Show HN: Browser Extension to make a language test out of any website I was preparing to German C1 recently and my vocabulary was the bottleneck. I didn't want to read boring materials and do boring exercises. Instead I noticed that there are sites in German, which I naturally enjoy. So I just made an extension to make language tests out of them. The approach is the following: 1) Open an interesting webpage in your target language. 2) Select text. 3) The extension replaces some words with gaps. 4) Read the text, fill in the gaps. Obviously just typing random words out of the blue can be overwhelming, so there is a mode to drag&drop words from a list into the correct places. I personally see this as active reading. My brain not only consumes information, but always try to guess the word from the context. I suspect that this helps with active vocabulary (i.e. to actually use the new words in writing). In the end I passed C1 exam (obviously I did other preparations too, not only this extension). This is a beta version for now and it is 100% free: Chrome: https://ift.tt/3swC3SN Firefox: https://ift.tt/2ZMgXDh If you didn't enjoy my explanation skills, there is an example video here: https://ift.tt/2OYXUUk I would love to hear whether you find this useful and your ideas how I could improve it. I might add payed features eventually to help developing the extension further, but I don't know a good mechanism to do this. I understand that 1$ in the US is very different from 1$ in e.g. India. I want this extension to bring value to everyone independently of their location and financial state. My current plan is to have the base version (i.e. like now) always free, since this already provides majority of value. Curious to hear your thoughts. February 25, 2021 at 02:41PM
Show HN: Tape It, iOS recording app for musicians Hello HN, Over the last 15 months, two friends and I developed the music recording app we felt we wanted based on our own needs as musicians. It's called Tape It [1] and has just recently hit the Apple App Store [2]. We put a lot of effort into a good UX to help musicians really focus on playing their instrument instead of pretending to be a recording engineer. The app records in stereo on newer iPhones (although that's a premium feature; the free version only records in standard mono audio quality). I would be really grateful for advice from this community on how to best approach marketing. We had a great TechCrunch article covering our launch [3], and we posted it on various music websites. Turns out advertising on Google or Apple Search is a dark art, though. We have some good ideas for developing a good social media presence, but they will take time. Please hit us with feedback, opinions and advice that you think a young ind...
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