Nº 01 · macos · released 2026
A searchable memory of your Mac. You describe it, Trawl finds it.
Sole builder: product, engine, brand, checkout, release
problem
I kept losing things I knew I had. I remembered what they were about, never what they were called. Spotlight finds file names, and it misses the video I half watched, the thing I copied last week and the moment someone said it on a call.
constraint
Nothing was allowed to leave the Mac. I built it alone, and it had to run well on my own 8 GB MacBook Air.
decision
- 01I kept everything on the device: Electron, with native Swift helpers that read text in images, recognise objects and sounds and turn speech into text.
- 02Search blends keywords with 384 dimensional embeddings through reciprocal rank fusion, then a small quantised ONNX model reranks the top 14.
- 03It costs $20 once, with a signed offline licence. No account, no subscription, nothing to phone home to.
result
- files searchable on the test Mac
- 4.6Mfiles searchable on the test Mac
- per query across your own files
- 2–60 msper query across your own files
- to index 11,165 photos, videos and sounds, in about 210 MB
- 11 minto index 11,165 photos, videos and sounds, in about 210 MB
- files uploaded
- 0files uploaded
Measured on a MacBook Air M3 with 8 GB on macOS 26, using the maker's own files.