I’m curious to discover more stuff that exists in the App realm, there must be some small indie apps we don’t know about everywhere
Lots.
- Spectroid: a realtime frequency analysis of sounds from microphone (Fast Fourier transform)
- The Powder Toy: a falling sand sandbox, where you can play with and mix and react various elements.
- Sketchbook: app to draw, lots of pencil styles
I’m not sure whether they fit the “indie” category, tho.
Chafa - I can turn pictures in ANSI art for my terminal
Syncthing - A godsend for me and I can’t believe how easy it is to set up and have it just work, I was almost disappointed when I was setting it up expecting issues and then the mf just works perfectly fine without issue
Tailscale - Very useful to remotely ssh to my computer(s) even from my phone
Termux - terminal on android
This one you may have heard of and it’s not exactly niche or small of but I’ll add it anyways just in case: Too Good To Go - allows you to get cheap food and save it from going to waste. I use it a lot when I can’t go to the university cafeteria and don’t feel like cooking
PianOli: A little toy piano for your kids to play without being able to swipe out and see other apps.
Flashlight: Flashlight from the Simple suite, that allows you to pulse or strobe your phone’s torch. It can even pulse SOS messages.
Moonlight: Stream your entire desktop (e.g. gaming PC) to your phone using the sunshine (previously nvidia gamestream) protocol. Works fantastic.
I got a couple of apps I’d recommend in a heartbeat.
Spectdroid is a spectrogram app. Its unreasonable how often I’m using this app. I got some mild tinnitus that comes and goes and this app allows me to find out if I got some actual weird buzzing I’m the house or if it’s just in my head.
And LocalSend is an amazing app for sending files between various devices and OSes over a local network. I no longer need to set up file shares, plug in my phone to a computer, or use cloud storage just to transfer over some files.
LocalSend is amazing. So easy to use! Impressed that google haven’t been able to make a product as simple as localsend for Android.
Knowing Google, they will probably kill it after months of neglect.
I’m not sure what you mean; Google doesn’t have anything to do with LocalSend, do they?
I honestly feel silly for not having looked up a solution like it earlier.
LocalSend
I’ve been using TrebleShot for that for a years now, but maybe I’ll try LocalSend
Spectroid is great! I use it to tune my 3d printer.
Oh, that sounds cool! What is it you tune? I imagine some coil whine from heating elements maybe?
It’s for the belt tension actually! Like a guitar tuner. It’s just one tool in the process though as it is not just the frequency of the belts that matter. Instead the frequency/resonance helps get the belts into similar tension before doing more adjustment.
Motors?
If you travel a lot, Toilet finder.
Edit: and not an app, but a website: Pairdrop - really useful for cross-platform file sharing, especially when you just need to email to colleagues something you snapped with your personal phone, but yoe have overly tight IT systems in place at work that stop you from connecting your personal phone to your email or OneDrive.
Unit converter on f-droid
ShareWaste. You can sign up that you have a compost pile or chicken to feed, etc, and people with food scraps can find places to “donate” to! I have 3 or 4 regular contributers to my compost pile!
Trail Sense, it’s all the “survival” tools in one great package. Do I use it often? No. Does it feel like unwrapping my favourite toy every time I open it? Absolutely.
I use the AR tool for sun positions every time I’m finding a tent spot or to watch a sunrise/set, and the bubble level is perfect for finding a tent spot that isn’t tilted 2 degrees towards your head so you wake up with a headache.
That is a great use of this tool that I have not thought about!
If sunrise and sunset is your thing then the website suncalc.net works great to find what places will have the best views for different times of year.
I go watch the sunset as part of my solstice and equinox adventures so finding new places with nice views is fun.
It may have to start being my thing, I moved to a place on ground floor with no sunrise or sunset view. I never thought about it when moving, so now I’ll have to supplement my sunset intake
Grainstorm
It’s a ridiculously versatile granular sampler synthesizer. Obviously not for everyone, but it’s super fun to just make weird soundscapes with. Even with just your phone mic.
Unified Remote. It’s a little janky, but it does you to turn your phone into a trackpad and/or keyboard for your phone. It works with swipe typing, and allows you to use keyboard shortcuts such as Alt+Tab or Win+Shift+Arrow.
Truly the best way I’ve found of using my PC from my couch.
(>!Working on a similar app these days, but for game controllers 👀!<)
Used for years, unfortunately it appears to be abandoned.
Yeah I wish they were still adding new features and stuff. But I haven’t found a better alternative yet, so I guess that’s what we have.
Try KDE Connect. It works over LAN, has KB+M input, media controls, file transfer, among many other things. It’s available for many platforms.
I’ve tried it. There were three issues:
- Mouse movement was pretty choppy. Not exactly a dealbreaker, but it took a little extra effort to aim at buttons.
- There wasn’t an easy way to do keyboard shortcuts. I googled the issue and people were suggesting to change the system keyboard to one that includes extra keys like Windows, Ctrl, etc. I really didn’t want to deal with that.
- The interface was pretty hard to navigate. In the absence of extra keyboard keys, I looked into creating a custom script in the app to maybe do things like Alt+tab a different way, and I never found it. Both apps said it had to be configured on the other device.
That makes me sad. It ran my TV for like a decade
Easily Converter Now. So darn handy.
Lemmy Boost
Brain Waves for binaural beats
I use YouCut to condense short porn vids into very short highlight loops
drivvo if you do your own car maintenance or want to track mileage.