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Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker is finally here, marking the final episode of the nine-part “Skywalker saga.”

To celebrate, Morphin, a CGI studio where you star in your favorite movies and GIFs, launched “Intruder in the First Order” to let you insert yourself into the world of Star Wars.

The experience is for die-hard Star Wars fans who want to see themselves holding a lightsaber like a Jedi, piloting an X-Wing or firing a blaster gun. All you have to do is take a selfie and you’re there.

“Since we started working on this computer vision tech, we knew that someday, it would be possible to see your CGI self in a movie. And isn’t Star Wars the movie universe that got us all dreaming? Who never dreamt of using the Force?” - Morphin founder Loic Ledoux 

In honor of the final movie installment, here’s some of our favorite Star Wars-related products from over the years.

💬 Star Wars on Messenger is Star Wars-themed Facebook messenger

🙌 Star Wars Intro Creator lets you create your own Star Wars intro

💪 Lightsaber Escape lets you use your phone as a light saber

😍 BB-8 Droid by Sphero is the cutest little droid

👏 Columbia Echo Base Collection are limited-edition Star Wars jackets

🔥 Stance Socks have a Star Wars collection to keep your feet warm

🚫 Force Block blocks spoilers from the latest Star Wars movies

📱 Star Wars is the official Star Wars mobile app

“Although there are some robocall blocking solutions out there, most of them just flag suspicious calls by adding something like ‘Scam Likely’ to the caller ID, but they don't actually stop the calls from ever (annoyingly) ringing your phone. Rather than selling vaccinations, they're selling medication.“ - Pepper Maker Ethan Naluz

Pepper is the latest product attempting to solve robocalls, due to the fact that there are over five billion robocalls each in month in the U.S.. And this number is set to hit 62 billion (in total) by the end of 2019. Why? Because robocalling is a cheap and easy hustle. Every successful spam call brings in an average of $430.

So Pepper works like an email spam filter.

“Instead, of warning you that a call *might* a robocaller, Pepper blocks robocalls from ever ringing your phone in the first place, so you don’t even get call notifications unless they’re confirmed to be from a human.” - Ethan

According to Ethan, not a single robocall has gotten past Pepper’s technology. The service currently works in the U.S. with AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon, and the company says it will expand internationally if there is enough demand. Would you use this?

It’s worth highlighting a few other clever products in the space, which all of their own approach to blocking unwanted, spammy calls. Mostly notably, there’s RoboKiller, an app which has devised a smart SEO strategy to get in front of folks looking for a solution.

According to the predictive trends newsletter Glimpse, 89% of RoboKiller’s traffic comes from search, but searches for ‘RoboKiller’ only account for about .5% of traffic. Instead, RoboKiller uses landing pages for individual phone numbers (the company has created about one million of them) that people commonly search after getting a robocall. Using this approach, the company’s site visits have gone from 375,000 in May of this year to 2.5 million in October.

A few other options to block those robocallers 🚫

📞 Numverify

📞 CallHero

📞 RoboStopper

A hard truth about AirPods: they can get kind of gross.

Don’t get us wrong — the new AirPods are slick and full of noise-canceling magic, but that doesn’t prevent accumulated dust and wax residue in brand new ear buds.

Luckily, the Product Hunt community is always thinking about pressing issues like this and came up with a solution. Enter Just Away, a cleaning kit for your AirPods.

“Just Away started with a simple struggle as AirPods users: dirty, ugly ear wax and dust accumulation on the Pods and the Case. Having tried and tested multiple solutions, I have not found a solution that answers this problem properly. I realized I needed to come up with something myself.” - Just Away Maker Mehdi Izemmour (he worked on the project as a side hustle).

What you get in the kit:

• Cleaning paste
• Alcohol wipes 
• A spudger (a little tool for electronic repairs) 

All of the materials are non-toxic and eco-friendly, and if you clean your Pods/Pods Case just once a week, the kit will last you for ~ three months.

Some early reactions from AirPods owners:

“NICE! I thought about making an AirPod cleaning kit and talked myself out of it like 8 times” - Armand

“I've been using blue tack and dental pics from the dollar store for two years now. Works great. Beautiful website, though.” - Steven

“Sounds like a product I need - frequently obsessively worried about how dirty my AirPods get.” - Cheung

More quirky accessories for your tech products:

⌚️ Five.pm makes Apple Watch bands that look like scarves

🙌 Nintendo Labo are DIY creations for your Switch

😻 Product Hunt on Amazon Echo is...exactly what it sounds like

New Year’s resolution: Become as fit as Kumail Nanjiani (see above — it’s not photoshopped).

The Silicon Valley star alerted the internet yesterday that he’s extremely ripped for his upcoming role in Marvel’s “Eternals” movie. Kumail shared his thoughts about his new physique on his Instagram account, crediting his transformation to the “best trainers and nutritionists paid for by the biggest studio in the world.” 

If you’re not about to make a Marvel movie, but are inspired by Kumail, we have some 2020 inspo for you. A sampling of some of the personal trainer substitutes that launched this year: 👇

👀 Onyx is the fitness app that watches you

⌚️ Gyroscope tracks your workouts, mood and sleep on your Apple Watch

🍎 Meals App is a sleek app for healthy meal planning

💪 HeroTracker is a workout tracker for CrossFit athletes

👋 Kudos lets you text a certified personal trainer (for $3/day)

🙏 Zenia is an AI yoga teacher

👏 Body Time is an AI personal trainer

⏰ 7 Minute Workout is exactly what it sounds like

🤔 The Longevity Index teaches you how to exercise for long-lasting benefits

💸 Future is a $150/month workout app that connects you to real trainers

🤑 Squat for crypto lets you earn crypto for exercising

“Every once in a while I'd discover someone new, and I'd want to learn more about how they think. The problem was, all of the content that they've generated is scattered around the web.” — WaitWho.is Maker Faraaz Nishtar

This a problem that most people who regularly browse the internet can relate to; someone leaves a virtual impression on you, so you scour personal websites, Twitter, podcasts, Medium pages, and YouTube accounts to dig up more of their content.

With so many entrepreneur types sharing war stories and lessons learned across the web, this problem is especially rampant in startupland. So Faraaz made a (growing) directory to bring content from people like Ben Horowitz, Jessica Livingston, Stewart Butterfield, Naval Ravikant, Brianne Kimmel and many others to one centralized place. WaitWho.is is like an RSS feed for people — it includes podcasts, essays, tweets and interviews. You’ll also get notified whenever your favorite content creator/influencer/role model shares new media.

“Love the subscription feature! Also, Paul Graham's avatar is the cutest.” - Alisha

“Love this - so many gems from people whose content I thought I already knew well.” - Chao

“Besides the really really smart category design, the site is just so visually friendly and warm.“ - Edward

“This is easily going to become a first stop in so many searches. There is a lot of potential in this.” - Mark

Who else should be in this directory? Let Faraaz know (P.S. He made this as a side project). 👏

While this is a great source of inspiration from individuals who have made waves in tech, you can also use this to find new people to follow on Twitter and this to share your own profile as a Maker. 🙌

“This is basically a free car rental... at least with the current pricing.” - Chris

Lyft just announced that the company is getting into car rentals, improving upon the headache that often comes with renting a car. 🚘

How it works: You can rent a car on a whim from your main Lyft app, and the company will even provide a $20 ride credit to make sure you don’t pay extra getting to and from the car pickup point. There are no mileage limits and you don’t need to fill the car back up with gas when you’re done using it — Lyft will do that for you and only charge the local market price. Folks have to be 22 in order to rent a Lyft car, and the company doesn’t seem to be charging the “young person fee” that traditional car rental companies have historically tacked on for drivers under 25.

The idea is a transportation app to rule them all (and eliminate personal car ownership); Lyft expanded its ride options last year to include bikes, scooters and public transit routes.

The company is starting the service in San Francisco in Los Angeles, where their cars are currently available for rent for as a little as $35 per day. 👀

Beyond traditional car rental companies, Lyft rentals is competing with car rental apps like Getaround (which Uber partnered with and then un-partnered with) and Turo. It a smart move by Lyft, considering car rental companies have been losing money to the ridesharing industry to the point where they’re even investing in their own ridesharing tech.

The click-click-click noise is back. What click-click-click noise as we talking about? The one from your iPod’s click wheel, obviously.

There’s a new app called Rewound that recreates the iPod experience on your iPhone’s touchscreen. Rewound basically operates like any music player app (it’s only available in the App Store right now) and lets you sync your music from an Apple Music library. The app also lets you use downloadable skins to seem more like an iPod and it uses haptic feedback like the classic iPod.

Note: Right now, it only works with Apple Music. Sorry, Spotify users. 😭

“I had no idea how much I needed this to exist until now.” - Alexander

“I bought it to support the developer and also because I rely heavily on playlists. I love the use of haptic feedback and the app is great so far.” - Michael

The app triggered a lot of nostalgia among the Product Hunt team, and even sparked a heated debate.



Settle this for us. What’s the best Apple product ever designed? Answers go here. 👈

The fashion industry is outdated. As it stands, there’s a lack of software-based solutions to help new entrants start their own clothing lines — there’s no automated infrastructure and manufacturers don’t tend to accept new clients.

Cala launched yesterday to shake things up. The “fashion house technology” aims to help the next generations of creatives launch their own fashion brands, similar to how, in the founder’s words, an Uber experience lets anyone have a private driver. 👗

“Our target audience is anybody who wants to produce apparel products. At the small scale, we're leveling the playing field for new and emerging brands by granting access to a distributed network of manufacturers. At the large scale, we help established brands scale beyond their initial launch stages into retail and other untapped markets.” - Cala Head of Product Ryan Wood.

How it actually works: Designers (anyone) submit sketches for their imagined clothing collections and wait for manufacturers to submit a bid to make it (this matching system also resembles Uber). Once matched, the designer and manufacturer can exchange samples, manage garment supply chain, source materials, organize fulfillment and complete up to 40 other tasks related to production. Cala already has already partnered with manufacturers around the world, which have the capacity to product ~500,000 items per month.

What Cala really wants to do is identify the next Kylie Jenner(s) of the world. Jenner built Kylie Cosmetics with about six employees and ended up selling a majority stake in the company for $600 million. She had the industry connections to quickly outsource manufacturing, which is not something most people are born into.

“Since not everyone has Kylie's network, Cala was created to help, which is why I love them.“ - Adam

Using Cala, anyone with a creative vision (and a bit of merchandising savvy) can get an apparel line into production. As the internet has made trends rise and fall faster than ever before, Cala’s long-term vision is to streamline and automate the entire fashion industry with a particular focus on product. 👕

A public waitlist to use Cala opens today. Would you try this?

Over the past few months, we’ve seen a number of innovation fashion-focused products launch. These include things like on-demand tailoring, a site that lets you code your own t-shirt, a voting platform to eliminate clothing waste, a marketplace for custom sneakers and a clothing line made from unusable clothes.

We love end of the year lists (see yesterday’s newsletter). So obviously we were excited (giddy) to dig into Apple’s Top Charts of 2019, aka a series of lists on the App Store that highlight the most downloaded apps this year. 👀

Many familiar apps topped the “free” chart, including YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Messenger, Gmail, Netflix, Facebook and Google Maps, Amazon, DoorDash, WhatsApp, FaceApp, Uber, YOLO, Hulu, Venmo, Bitmoji and Google Chrome.

Among the top paid apps sat Facetune, AutoSleep Track Sleep, Touch Retouch, Procreate Pocket, Sky Guide, Scanner Pro, kirakira+, Forest, Camera+ 2, WaterMinder and Things 3, among others.

Apple also highlighted the app trend of the year, which was storytelling. These apps — things like Anchor, Wattpad, Unfold (which Squarespace recently bought), Steller, Canva and Spark Camera — inspired people record their “memories, dreams, images and voices” more than ever before. 🗣

And of course we’d be remiss if we didn’t shout out the app of the year, which one Product Hunt member described as an “instant buy.” 🙌

ICYMI: Spotify launched its annual Wrapped stats last week. 👀

Wrapped lets you relive and discover the artists, music and podcasts you’ve loved most over the past year. Since we’re approaching 2020, Spotify also included information about your listening habits from the past decade (between 2009 and 2019) in beautiful, infographic form. The product is optimized for self-reflection and humble bragging — Wrapped provides intimate, data-backed details of how we all pass the time (with music).

“Supported by email and in-app prompts, the experience is optimized for sharing, creating virality organically through social sharing and augmented by ad money and sponsored hashtags,” writes Sarah McBride, Maker of AI t-shirts and Partner at Shrug Capital. 

In this article, Sarah breaks down the organic marketing lessons we learn from Spotify Wrapped. Here’s what you’ll learn from the piece:

• Why giving users tools to express their identity works 
• How to make the sharing experience as frictionless as possible 
• How to harness organic distribution channels 
• Why an experience “people can’t resist sharing” works best 

Plus, here are a few actionable steps to help you build your own organic marketing engine. 🚀

For the data nerds who want more of this, you can dive even deeper into your music listening metrics with this.