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Our experiment from last Friday continues!

ICYMI: Instead of a deep dive on one particular product (our usual style), we’re recapping the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches, along with a few other things you may have missed on Product Hunt. We hope you dig it, and please share your honest feedback here!

 Big Tech 💻

Apple made its big AirPods announcement on Monday, dropping the second-generation earbuds. We covered what’s new and initial impressions here.

Spotify also had a big launch this week with its new standalone app for kids, appropriately named “Spotify Kids.” The company is starting with a beta test in Ireland before rolling the app out more widely, but the vision is to “create an entirely new generation of music listeners.”

Random Hacks ✍️

Weglot launched this week to translate your website instantly (no code required). The product has been in development for three years (it started as a Wordpress plugin and later a Shopify app) and already has 50,000 users.

If you’re writing content on the internet, Hyperlink will send you a push notification when your link gets clicked. It’s a super simple (but useful!) product created by ex-Googler Siggi Simonarson that helps small businesses learn if their posting is worth while.

Sendy just debuted on Product Hunt to...pay you for reading newsletters. How it works: you earn points for opening emails and cash out for gift cards or cryptocurrency. The product lets marketers directly reward engaged subscribers (especially as newsletters continue their resurgence).

“What is the hourly rate? LOL” - Max

Hardware 👀

DJI announced the smallest Mavic drone yet (starting at $399). It’s actually so small and light that users won’t have to register the drone with the Federal Aviation Administration. 

The Weird and Wacky 😜

Helvetica got a fresh look except it’s terrifying. GANimal launched to let you put your pets face on other animals.

Predictions 🔮

Toothbrush maker Quip launched a sleek refillable floss line. We predict it will not remind us to floss more.

Some other stuff from this week...

An article on why now is the time to be a maker in generative media. A discussion on Twitter’s move to stop political advertising. A debate on commercial flights to space. And a podcast on why work doesn’t have to be a crazy place with the CTO of Basecamp.

It’s Halloween! So of course it’s time for some culturally relevant #content. 🎃

Today we found a tool that calculates the chances of human survival against vampires. It also gives a nice overview on the concept of “vampirism.” If vampires aren’t your thing (and you happen to be a designer), try this for creating monster Sketch symbols and Figma components. Beware: the monsters are more cute than scary.

If you’re going trick-or-treating tonight, use this Halloween candy map for finding the best candy in the neighborhood (no one likes raisins on Halloween). If you’re staying in, maybe a scary movie is in order? 👻

And of course, we’ve got you covered if you still don’t know what you’re going to be for Halloween. Lapa Studios lets you print last-minute paper masks at home; you can go as an alligator, an anteater, a barn owl, or a dire wolf.

Today’s Daily Digest was crafted by Product Hunt and sponsored by our friends at monday.com. 

Over the last few months, we’ve shared how monday.com‘s ($234 million raised and valued at $1.9 billion) work management tool is uniquely designed to help teams collaborate, communicate and keep in sync. To date, 90,000 teams worldwide — including companies like Discovery Channel, Carlsberg Group, Philips, and Fiverr — use monday.com to get work done. 💯

Earlier this year, the company expanded their offering to include automations, eliminating repetitive to-dos in the process. 

How it works: monday.com’s automations allow you to put your most repetitive tasks on auto-pilot. Common use cases include notifying someone every time a task is completed, sending an email when reviewing requests, creating a calendar invite for meetings  and sending reminders to the team so deadlines aren’t missed. monday.com takes these tasks among many others off your hands, so you can be more productive on work that really needs your time and attention. 🙌

More features: monday.com also works as a central hub for your projects through its automations for third party tools. You can integrate directly with your calendar, email, and Slack, or explore more integrations with tools like Zapier and Integromat.

There is a 14-day free trial (no commitment needed), so you can see for yourself why more than 90,000 teams worldwide are using monday.com

Apple just launched their highly anticipated AirPods Pro. 👂

Here’s what’s new: The second-generation earbuds have noise-canceling features (similar to the Beats Solo Pro headphones) and a flexible in-ear design with three different sets of tips (to fit more ears). The AirPods Pro also support a “transparency mode” that lets users hear their surrounding environment.

The premium earbuds come with audio sharing, which lets users sync up to a second pair of AirPods — to listen to a song or watch a movie — by simply bringing the second set of buds close to an iPhone or iPad. There’s also a hands-free “Hey Siri” to play a song, increase the volume, make a call or get directions. 👏

Would you buy them?

A few initial impressions from the community:

“I think these look good, an upgrade from the standard model we've had for a while. Noise cancellation will be fantastic. Only disappointment (and a big one) is the battery life. Less than the non-pro version.“ - Max

“Being able to actually fit them to your ears is going to be key. Love it.” - Joshua

“Apple wants us to insert these into our heads and never remove them. The age of ‘Her’ is upon us." - Chris

The new AirPods will hit stores tomorrow for $249 (the current AirPods cost $159).

If you're not into them, you could also try the Powerbeats Pro, the Surface Earbuds or Google’s Pixel Buds.

The final season of Silicon Valley premiered last night, and in classic form, the title sequence was updated to reflect tech’s ever-shifting culture. 👀

When the series premiered in 2014, showrunners Mike Judge and Alec Berg worked with the LA-based design firm  yU+co to create the title sequence. Over the years, the 10-second clip has been updated to include the rise and fall of a Napster balloon, Facebook’s acquisition of WhatsApp and Oculus, Amazon drones delivering champagne bottles, Soylent trucks, Tesla semi-trucks, a Lyft balloon inflating and colliding with an Uber balloon, and the Facebook logo briefly turning into Cyrillic alphabet to spell out “ГДÇЭБФФЖ" (a cheeky nod to the Facebook scandal around the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election). 

Over the weekend, HBO rolled out a title sequence generator so everyone can get in on the fun. The website lets you put two words (your name, your company, whatever) into the title sequence, which then show up in big red letters where the show’s name usually is. You can then download your creation as an image or a video (see ours above).

This isn’t the first time Silicon Valley (the show) has nailed it’s content marketing. Two years ago, Jian-Yang joined Product Hunt to launch Not Hotdog, an app that can tell hotdogs from...not hotdogs. The app was based off of a subplot in the show, where the character Jian-Yang managed to get $200,000 in funding for his “Shazam for food” app called SeeFood. Last year, the show made real pizza deliveries based on a fake app called “Sliceline.” The pizza was delicious. 🍕

We’re trying something new in the newsletter today.

Instead of a deep dive on one particular product (our usual style), we’re recapping the week’s big/small/weird/creative/futuristic product launches, along with a few other things you may have missed across the Product Hunt ecosystem. We hope you dig it, but please share your honest feedback here.

 Big Tech 💻

Facebook News, a dedicated place for journalism on Facebook, just arrived. The “News Tab” is available today to certain U.S. users, and will roll out more widely in the coming months. The idea is to drive revenue back to media companies — the Facebook News homepage will by curated by journalists with “editorial independence.” Tell us what you think.

Google launched a new set of apps designed to help you balance your life with technology this week. The “Digital Wellbeing” experiments debuted in the Play Store, and include apps like “Unlock Clock” to tell you how many times you unlock your smartphone per day, “Post Box” to control when (and how often) you get notifications, “Morph” to show you different apps based on the time of day, and “WeFlip” to help you unplug during IRL time with others.

Productivity ✍️

Coda, a startup reinventing docs, just took the hood off of a refresh. The update is sleeker, simpler and faster to give makers a more efficient space to collaborate on projects. Todoist also released a big update, which includes new task views and the option to create sections for to-do lists.

“Well, this update is simply great. Love it. I used Todoist since 2010, closed 39'840 Tasks and reached a Karma of 58'480. But I have to say that this update is almost perfect.” - Daniel

Kapwing made a splash this week to introduce real-time collaboration on multimedia projects. With its new tools, creaters can edit video, animate, add music, caption images, make ads, design graphics, create memes...should we keep going? Since Kapwing came out of stealth about a year ago, it’s grown 10X (to more than 1 million users) and just raised a $11 million Series A.

Hardware 👀

Fujifilm is making interesting moves. Their new X-Pro3 digital camera is reverting, in a sense, to include more analog features. The idea is to replicate a film-like experience on a digital camera, meaning make it slower and more deliberate. When you want to review your photos during a shoot, you have to actually stop and “open” the screen.

The Weird and Wacky 😜

An unexpected pairing: an app that recommends stock investments based on your astrological sign. Will it actually help you make money? According to Maker Daniel Greenberg, the answer is yes.

“For a Leo born on August 18, 1997, Bull & Moon’s algorithm recommended 6 stocks. Over the duration of Q3 2019, the portfolio returned 7.47% versus a market baseline of 1.7% in the same quarter.” - Daniel

Predictions 🔮

The first analytics tool for TikTok influencers just launched. We think we’ll be seeing a lot more of these type of tools in the coming months. Stay tuned.

Some other stuff from this week...

An AMA about fundraising, intellectual property and mixing nostalgia with tech. A debate on paying for ad-free YouTube. Some honest feelings about AirPods. And a podcast about growing from zero to eight figures in 24 months.

Over the past two years, our Makers Festivals have encouraged makers to build, tinker, and launch products in just four weeks. It’s like a hackathon but online and open to people from all backgrounds, not just software development. From there, we’ve seen everything from walkie-talkie apps raise $400,000 to writing communities garner thousands of members after launching out of the Festival.

The literal prize at the end of each Festival is a silver kitty trophy, but the larger win is all of the amazing products that launch in such a short amount of time.

Needless to say, we love partnering with companies that share our love for building new things. That’s why we’re super excited to announce that we’re teaming up with Snapchat to bring you the biggest Makers Festival yet. 🎉

This month, we’re encouraging makers to flex their creative muscles using Snap Kit and create fun/useful/weird apps for the hundreds of millions of Snapchatters around the world.

But first, what is Snap Kit? 

Snap Kit is Snap’s collection of developer tools that help third parties build integrations with Snapchat. Makers can bring some of Snapchat’s features into their own apps, as well as integrate their apps or websites into the Snapchat experience.

More than 450 apps integrated with Snap Kit to date — here’s a few of our favorites for some #inspo (you can find the full collection of apps here).

🤳 Squad lets you screen share with friends in a video chat

🛍 Wishupon lets you create and share shopping lists

🎙 Breaker is a social podcasting app

👻 TOKO lets you make polls directly in your Snapchat Stories

👀 WYA is an events app for Snapchat

🎨 PicsArt is a social photo editor

💬 YOLO lets you receive anonymous questions from your Snapchat followers

We’re giving makers five categories to build for this time around, including:

Creative Tools

This is for the most creative use of Snapchat’s Creative Tools (Stickers, Captions, Filters, and Lenses) accessed through Creative Kit. You can check out Creative Kit for Web as an additional resource — it’s a newly released toolset for sharing webpages and web apps to Snapchat.

Bitmoji

This is for the most creative use of the Bitmoji avatar that is compliant with Bitmoji Guidelines. Special consideration will be given to apps that use Bitmoji in an innovative way beyond their use in chat and communication. This category also includes Friendmoji, stickers co-starring a users and their friends.

User Experience

This is for a seamless, excellent user experience in your Snap Kit integration.

Snap Kit Combo

This is for the best use of multiple Kits that work together to create a great product.

Anything Else

Feel free to build a product outside of these themes. Go crazy, get creative and have fun. 😻

Prizes

Each category will have a winning product, which will receive the coveted silver kitty trophy.

The most ingenious Snap Kit product will also receive two pairs of Snapchat’s new Spectacles.😎

The Snap Kit Makers Festival starts now. You can register here.

Registration closes the 31st of October at 11pm PT (spooky, right? 👻). 

We cannot wait to see what you build. 🤗

The Squarespace of social media might actually become...Squarespace. 👀

The company just announced that it’s acquired Unfold, a toolkit of templates that people can use to make beautiful (really beautiful) Instagram Stories.

Unfold was founded in 2017 by Alfonso Cobo as an app originally built for designers. It took off when Cobo partnered with Andy McCune, the person behind the Instagram account Earth (which currently has over one million followers). By 2018, the company was on track to bring in $2.6 million for the year, had 11 million users and garnered about 100,000 app downloads per day.

Some reactions from their initial PH launch:

“Well, this social media marketer will be using it ..beautiful.” - Jayne

“Would strongly suggest it to anyone looking to ‘tell a story’ on instagram, the format is all about storytelling“ - Dina

When Unfold refreshed it’s app last year, McCune wrote on Product Hunt that the app had grown to nearly 20 million users (including people like Selena Gomez and Kim Kardashian). 🤳

Now, Unfold has reportedly been used to create more than 700 million Instagram stories. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it does seem like Squarespace has been expanding its suite of products as of late. The company recently acquired an online scheduling tool and launched an email marketing product last year. It makes sense — landing page creation is becoming an increasingly competitive space, with Carrd, Wix and Webflow as viable alternatives.

Pablo Stanley believes in the idea of open design. Pablo (the maker behind Buttsss, Humaaans, Bottts and Avataaars, among others) recently launched his latest (seemingly controversial) project, Open Doodles, a collection of “open-source” illustrations that others can copy, edit, remix, share or redraw for any purpose without restriction under copyright or database law.

“I hope that this kind of resource makes it easier for designers to show the value of illustration in their mockups, or just add a bit of quirkiness to their products. Maybe this will encourage others to create their own kit and share it with the world,” Pablo wrote on Product Hunt.

It seems Figma shares his sentiment. Today, the startup is taking the hood off Figma Community, a public space where people can publish live design files.

How it works: Because Figma has a free tier and is web-based, anyone can inspect, remix and learn from the work shared. This means diving into layers panels or clicking through nested design elements to understand how a design was made. Designers can duplicate those works to their own Figma account when the licensing allows for it, and companies can create public profiles to share their teams’ designs out in the open.

“Designers are opening up. They’re welcoming non-designers into their process. They’re co-editing with teammates. They’re sharing what they do and how they do it with the community. And they’re setting a new standard for the next generation. So, today, Figma is evolving to make it even easier to open up the design process," says Figma co-founder and CEO Dylan Field. 

Out of the gate, a number of tech companies and designers are sharing their work (and how they do it) through Figma Community. 👀

Slack is publishing its UI kit to help its partners build better Slack apps. Lambda School is publishing free design learning templates for students to adapt and play with. Dropbox is sharing culture kits for design managers to use at their own companies. Zach Grosser, a designer who runs his own presentation design business and formerly led communication design at Square, is publishing a few of his most popular slide templates to generate leads. Artist and designer David Kulakevich recreated a painting in Figma a few months ago and is will open up the file in Figma Community so every can see how it was made. The Square Crypto team is even researching methods for designing Bitcoin, and is working with Figma’s new platform to explore ways to do that.

The boom in open, free illustration kits is certainly heating up. At Product Hunt, we’ve seen over a dozen collections and tools in the space launch over the last year. You can browse them all here. 👈

It’s been about a year since Apple announced new iOS tools to help iPhone users understand the time they spend on their phones. The idea was to help people manage their screen time and reduce interruptions with things like Activity Reports and App Limits. But are smartphone users actually disciplined enough to use these tools in practice? We polled the PH community.

We specifically asked folks if they use screen time limit notifications on their smartphones. The results:

• 54 percent don’t use screen time limits. 
• 32 percent do use them, but ignore them (yikes). 
• Only 14 percent of smartphone users we polled actually follow the screen time limits they use. 

“I also turned this on for Instagram and Candy Crush. When it cut me off the first time — it was so abrupt (it was like only 10 a.m.!) and I felt cheated. Now it's much much, much easier and most days I don't even get to the time limit anymore.” - Lanre

“I feel guilty for ignoring it sometimes. It somehow already became muscle memory to just ‘Ignore it for 15 minutes.’" - Kevin

“I use this for Instagram — but I pretty much always hit the time limit and ignore it” - Taylor

“I didn't know they made notifications, I just check the screen time hours each week! I'm going to start using them though” - Sarah

Do you use screen time limits? Take the poll.

If Apple’s built-in screen monitoring tools don’t work for you, here are a few alternatives to consider:

⏰ Screentime is a Chrome extension to track your time on websites

🚫 Go Fucking Work is a website blocker to help you work smarter

📱 Detoxify creates fake apps to replace addictive apps

📹 YouTube Rabbit Hole limits you from going down a YouTube rabbit hole

👀 Trackr helps you track the time you spend on certain websites

📈 Rescue Time gives you analytics on your daily online habits

⏳ Hours is a sleek and simple time tracker