, but my friend and I are tracking different things.

Is there a similar app that has that functionality? And one that is free and has a simple/aesthetic UI like Habit Tracker?

Hi everyone! I'm currently building Phase, an upcoming self-improvement and productivity app that's centered around the idea that productivity shouldn't feel cold, stressful, or like another checklist. Instead of opening a dashboard full of cards and graphs, you enter a living illustrated room that becomes your personal space. The room changes throughout the day with different lighting, weather, seasons, and animations, while your companion (a beagle mascot) reacts to your progress and grows alongside you. The goal is to create a place that people genuinely want to spend time in—not just because they have work to do, but because the world itself feels comforting, immersive, and alive.

The app includes a variety of self-improvement tools built directly into this world. There are interactive to-do lists, Deep Focus sessions that transform the room into a distraction-free environment, a guided journaling system for reflection and personal growth, habit and challenge systems that encourage consistency, and additional features that all tie back into the room and your companion. Rather than feeling like separate pages, everything is designed to feel like you're interacting with one cohesive world. The room isn't just a background—it responds to your actions, your progress, and eventually your achievements.

Over the past few months we've been designing the app, but recently we've started questioning our visual direction. Our current UI leans toward a cleaner, more polished aesthetic, but the more we've developed Phase, the more we've realized that it may not communicate the personality of the product. We're now exploring a completely different direction inspired by hand-painted illustrations, watercolor, children's storybooks, Studio Ghibli, and handcrafted art. The goal isn't to make the app look "cute," but to make it feel memorable, emotionally warm, and unlike anything else in the productivity space.

Below I've included our current logo and UI (settings, sign-in, pause menu) followed by our new mascot-first logo concepts and several ChatGPT-generated mockups that we're using purely as art direction references. These aren't final designs—they're helping our illustrator explore the feeling we're aiming for before creating original artwork.

I'd really appreciate completely honest feedback.

Some questions I'd love your thoughts on:

• Which direction would make you more likely to download the app?
• Which visual identity feels more memorable?
• Does the illustrated direction better communicate the idea of an immersive productivity world?
• Is there anything about either direction that immediately turns you away?
• If you discovered this app on the App Store, which version would you be more likely to tap on, and why?

Thank you for taking the time to look through everything. At this stage, honest criticism is far more valuable than compliments, so don't hold back. Our goal is to build something that feels genuinely different from the sea of traditional productivity apps, and I'd love to know whether we're moving in the right direction.

Task Bloom: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smartfamily.studentplanner

I'm developing a note-taking app and wanted a way for users to quickly understand where they are in a document, see its overall structure, and jump to another section.

Most apps solve this with a dedicated Table of Contents (TOC). But I found them not ideal because:

1. They need a dedicated section/panel and take up space.
2. The TOC is visually different from the document itself, so users have to mentally map each entry to the actual content.

So I implemented an 'Overview Mode'. When enabled, the content of the page gets simplified (showing only the titles) and by clicking on a content it will disable the mode and shows the actual content instantly without any jump or scrolling.

The video shows an example. I'd like to know what you guys think about this approach.

P.S. This is implemented in Daftak.

I built my own (model agnostic) version of cowork/codex.

The way I use cowork is really not that complicated. I use it for things like email drafting, doc analysis and synthesis, sometimes to review and schedule cqalendar events, etc…

I built something that allows me to more deeply integrate my gmail, calendar, drive, files, slack, etc…directly into the chat experience. That way I just drag emails/slacks in as context and get agent responses back. It also lets me test different models more easily side by side, store versioned copies of all my skills, etc…all in one place.

I built this with myself in mind, but open to feedback on if others would try something like this. (Also happy to give a few people access and maybe ~$50 in token credits to give me feedback). I think more people testing it would help me make the harness and tools better. 

Hey everyone - as of this week Anythings now has a MCP, so your AI chat can work with you on your to-do list without having to leave the chat. I've been testing it this week and its been a game changer for me in getting things done / feeling like I have someone to tell me exactly what to do next on top of the order Anythings already keeps your to-do list in.

What the connector can do (so far, but looking for feedback on what else it should be able to do):

• Capture: "add all of this to my list" turns a whole planning conversation into tasks: split, dated from natural language, ranked against your priorities that you have set up in the app
• List: "what should I work on today?" returns your to-do list in the app's actual order
• Complete: "mark the dentist thing done." Recurring tasks auto spawn the next occurrence
• Reschedule: "push the report to Friday" / "snooze the groceries a few days."
• Attach: "draft an outline and attach it to the task" links the doc on the task with a link to the Claude artifact, Google drive link, etc. This is the one I've been using the most, as it feels like the AI tool can actually complete my asks for me
• Stats: completion streaks, biggest brain dump, on-time rate, etc.

Setup: paste https://www.anythings.app/api/mcp into your AI tool's connector settings, sign in, approve. It uses just normal/standard OAuth so it never sees your password. It also cannot delete tasks or touch account settings by design.

Works in any AI tool that supports MCP - super curious for feedback here and if there are other use cases or features I should think about adding to the MCP?

I'm looking for a Pomodoro application that takes into account that your tasks don't all take 25 minutes, some only need 5 minutes.

My goal is 2 fold

• track how much time I spend on each category of task per week. Units could be time ( you spend 3 hours writing notes this week) or pomodoros ( your completed 7.2 pomodoros writing notes this week )
• get a reminder to take a break after X minutes ( currently 25 ) so that I don't good too long without a break.

My current app lets me end a pomodoro early, but then doesn't log a partial one if I do.

It might be that pomodoros just aren't for me, and I need to try different apps like toggle of clockify as found in this thread in the productivity subreddit ( ie right here!)

Ideas are welcome, recommending an app you wrote is not.

I make NameQuick, a Mac app for renaming and organizing ordinary files in Finder. You can drop in PDFs, scans, images, or documents, and it reads what's inside before suggesting a useful filename. You can review each change before applying it, save naming presets for recurring files, or watch a folder and use rules to rename and sort new arrivals.

That's the core of the app. Since my last post here, I've added two things that cover opposite ends of that workflow: files arriving from email and files piling up as duplicates.

Connected Inboxes handles the intake side. You connect an inbox, approve the senders you trust, and route their PDF attachments into a watched folder. NameQuick can then rename and organize them through the same watched-folder workflow. You can review new senders, pause an inbox, or change its destination.

Duplicate Detection handles the cleanup side. The attached video demonstrates Duplicate Detection; it does not show Connected Inboxes.

A file called scan 17.pdf is hard to recognize. Three copies saved as scan 17.pdf, Document (3).pdf, and attachment.pdf are also hard to recognize as the same file.

For exact copies, NameQuick compares the file contents, so the filenames do not matter. It groups identical files, suggests one to keep, and shows how much space the other copies use. You can change the keeper or skip the group.

Similar images need a different decision. A crop, export, or edited version might be intentional, so NameQuick keeps those out of the exact-copy cleanup. They open side by side and you choose Keep left, Keep right, or Not duplicates.

Copies you remove go to the macOS Trash, and the cleanup has Undo.

One honest limitation: Duplicate Detection only covers files already in the NameQuick library. It does not scan your whole Mac, Photos library, or external disks. If that broader scan is what you need, Gemini 2 is the better fit. NameQuick's duplicate view is for the folders you are already renaming and organizing.

Pricing, since people reasonably ask: Self-Managed is $69 once for one Mac with lifetime updates, using your own AI provider or a local model. Managed starts at $12/month with the AI included. https://namequick.app

Which side is more annoying for you: getting document attachments out of email, or cleaning up duplicates once they pile up?

For the past few months I've been working on a to do app that actually works with how my ADHD brain functions. It's called Ikoi. Some features (and anti-features):

Energy levels for tasks: Set how much energy each task needs, then filter them out on bad days.

Task decay: Most apps just shove undone tasks to tomorrow forever. Ikoi slowly fades them instead. If you haven't touched something in 7/14/21 days, it fades and then archives itself. Guilt-free.

No streaks. Ever: Streaks don't work. One missed day and the whole thing feels pointless. There will never be streaks in Ikoi.

Group body-doubling timer: Join a public room, see what others are working on, and work on your own thing alongside them.

Cute, not corporate: Customize it with different icon sets or bring your own.

This version is stable and shaped by feedback from people actually using it.

You can get it for iOS or Android.

Let me know if you have any thoughts.

i wanted to use large language models to help me organize my thoughts and plan out my life goals, but the privacy policies at most of the big tech companies made me deeply uncomfortable. i do not want my personal vulnerabilities and private entries getting used to train public models, or ending up in the hands of some massive advertising corporation. i ended up switching my routine to copymind because they built the whole system around keeping personal data isolated for their mind twin feature. what it produces is based specifically on my own history, and i don't have to worry about my logs being shared or leaked somewhere. how much do you guys factor data security into your personal development tech stack, and are there other privacy first tools i should be looking at?

Hey. If you ever liked progressing through skill trees in RPG games and leveling up and gaining new abilities, well now you can do it in real life. Skill Tree allows you to create ANY CUSTOM tree that you want. You can use it for anything from fitness, health, cognition and focus, creativity, art skills & projects, social skills, investing or LITERALLY ANY OTHER personal development goal. If you don't feel like making trees, you can use the AI builder to do it for you. Although the title says "Skill", it works equally well for various types of projects that have steps.

As you progress, your character gets points across Health, Intelligence, Discipline, Creativity, Relationships, Charisma and Stewardship. It's a fun way to organize skills without overwhelming yourself.

Build your character (you!) and give me some feedback, if you will:

https://skilltreeimprove.pages.dev/

Byeee! 

P.S: Dear iOS people, you can sign up for the waitlist. I'll be releasing the iOS version if folks show interest.

Hi everyone!

I built my first desktop to-do app using Python and PyQt5

It's a lightweight Windows application that stores tasks locally, so there's no account or cloud sync required.

Current features:

- Add and delete tasks

- Mark tasks as completed

-Automatic saving

- dark mode

I'd really appreciate any feedback or ideas for future versions!

Github:

https://github.com/MasaWorks/TrackTasks

Download:
https://github.com/MasaWorks/TrackTasks/releases/tag/v1.0.0