If you hand your laptop to someone for a few minutes, they can still open Messages, Photos, Notes, Mail, WhatsApp, browsers, password managers, and other personal apps. I wanted a way to protect specific applications without constantly locking my entire Mac.

I looked around for solutions, but most were outdated, paid, abandoned, or didn't feel native to macOS.

So I built FaceGate.

FaceGate is a native macOS app that lets you lock individual applications and unlock them using Face Unlock, Touch ID, or a password.

A few things I focused on from day one:

• Everything runs locally on your Mac
• No cloud processing
• No accounts
• No telemetry
• No subscriptions
• Fully open source

Features:

• Face Unlock powered entirely on-device using Apple's Neural Engine - little impact on cpu and gpu resources.
• Fast authentication with very low memory and CPU usage
• Liveness detection to prevent photo and video spoofing attacks
• Touch ID and password fallback
• Per-app unlock timers
• Automatic re-lock on sleep, wake, or screen lock
• Custom schedules for automatic lock/unlock periods
• Tamper protection that prevents FaceGate from being quit, disabled, or uninstalled without authentication
• Runs quietly from the menu bar with minimal system impact.

The entire project is written in Swift and designed specifically for macOS.

This is still actively being developed, and I'd genuinely love feedback from Mac users.

Some questions:

• Is app-level locking something you've wanted on macOS?
• Which apps would you personally lock?
• What security or privacy features would you like to see added?

Website: https://facegate-applocker.vercel.app/

GitHub: https://github.com/dweep-desai/FaceGate-Mac

If you think I did a good job, please feel free to leave a star on my github repo - means a lot to me.

Feedback, feature requests, bug reports, and contributions are all welcome. I'd love to hear what you think.

I developed Weather World because I wanted a simpler, more helpful way to stay ahead of the forecast. I truly believe that a weather app should be a tool that makes your life easier, not a source of distraction with ads and confusing menus.

How it helps you: The core of the app is all about visual clarity. I’ve focused on creating intuitive graphs that let you see temperature shifts and precipitation trends at a single glance. Instead of reading through long lists of numbers, you can visualize exactly how your day will unfold. It’s minimalist, lightweight, and built for speed—perfect for anyone who values a clean Android experience.

I’d love your support! Please give it a try and see if it helps your daily routine. If you find it useful, please recommend it to your friends! As a solo developer, your support and word-of-mouth are what help me improve and grow.

In compliance with the community rules, I’ve shared the link via IndieAppCircle. Check it out there and let me know what you think!

Find it here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danie.pocasisveta

A few months ago, I had an idea.

I wanted a habit tracker where your habits actually belong to you.

No accounts.
No subscriptions.
No ads.
No cloud.
Just your data, stored on your own device.

So I started building HabitRail.

Today, I checked the Play Console and realized something that honestly made my day...

More than 600 people have installed it. ❤️

I know 600 isn't millions, but as a solo developer, seeing hundreds of people around the world use something I built is surreal.

One thing that surprised me the most is how many different countries it's reached.

To make HabitRail accessible, I translated it into 17+ languages, and now people from all over the world are using it to build habits, track streaks, and stay consistent.

Every download, every review, and every piece of feedback has helped shape the app into what it is today.

Some of the features users asked for have already made it into the app:

• Local backup & restore
• Streak Freeze
• Calendar history
• Detailed statistics
• Custom reminders
• Daily, weekly, and custom habits
• Completely offline
• No account required

And I'm not stopping there.

I'm currently working on home screen widgets, so you'll soon be able to check your progress and complete habits without even opening the app. They'll be coming in one of the next updates, and I'm really excited to share them.

I still have a long list of ideas I'd love to build.

If you'd like to support an indie developer, the biggest things that help are:

• Trying the app
• Leaving an honest review
• Sharing feedback (good or bad)

It genuinely keeps me motivated to continue improving HabitRail.

Google Play:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hzfapps.habitrail

Thank you to every single person who's downloaded HabitRail.

Here's to the next 600. 🚂❤️

I build myself a quick and easy, anonymous text-sharing tool - files should work, too.

How it works:

- straight forward peer-to-peer transfer, encrypted (some edge cases require traffic to go through Cloudeflare)

- when on the same network, you connect directly, if not, Google or Cloudeflare are used for connection handshake - not transfer!

- no log-in required, no costs, if you dont trust me, host it yourself - its a static web app, no backend required, it basically runs on every device that supports HTML + JavaScript

- PWA app can be "installed" on your mobile phone

Use case:

You are setting up a very new computer and quickly want to transfer that one password, because password manager is not set up yet? You want to send a code snippet from your private laptop to your business laptop?

Even between three devices the process is quite easy:

• open 9.1-1-1.de on your MacBook
• paste text in the box
• take a picture of the QR code with your smarthpone - it will no connect to the MacBook - directly, peer 2 peer
• after two seconds the text is on your smartphone
• open 9.1-1-1.de on your Nobara PC
• take a picture of the QR with your smartphone again
• after two seconds its connected to the Nobara PC, your text synced

Why 9?

Of course there are alternatives, but most if not all of them are either not fully free, to bulky and bloated or relaying the data to a 3rd party server.

Github:

https://github.com/nickyreinert/9

Try Yourself:

9.1-1-1.de

Builders-welcome post with the substance up front (disclosure: I'm the maintainer). OmniRoute is a free, MIT, self-hosted AI gateway — one OpenAI-compatible endpoint over 237 providers — built around two problems: runs dying on a provider 429, and tokens bleeding on tool/log output.

One endpoint, 237 providers — 90+ of them free. You point any tool or agent at a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint (localhost:20128/v1) and it can reach 237 LLM providers without you rewriting anything. 90+ have free tiers and 11 are free forever (no card), which aggregates to ~1.6B documented free tokens/month — and that's honest, pool-deduped math (we count each shared pool once instead of inflating it; the methodology is public in the repo). There's a one-command setup-* for 13+ coding tools (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Cline, Roo, Kilo, Gemini CLI…), so switching your existing setup over takes seconds.

Fallback combos — so it never stops mid-task. A "combo" is a ladder of models the router walks automatically: your subscription first, then API keys, then cheap models, then free ones. When a provider returns a 500 or you hit a rate limit, it slides to the next target in milliseconds, mid-request, and your tool never even sees the error. There are 17 routing strategies (priority, weighted, round-robin, cost-optimized, auto/coding:fast…) plus three resilience layers — a per-provider circuit breaker, a per-key cooldown, and a per-model lockout — so one dead key can't take down a whole provider.

Fusion — an ensemble mode for the hard steps. Beyond simple routing, there's a fusion strategy that fans a single prompt out to a panel of different models in parallel and then has a judge model synthesize one best answer (mixture-of-agents, built in). It's cost-aware, so easy turns stay on one fast model and it only fuses when the step is worth it.

A 10-engine compression pipeline — the part most routers don't have. Every request flows through a transparent compression pass you can toggle/stack per combo. Instead of one trick, it stacks the best of the open-source ecosystem: RTK filters command/tool output (git diffs, test logs, builds) at 60–90%, Microsoft's LLMLingua-2 does ML semantic pruning, Caveman handles prose, session-dedup strips repeats across turns. Critically, code, URLs and JSON are preserved byte-perfect, and a default-on inflation guard throws the compressed version away and sends the original if compressing would actually grow the prompt — it never makes things worse. On tool-heavy sessions that's ~89% average input-token reduction (an 8k-token git diff becomes a few hundred). Full credit to every upstream project (RTK, Caveman, LLMLingua-2, Troglodita) is in the README.

Agent-native — the agent can drive the router itself. There's a built-in MCP server (95 tools across 30 audited scopes, over stdio / SSE / streamable-HTTP), plus A2A (v0.3, JSON-RPC 2.0) support. That means an agent can query providers, switch combos, read its own remaining quota and manage memory through the gateway — not just consume tokens through it.

It's 100% local (zero telemetry, AES-256-GCM at rest), MIT-licensed, has a prompt-injection guard on every LLM route, opt-in memory, and runs on npm, Docker, desktop or your phone via Termux.

For context on whether it's worth your time: it's grown to ~9.8K GitHub stars, 1,490+ forks and 280+ contributors in ~4.5 months, with 21,000+ automated tests and 1,830+ issues closed — so it's a battle-tested project, not a brand-new experiment.

npm install -g omniroute

GitHub: https://github.com/diegosouzapw/OmniRoute · Site: https://omniroute.online

Would value a critique of the routing/compression architecture from this crowd.

Security researchers have disclosed Bad Epoll, a critical Linux kernel vulnerability that allows a local attacker to gain root privileges.

The bug affects the kernel's epoll subsystem and highlights how subtle race-condition vulnerabilities can remain hidden for years. Interestingly, Anthropic's AI security system (Mythos) found a different bug in the same codebase but missed this one.

If you run Linux servers, desktops, Android devices, or self-hosted services, it's worth checking whether your distribution has released a patched kernel.

Read more: https://digitalescapetools.com/2026/07/bad-epoll-kernel-bug-anthropic-mythos-missed.html

Meta just open-sourced Astryx 🤯

It's the design system they've reportedly used internally for over 8 years, powering 13,000+ apps. It's released under the MIT license and includes 150+ React components, themes, templates, and a CLI.

That got me thinking:

Would you use open-source software released by Meta, or does the company behind it make you hesitant?

Does being open source make it trustworthy enough, or do you still avoid Meta projects on principle?

GitHub: https://github.com/facebook/astryx

Curious to hear what everyone thinks.

​

I won’t go on too long...

Let me introduce you to the giraffe that protects the files you send. A 100% P2P project.

I just updated the Giraffile 🦒 website to v1.0.1, adding a legal notice and a QR code (thanks to an awesome community member) that you can scan to make it even easier to use.

The file travels directly from device A to device B.

I designed the architecture so that even if someone tried to intercept the data stream, they wouldn’t find anything on servers because, technically, there are no transfer servers.

- No cloud.

- No intermediary server

- Everything lives in local memory.

- Open source

Start sharing now: https://giraffile.pages.dev/

Github: https://github.com/coffeetron832/Giraffile

You can use it via Docker / Bun installation and use from your tab:

http://localhost:4444/ (without installation it will be 404)

really easy to install and use. Has many offical-community extensions to enhance your private, local search experience.

I've just installed degoog and adding extensions, plugins, themes easily. Awesome!

Public instances

Some amazing people around the web decided to make their degoog instances available for everyone to use, and they 100% deserve a shout-out! Check out the full list here

Documentation

Full customization guide (plugins, themes, engines, transports, store, settings gate, aliases, env): documentation.

Official Repo:

https://github.com/degoog-org/degoog

AppFlowy is an open-source, self-hostable alternative to Notion available for iOS, Android, macOS, Windows, and Linux.

Supports databases, Kanban boards, calendars, linked views, and collaboration via comments and mentions, can use local AI models via Ollama or LMStudio and works 100% offline, just sync when you need it.

GitHub: https://github.com/AppFlowy-IO/AppFlowy

Every shared grocery list app my wife and I tried wanted an account before we could share one list, and most shipped with the usual analytics and ads. For a grocery list. So I built one the opposite way, where the privacy is in the architecture, not a policy page.

You make a list, share it with a link or a QR code, and the other person taps it once. From then on, whatever either of you adds or checks off shows up on the other phone within a second or two. It sorts itself into aisles as you type, and "Finish shop" clears what you bought but keeps the list for next time.

How the sharing actually works, since this sub will care:

- No account. Pairing is a random per-list key carried in the share link or QR. The only "identity" is a throwaway signing key made per session, which identifies nothing and is never saved.

- End-to-end encrypted. Every change is sealed with NaCl secretbox (via TweetNaCl) under a key derived from that per-list secret. Ciphertext is all that ever leaves your phone.

- No server of mine. The encrypted changes ride over a handful of free, public Nostr relays as ephemeral events (NIP-16, so relays pass them along and don't store them). I don't run or pay for any relay. The merge is conflict-free and happens on each device, so two phones converge with nothing authoritative in the middle.

- Local-first. The list lives on your phone and works fully offline; sync just re-converges whenever a relay is reachable.

Honest threat model: a relay can see connection timing, your IP to that relay, and that some random channel tag is active. It can't see the list, the items, who you are, or who you share with, and there's no stable identifier tying your sessions together. No analytics, no crash reporting, no telemetry anywhere in the app, so "Data Not Collected" on the store listings is literally true.

It's free and open source (MIT), so none of the above is something you have to take on faith. You can read it: https://github.com/Josh-Approved/grocery-list. There's an optional tip jar and that is the entire business model. It's one of a few utilities I build under "Josh Approved," all the same way. Why I do it: https://joshapproved.com/about

Full disclosure, I'm the developer. I'd genuinely value scrutiny of the privacy model and the sync design, and bug reports if the sharing ever hiccups.

Get it (picks your store): https://joshapproved.com/apps/grocery-list?install=1 

TL;DR: an ad-free, no-account grocery list whose shared lists sync over public Nostr relays, end-to-end encrypted, with no server of mine in the path. Open source, no tracking, no telemetry.

Let me begin with my experience with Note-Taking Apps. I have tried to increase my productivity with a lot of note-taking apps like Obsidian, Notion, Google Notes etc. But each one had its own limitations.

Obsidian - Yeah! It is preferred by many people, it has a rich plugin library, but it is not free and open source. It also requires you to sign-up with an Account. I tried Logseq as its alternative, and even though it is quite good for an open-source app is still currently in its beta stages and the overall experience is not quite polished yet.

Google Notes - It is very simple to use and it does actually work for me, but here also there are disadvantages. First is it is owned by Google. It also does not have many features like tables, math formulae etc., even though its basic syntax works for many people. But here the problem comes for Digital Privacy.

Notion - Again it is a corporate product, and I wasted more time organizing notes instead of reading them which killed my productivity.

As I was looking for more tools like these, I came through some YouTube videos in which I knew about Apple Notes like these -

[How I Organized My Entire Life Using Just Apple Notes](https://youtu.be/IMJSkU3rVNg?si=gGf192xN1zIq_LnV)

And even though I am a Windows user, I liked the simplicity of Apple Notes and especially its premium-looking User Interface. So, I started looking for its Windows-Alternatives. I found -

Joplin - FOSS, Simple UI, rich-plugin library, rich-markdown features. But the catch here was, it didn't give that premium Apple-Notes like feeling. I searched for many such apps like Trillium, QOwnNotes etc. but they did not quite match the aesthetics I was looking for.

Finally, I found this Note-Taking App - HelixNotes.

It is an AGPL3-Licensed FOSS, fast and lightweight Note-Taking app with simple and premium looking UI (which I personally prefer). Ofcourse, it does not have the famous Apple "Ecosystem" features but it can do most of the things in a simple and fluid way. Here are some features -

1. No account sign-up required.
2. All files are stored locally (no database) inside a folder you make as .md files.
3. KaTeX math and Mermaid diagrams, rendered natively, also images, documents etc.
4. Full-text search inside notes.
5. Optional AI, local with Ollama or your own key.
6. And more features that you probably wouldn't even need :)

Here are some useful features I found from the previous Note-Taking apps I used like-

1. Graph/Node view of Obsidian.
2. Backlinks and Daily Journal of Logseq.
3. with many features for customization like 29 in-built color palates (you can even create your own theme) so that you can make it match your aesthetics.

This note-taking app is for Linux, Windows, MacOS and Android. You can sync your notes across devices using your own WebDAV server (No need of OneDrive or Google Drive). You can sync manually and even automatically through settings.

Source Code - [Helix Notes](https://codeberg.org/ArkHost/HelixNotes)

Setup for Windows is only 8.24MB! Very Lightweight, but I don't know how it will perform when I start writing more and more notes in it (Hope it does not start lagging.)

Overall, it has a very similar interface, It has the same folder system of Apple Notes with simple commands, customizable shortcuts and many more. It does not have all features of Apple Notes but I feel this is the closest to experience it in Linux, Windows and Android. So if you guys are looking for a Windows Version of Apple Notes like I did, this it it! If you have tried Helix Notes, you may also check another such AGPL3-Licensed FOSS, Note-Taking app which is similar to Apple Notes-

[Tolaria](https://tolaria.md/)

Obsidian Users! You can import your Notes Vault to Helix Notes in the settings!