alyssaxuu

Ha, I had the same thought. I recently watched this video which you might find interesting (mostly re: demoscene): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roBkg-iPrbw

Appreciate it! :)

I've been thinking about building a motion graphics editor for a while now, since I feel like After Effects can be pretty overkill.

My idea was to combine the simplicity of a tool like Canva or Kapwing, where you can easily search and drag and drop assets into the canvas, with more powerful features like keyframing, easing, masking, and more. I decided to make it free and open source, as I might add more to it in the future.

If you're curious I've been sharing how I built this on my newsletter, here's one of the issues I wrote a few weeks ago: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/alyssaxuu/issues/adding-imag...

I'm an avid Notion user, so I wanted to build something to help me be more productive. My first thought was to create a simple inline canvas to draw using a /draw command, to annotate my pages, only to realize that Notion does not allow you to create custom commands.

So instead I decided to do a bit of a workaround to implement custom commands into Notion (through an extension), and created a couple of them to draw and record your camera and audio. I also made a bit of a SDK to interact with Notion so anyone can create their own plugins with ease, and made the code open source.

Thank you so much! I'm trying to be more open with my process :)

Last month I created a menu bar app for Mac to solve a problem I had when traveling. I decided to write about how I came up with the idea, learnt to use Swift from zero, and how I marketed it to get thousands of dollars in sales. Hope you find it interesting!

I decided to learn Swift in a week and build an app to solve a problem I've been having for ages.

Basically what the app does is save and close all your apps in one click (or keystroke), and reopen them all later. The idea is to be able to clean up your desktop before screen sharing / making a screen recording, or just saving your workspace to switch off from work and come back another time (even by scheduling apps to open automatically some time later).

I wrote about how I developed and designed the app over here if curious: https://ckarchive.com/b/0vuwh9h4ron7

I've been trying to optimize my time lately, and I figured I could build some sort of tool to help me with it, so I decided to build Omni. It's a Chrome Extension that allows you to manage your tabs, bookmarks, browser history, perform actions, and more, using a simple interface (similar to spotlight on Mac). It also adds a few new shortcuts to Chrome (and elevates existing ones) for muting, pinning a tab, etc.

The extension is open source too so anyone can contribute new actions and features - at the moment it is integrated with products like Figma, Notion, Linear... and I plan on adding more.

Love ExtensionPay, so easy to use! I spent a while looking for ways to accept payments and most importantly handle subscriptions for Chrome Extensions, and everything felt like too much work. Super glad I came across your product, was very quick to integrate too and easy to check if a subscription is active or not. Been using it for my Carden extension, sadly no sales just yet :P

Most of my projects are fairly simple stack (either plain Javascript or with jQuery, using Firebase as a DB if necessary), but I tend to build relatively complex WebApps with it (e.g. a collaborative map editor, audio editor, motion graphics editor, animated mockup maker...).

The simplest product I've ever built in terms of code (fewest lines of code, no dependencies besides jQuery) is Omni, which is an extension that adds an omnisearch to your browser to manage tabs, bookmarks, history, perform multiple actions, add shortcuts, commands...

It's basically just an array of available actions with a simple UI to search through them and select them. I love it because it's incredibly simple to add new actions, I've also open sourced it so anyone can easily contribute: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/omni

I still don't know if it's going to do well or not, I am going to publicly launch it tomorrow, hopefully people find it useful despite its simplicity :P

I think there's people who do check out Product Hunt without posting themselves, although it's probably not a whole lot. I regularly check it out to find new products, or for general inspiration, but that said I do post in there myself.

It's worth it from experience if you manage to get in the top 5 or so, and get featured in the newsletter as well. I've personally gotten a decent amount of users and traffic by posting in there. Plus it can also help to get all sorts of opportunities, after a launch I tend to have people and companies reach out who are also in the space, or looking to partner - it's generally pretty good for networking. But it also depends on the kind of product you're launching, I've had more success with productivity tools (a task management app, screen recorder, design tool...) than with other types of products (directories, communities, niche tools...), you have to know the audience.

Definitely do agree though that it can be a bit of an echo chamber. I wish there were more platforms that were used by "lurkers" where you could post your product and reach your audience. Unfortunately many platforms discourage self-promotion, it's a shame really. I love discovering new things all the time, but it seems nowadays the only products that reach you are the popular ones, it's incredibly hard to discover niche ones. Not just for websites and apps, but it also goes for movies, books, and all sorts of other content.

Happy New Year!

For 2022 I think my goal is actually to figure out what my life goals should be, in terms of career path and also more on the personal side, I am a bit lost right now.

Work-wise, for the past 3/4 years I have been doing the same thing, building websites and extensions non-stop (I think I've made like 30 so far, although I've gotten rid of a lot of them over the years), and it's gotten a bit boring. I don't know if I should just stick to a couple of products to grow and monetize them, or maybe do something else entirely (AR/iOS/Mac apps/Game development...), but I just don't find it rewarding or exciting anymore sadly. I feel like career-wise it all went too quickly, I'm 21 and I've already worked for several startups with a lot of ownership (leading the design + product side in some of them), so I don't really have much ambition anymore, it feels like I've topped it already in a way (also in terms of salary and comp).

On the personal side, I just feel a bit lost in general. I recently moved to London, but I still don't really know where I belong. I've always thought about moving somewhere like SF, LA, or NYC, I know people in all these places and I constantly feel a lot of FOMO. It's just hard to decide where to live (especially when working fully remote and having no family ties whatsoever), hopefully I figure it out soon enough.

Whenever I launch a new product, I like to create simple product teasers to showcase their functionality. I've found that posting GIFs/videos of the product on social network and adding them on places like Product Hunt when launching helps the product get a lot more impressions and engagement.

So I built Animockup to simplify the process of creating such teasers - instead of having to use After Effects, you can just upload the video / image of the product you want to showcase, select a device or window mockup, and customize the teaser with images, text, gradient backgrounds, and preset animations. I think it's pretty simple to use and gets some nice results too, let me know what you think! :)

I've been having a hard time finding Twitter users to follow without relying on existing connections, so I decided to build a platform to make that easier. Essentially it's a directory that uses filters such as interests, location, and identity to show you users you might be interested in. On top of that I also built a Tinder-like section where you can meet users 1:1 and have all sorts of conversations.

I love horror movies (especially sci-fi horror, big fan of The Thing, Alien, Event Horizon...), but I absolutely can't stand the jumpscares. I've been having to rely on https://wheresthejump.com/ for so long - basically I would search for a movie I wanted to watch, see if it had any jumpscares, then remember the timestamps, keep track of the time, and when it got close I would simply look away and take my headphones off for a while.

I thought I could build something to simplify the process, so I scraped the data for >540 movies and created an extension that automatically skips, mutes, or shows a warning when a jumpscare is about to happen. Currently it only works on Netflix (since that's all I have), but it could be expanded to work for Amazon Prime, Hulu, etc. I've open sourced the code on GitHub so anyone can contribute or make their own version.

Super handy library. I used it for a real-time collaborative map tool [1], it's especially useful when it comes to customization, plus it has many plugins which add a lot of functionality. Leaflet Geoman [2] for instance is great for creating all sorts of geometries on the map, I've personally used it for my tool so users can designate areas and paths. So good.

[1] https://github.com/alyssaxuu/mapus

[2] https://github.com/geoman-io/leaflet-geoman

Yeah, I thought Firebase was only for mobile apps and simple projects, but a few months back I decided to give it a shot and I've been able to use it on some very complex products without a problem, I was so surprised. It just makes things so much easier honestly.

Glad you like it! :)

Last month I came across MyMaps by Google which claimed to be a tool to collaborate with others to create custom maps. I was surprised to find out this didn't mean real-time collaboration, rather asynchronous with user changes only updating when refreshing the page.

Because of this for the past weeks I've been working on a real-time collaborative map tool to make it easier to plan trips with friends. You can freedraw, make lines, areas, markers, find places and things to do nearby, observe other users, etc. Since real-time collaboration costs $$$$ I've made it open source and shared some instructions in the repo as to how to self-host it (or even commercialize it and turn it into a live product if anyone is interested, it's got an MIT license so go ahead!)

While there's a lot of flashcard apps out there, we wanted to build something new and different. We noticed that apps such as Anki didn't have a very sleek design, and they didn't feel very fun or rewarding to use. So we built Carden with design in mind and paired it with gamification using points and levels to encourage you to practice.

You can either self-host it from GitHub following the instructions there, or use the version from the Chrome Store (although in that case some of its features fall under a premium plan).

There's an issue with porting to Firefox unfortunately: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity/issues/3#issuecomment...

I have been porting the extension to Firefox, but I ran into a problem with getDisplayMedia (to record the screen). Apparently it can only be run through a user gesture (DOM event), but I have to run it from the background script in order to be persistent at all times, no matter if the popup is closed or the user closes or navigates away from certain tabs. It explains the lack of screen recorders for Firefox, the few I found have the workaround of opening a separate tab with a button to start recording, but it is extremely counter-intuitive, plus if the user closes that tab at any time, the recording would automatically stop. Here's the discussion in the repo if you'd like to share your thoughts, I could do that same workaround myself but I'm not fond of releasing an unintuitive product: https://github.com/alyssaxuu/screenity/issues/3#issuecomment...

Thank you so much, I really appreciate it!

Thank you! It took me around a month to make, it was a pretty straightforward project.

Thanks! I spent several days searching for screen recorder extensions and trying them out one by one. It was helpful to understand all the features Screenity needed, not just based on what was available in the extensions, but also from what people complained about in the reviews. On top of that I also tried some desktop screen recorders to add unique features such as push to talk or individual audio controls while recording (system/microphone) which aren't a thing in any other Chrome Extension.

Haha I turned 20 just a couple months ago :P Thanks!

I've been coding from a very young age, I started at ~7 with Visual Basic making all sorts of programs, and Action Script in Flash for creating simple games. I've just been always had a lot of ideas I wanted to execute on, so whenever I thought "I wish X existed" I just learnt how to make it myself. That's how I got into web development specifically, at high school I wanted to have a better way to organize my homework and events so I built a collaborative task manager with many features (tags, Gantt chart with tasks starting when another ended, shared tasks between other students via teams, different priority assigned to tasks, choosing to see tasks only within a specific timeframe...), all without any prior knowledge of PHP or Javascript. I just watched a lot of tutorials and read through guides and I built it in a few months.

Thanks! I might work on a Firefox version since there seems to be a lot of people interested, porting shouldn't be that hard: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/10/porting-chrome-extensions-...

Thanks, in terms of privacy if you're worried you're free to self host the tool using the code from GitHub instead of installing the extension from the Chrome Store. But it doesn't store any data whatsoever, it's all client-side.

It should be easy yeah, maybe in the future I (or someone else using the code from the repo) could port it to Firefox.

Thank you! Maybe there could be a shortcut to hide it, or the option to place it elsewhere, hm. I might think of some solution for this, although I'm not sure when I'll be able to look into it. You could modify the CSS in the content.css file in GitHub for the toolbar to be positioned elsewhere & then compress everything and throw it on chrome://extensions in developer mode if you want to have it changed right away :P

Thank you so much!