r/ProductivityApps

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Every project starts the same way - same folder structure, same starter files, same boilerplate. Prefab lets you capture all of that once and deploy it whenever you need it. It started with a focus for development, but having used it for the last couple months, I have created templates for pretty much everything.

Most alternatives are either CLI-only scaffolding tools (cookiecutter, yeoman) that require config files and terminal knowledge, or they only handle folder structures without file contents. Prefab gives you a native Mac GUI - folders, files with content, variables in names and content, and post-creation automations like git init or opening in your editor - no terminal required. Finder integration for quick creation anywhere on your Mac - just right click and pick a template.

Cost: 100% Free, Always Free

I'd love to hear what you think and what features would make this more useful for you. Always happy to chat about the development side of the project as well.

App Store
Prefab
Prefab Docs

Hi community! I’m struggling with conversion rate of my app, and I thought maybe my screenshots are not attractive enough. My app is minimalistic, and I think AI screenshots will not suit the app, so I use very simple ones. But I’m afraid that they are too conservative and old fashioned. What do yoy think? Maybe you could share some advice?

Templatify lets you automatically open GMail with your email pasted as a new Email. It also lets you

• Define placeholders/variables to reuse emails
• works with Outlook, Gmail, yahoo, Proton mail
• send emails from any website with just 1-Click

Chrome web store: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/aeaapcbilfddlkeeggbkkjmbchfaemkg

I was thinking — if an email app already has access to the emails where your Amazon orders, UPI payments, bills, subscriptions, and receipts arrive, why not use that information to help you understand your spending too?

That’s what I’m trying with OrganizeEmail.

OrganizeEmail is an Android email app that helps organize your inbox with AI — categories, summaries, unsubscribe, smarter notifications, etc.

Now I’ve added Expense Summary: it looks at relevant emails already on your device and gives you a simple view of your spending, monthly trends, and categories.

No bank account connection. No separate expense app.

Just making better use of the data that’s already sitting in your inbox.

Would you actually use something like this, or would you prefer keeping email and finances completely separate?

#Android #Email #PersonalFinance #BuildInPublic

I have a full-time job. I built this in the evenings and on weekends, after everyone else went to sleep.

Three years ago my work lived in Jira, Slack, Gmail, Notion and two different to-do apps. Every morning I opened all of them just to figure out what my day was. By the time I felt "organized", the first hour was already gone.

The to-do list was the worst part. Not because it was wrong, but because it was honest in a way I couldn't use. 40 items in a list, 6 usable hours in the day, and no idea which of them was actually going to happen. Every evening I closed the laptop with more open tasks than I started with. After a while that does something to you. You stop trusting your own plan. You start feeling behind on a day you haven't even finished yet.

I tried a lot of apps. They were all good at storing my tasks. None of them would tell me what today actually looks like.

That's the thing I wanted. Not another place to write things down. Something that looks at my calendar, looks at my tasks, and builds an honest plan for the hours I really have.

So I started building it. I thought it would take three months.

That's what Fokus is now. It pulls your tasks from the tools you already use, then schedules them into your real day around your meetings and deadlines. When something moves, and something always moves, it replans instead of leaving you with a list that quietly went out of date at 10am. You can drop a messy one-line capture in and it fills in the priority and time estimate for you, or give it a big objective and it breaks it into tasks that actually fit somewhere.

Honest heads-up: it's in public beta. It's free right now, no credit card. Desktop (Mac, Windows, Linux), web and a Chrome extension are live. iOS and Android are still coming, which I know is a dealbreaker for some of you, and that's fair.

The real reason I'm posting: it works for me. That's the only thing I know for sure. But I built it for my own broken workflow, and after three years it's genuinely hard to tell whether I solved a real problem or just mine.

So I want to ask people who aren't me: does this sound familiar? The list is full, the day is full, and the two never meet?

If you want to poke at it: https://getfokus.com

I'll be in the comments. Happy to take hard feedback, and happy to talk about the build too.

A couple weeks ago I posted LifeBurn here

The idea was simple

Instead of looking at something and seeing $200, LifeBurn shows you what that purchase actually costs in hours of your life

$200 -> 8 hours
$600 -> 24 hours
and so on ...

I honestly wasn't sure if anyone besides me would find that useful, but you guys gave me a lot to think about

So I went back and worked on it
The new update is a pretty big one

I cleaned up the whole experience, made converting a price much faster, improved the way the actual time cost is shown, polished the UI, and made the "think about it" flow feel much more useful before an impulse purchase.

The goal is still the same

I'm not trying to tell you "don't buy it."

I just want there to be one tiny moment before you spend

"Is this thing actually worth X hours of my life?"

Sometimes the answer is absolutely yes

Sometimes seeing "3 days of work" makes you put the thing back 😂

Anyway, the updated version is live on the App Store now:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lifeburn-real-cost-calculator/id6770055817

Still a solo dev building this, so I'm genuinely curious:

What's the FIRST thing you'c change after using it?

I'll probably steal the some suggestion for the next update 😉, and thank you for reading

Wanted to share an app I launched 3 weeks ago with this community, it's gaining quite a bit of attention internationally and even got an article written about completely unprompted (which was so kind and I am so grateful):

A new way to manage your screen time:

I just wanted a feature that would let me set a limit for an app, cut me off before a doomscroll, and then put the app on a sort of cooldown before I could scroll again. Because I always just scroll through my daily limits in one sitting. Would have happily paid for any of the existing screen time apps for this.

But none of them have implemented this feature even after years of requests.

So I got to work and built an app centered around the feature I wanted.

I just pushed a big update this week that introduced:

1. limit modes:
   • Easy: dismissable block screen for gentle reminders
   • Normal: journal prompt to ask for more time, with an increasing cost to deter multiple uses in a short amount of time.
   • Hard: Only 1 limit stop per day, for the most strict blocks. Longer journal prompt entry.
2. The ability to have your limits active only during specified hours and days
3. A new parent mode which locks down limits a bit more concretely for anyone trying to help someone else practice healthier phone habits!
4. Deep Focus sessions for when you need to be completely distraction free
5. 14 language translations for the app, since the international community has been so supportive!

If you are interested, I am giving away FREE LIFETIME access for the time being. Redeem in app settings, no code necessary!

I am always looking to improve the app and I have pushed 1 substantial update per week since launch, so I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you have (especially if you notice the translations are at all off please let me know in app via the bug report button)!

Hi! I’m the dev behind PostSpark, a tool for creating beautiful image and video mockups of your apps and websites.

I recently launched a new feature: Mockup Animations.

You can now select from 25+ frames & devices, add keyframes on a simple timeline, and export a polished video showcasing your product. It’s built to be a fast, easy alternative to complex motion design tools.

Try it out here: https://postspark.app/templates

I’d love to hear your feedback!

Every productivity app I tried wanted me to log tasks, set goals, get nagged with streaks. I didn't want any of that. I just wanted to know, honestly, where my hours were going.

So I built Time Tracker Minimalistic. It's stupidly simple: click the activity you want to track, and it tracks. Everything shows up as a radial clock face for the day.

Writing, Reading, Work, Rest, whatever you're doing, so you can look at one ring and immediately see the shape of your day instead of scrolling through a list.

No streaks, no guilt-tripping notifications, no gamification. Just an honest picture of your time, in a dark terminal-style UI because I like my apps to look like they're not trying too hard. Premium version shows a weekly map as well as a montly heat map.

Play Store:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.alfredoxrock.TimeTrackerMinimalistic

Would love feedback.

I’m Joe, the founder of Paper2Audio, a free text to speech reader app for listening to complex documents and books, with highly accurate narration and high-quality voices.  Our free plan allows 56 hours of audio generation per week.  Our paid version, Paper2Audio Plus, is currently on sale through August 20 at $10/month for your first 3 months or $134.40 for your first year.

A: What problem does Paper2Audio solve and what’s new with Paper2Audio since our last post?
Most text to speech tools are not good at converting dense PDFs, research papers, textbooks and webpages to audio. Paper2Audio is built to turn complex text into accurate audio.  We also handle less complicated text, like standard EPUBs or plain text.

Supported languages: Full support for English.  Beta support for Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Mandarin), French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish.  

Since my last r/iosapps post, we’ve added or improved:

• You can now publicly share your documents, including embedding the audio directly onto a webpage with an iframe snippet you can paste into WordPress, Substack, or any site that supports HTML. 
• Narration improvements: subscripts and superscripts spoken more naturally, better pronunciation for abbreviations and Roman numerals, and more accurate header removal.
• Faster processing and downloads
• Bookmarks to save your position while listening
• Background audio support so music can keep playing while you listen
• More languages (added Chinese-Mandarin, German, Hindi and Japanese in beta)
• Better page rotation detection for scanned PDFs
• Export a processed document’s transcript as a Markdown file for use with other tools (web now, apps coming soon, Plus plan only)  
• Better pronunciation and accents for our British English voices
• Playback highlighting moves more smoothly from word to word
• Free pre-generated audiobooks that don’t count toward your audio generation quota (see the posts on our blog, with more coming regularly)

B: Why is Paper2Audio better than the top alternatives?

1. Higher audio limits for our free plan (56 hours weekly audio generation) with high quality voices.

2. Hyper-focus on accuracy:  Paper2Audio avoids reading things that usually make text to speech audio annoying, like repeated page numbers, headers, citations, footnotes, and unnecessary boilerplate. We clean up and normalize tricky text first, including math, Roman numerals, symbols, units, formulas, and other things that often sound wrong when read aloud by other text to speech services.

3. Summarizes visual elements like tables, math, and code or reads it aloud:  When adding a document, you can choose how tables, math, and code are narrated. Summary" (default) gives a concise summary of the item, while "Read as is" reads the content verbatim.  Or, you can skip narration for these elements during playback entirely. 

4. Follow along with Reader View, our optimized version of the audio transcript: We reformat PDFs and other documents to fit your screen while including rich content like images and document formatting.  Use it to follow along with the audio, or to more easily read documents that are normally poorly formatted for small phone screens (like 2 column PDFs, tables and figures, etc).

   • Visual elements are included: “Tables, figures, images, and math appear inline and can be opened in a zoomable “figure view” pop-up. 
   • Single column view: Documents with multiple columns are displayed in a single column to improve readability on smaller screens.
   • Rich text formatting: We preserve the original formatting of your documents, including math, headings, lists, subscripts, and other inline styling, so you can skim, navigate and understand the document more quickly. Citations and footnotes are also included so that you know when an author is making a reference, but are only read aloud when needed to keep sentences intact.

5. Multiple playback modes for your document:  Choose to listen to your document in full, or to have us generate a long or short summary instead.  We recently improved summary length, structure, and scaling for longer documents.

 

C: Cost
Paper2Audio is available on iOS, Android and on our website. We have a generous free plan for personal use (56 hours of audio generation per week), as well as a paid Plus subscription with higher audio and file/size limits ($20/month or $192 annually).  We also offer Enterprise plan options for teams.  

Our Plus plan is currently on sale until August 20 for $10/month for your first 3 months or $134.40 for your first year.

Any feedback or questions?
If you try Paper2Audio, I’d love to hear what works well, what doesn’t, and what feature or improvement would make the biggest difference for you. We are also working on adding more narrators, so please let me know what additional voice types you’d like to hear.