r/software

I’m a student who’s creating an internet horror series, and I was mainly depending on the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro subscription provided by my school to make my content. They decided to stop providing it and I’m kind of stuck on what software I should use now. I’m open to any suggestions, preferably low cost but I also wanted to hear what other softwares would be equal in quality to Adobe’s.

Hey everyone,

I've been wanting to learn Rust for a while, and I finally decided to dive in by building a practical project: Glance, a fast, lightweight, and native PDF viewer designed for Windows 11. It's completely open-source (MIT license).

Instead of using a resource-heavy framework like Electron or going pure C#, I went with a hybrid architecture to combine the modern Fluent UI capabilities of .NET with the systems-level speed and safety of Rust.

The Stack & Architecture:

• Frontend: WinUI 3 (.NET 10) leveraging native Mica backdrops, dynamic light/dark theme support, and virtualized scroll grids.
• Backend (Rust): Google's PDFium library accessed through a raw Rust wrapper (pdfium-render). Rust handles the heavy lifting: document loading, page rendering to bitmaps, and annotation processing.
• Bridge (FFI): A custom P/Invoke layer. All unmanaged FFI calls are offloaded to background threads using a custom asynchronous task bridge to keep the WinUI main thread buttery smooth (60fps scrolling).
• Self-Contained MSIX: The installer bundles both the .NET Runtime and Windows App SDK binaries internally, making the app zero-dependency for end-users (no extra runtime prompts).

Key Features Implemented:

• Side-by-side Split View: Compare two PDFs simultaneously with synchronized scrolling.
• Visual Welcome Screen: An Evince-style welcome grid showing cover-page thumbnails rendered on the fly.
• Anotations & Ink: Digital ink drawing for signatures (using a rounded pen pointer), text highlights, and floating sticky notes.
• Local Persistence: Annotations automatically serialize to a local JSON cache on pointer release with a fully-functional Ctrl + Z undo stack.

Lessons Learned (C# ↔ Rust FFI):

Writing FFI code between a garbage-collected runtime like .NET and a memory-safe language like Rust was the most challenging and rewarding part of this project. I had to learn how to:

1. Safely marshal complex structures and UTF-8 string pointers across the boundary.
2. Implement a DllImportResolver to locate and load native binaries dynamically.
3. Manage memory lifetimes carefully—specifically ensuring native Rust allocations (like page and document pointers) are freed correctly on the Rust side (memory_free) rather than letting the .NET GC touch them.

The code is fully open-source and I would love any feedback on the FFI structure or code design:

https://github.com/jonas1ara/Glance

Hello,

I have made something that has saved my large company 7 figures. I want to sell this to other companies. How does one go about this ?
Also how does one get bought out by a big corp for their software.

Thank you lol

Hello, im searching for a pdf editor that i can open a pdf file and "click" a image and delete to substitute for another.

Anyone have a "pay once" option? I was thinking about foxit pdf but it only have "yearly" subscription, also is pretty expensive

Suggestions?

I’ve been wanting to use a macro to make grind on games easier but I don’t know if they are safe. I heard that it was a virus but I see too many people using it for it to be a virus. Can someone confidently tell me that tiny task isn’t a virus and won’t hack my computer.

Which one will be best budget software? i upscale movies to 8k and now want to enhance sound as well.

I would like to create a software that can predict an online slot with the prng generator (Pseudo-Random Number Generator)

>

I spent the last 20 months over caffeinating and vibe coding to prove the humble sticky note is the perfect mental Legos....

Think of TaskLoco as Legoland for your mind 🧠

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Amazing 👏 premium plans for those few who need more, more, more

Normal file search windows/mac built-in tools always start breaking down for me once the actual detail is buried inside the document instead of in the file name. My usual mess is old project folders packed with PDFs, markdown notes, specs, and random text files. I'll remember that a specific decision or API detail exists, but opening ten different files manually just to find one paragraph is a massive time sink.

i ended up setting up Linkly AI over MCP to run as an indexer layer over my directories.

instead of forcing a full cloud migration or messing with my existing folder structure, it lets my assistant search the whole mess locally. the model can scan the matched snippets, pull document outlines when a result looks promising, and read the exact section needed on the fly. everything stays inspectable and you actually see the precise source trail of where the answer came from.

it's been running flawlessly and completely fixed my content search blind spots. since it's the weekend, i'm going to dump the rest of my unorganized project archives from the last few months into the index layer, let it parse, and finally go enjoy my Saturday.

I think we have all struggled with organising files and getting rid of unnecessary junk in our storage. What features do you think would be helpful in everyday use?

Hi, I would like to ask if there's some program (Windows) that shows me just how my space in my drive is used. The point of asking here is that I would love to install some program that just doesn't have the chance to delete my files by itself after indexing them, even if it's two manual clicks away. I would also like if the program can export the results so I can compare them over time.

The deleting issue is the reason why I didn't install any "show how my space is used" programs, even when I really wanted to few times. I like to just delete things manually if I need to.

Thanks for answers.

Just need a way of storing information that can have each piece clearly separate but connected to each other. Would like to use it to keep track of references/sources/links — a lot of which will be multiple pieces of media going to the same source — if that helps give an idea of what I’m after.

Hello. I'm a new user. I'm having an issue and hopefully you can give me some advice on what I'm doing wrong.

When I trim a video and export it to my desktop everything works fine. If I decide to trim the same to make some changes or even try to trim some sections off the video that I had just previously exported, my changes aren't made even after I export the newly trimmed video. No matter how many times I try to trim the video after the initial export, the following exports always revert back to the initial trimming edits I made.

I shut down the program, and I've deleted the areas I've trimmed, but I can never retrim the same video and get a different result other than the first trim and export I performed. I hope that makes sense. What am I doing wrong or missing?

The day I have been avoiding for years have come. I've decided to try to get all my photos organized. I am a hobby photographer and have hundreds of thousands of photos on different drives. Some are from Google Photos, that I've downloaded, some are from iCloud, some are from 20+ years ago taken with different cheap cameras.

I'm looking for a program that can handle these amounts of files without crashing. I've tried a few free ones, but they all crash before I can even import a couple of % of my photos.

Some photos aren't very important, but some are very important, like photos of my kids when they were young, and also of my parents and stuff like that. Yes I know, I'm a data horder. Just not a very organized one. But that's gotta change. If I'm looking for a particular photo, there's no way I can browse through them all.

So PLEASE, does anyone know of a good software (NOT!!! ADOBE!!) that I can use to organize my photos preferably on an external drive or NAS? I'd prefer a free software if possible, but I'd gladly pay for one that works. (NOOOT ADOBE!!!)

I got selected for the Ninja role, but I don't know when I will receive my joining letter. Can I upgrade my role to a higher profile, like Digital or Prime? If yes, how is it possible, and what can I do to prepare for it in the meantime?