5 comments

  • Dramatize 1 hour ago
    One app that's using this technique (not exactly sure if it's the same) is Littlebird: https://littlebird.ai/

    I also saw that HeyClicky started doing something similar but end up removing from the product.

  • zahlman 1 hour ago
    > reads the text of your focused window every few seconds through the Accessibility API

    > It writes plain markdown

    Where are the formatting decisions coming from?

    • Dramatize 56 minutes ago
      So the markdown is scaffolding the app generates deterministically.

      The ## heading is built from the block's timestamps, the app name and the window title. The frontmatter is per-day boilerplate. The file:/url: line is the window's backing document where the app exposes one. The captured text underneath is written exactly as the tree handed it over: plain lines, no reconstruction.

      That lossiness is also why the file/URL references exist. Trying to rebuild a document's formatting from its accessibility tree is a losing game, so instead each block records where the real document lives, and the LLM reading the file can open the original if the fragments aren't enough. "Plain markdown" was meant as "a markdown file you can open anywhere", not "faithful markdown conversion of what you saw"

  • purplecats 3 hours ago
    neat. why not screenshot and tesseract (videos/images/viewport/etc)
    • Dramatize 2 hours ago
      Because you then have the macOS orange screen sharing warning/icon. I don't really want to record my screen, just the text is enough.
  • etchalon 2 hours ago
    I experimented with this exact same approach earlier this year.

    It's barely sufficient, because, bluntly, most apps just aren't wired up right.

    So you end up having to hand code a lot of specific profiles for specific apps to make this work well, and even then, you don't quite get the right level of detail to make it work out.

    Will try this app, to see if it improved on my own approach, but man, the hope levels are low.

    • albert_e 57 minutes ago
      I hope in near future _that_ layer of abstraction -- looking at a fairly standard application window with minor UI variations and reasoning about what area / labels within the UI mean what (possibly paired with app documentation) -- could probably become a light-weight fine-tuned vision model it itself that can run fully locally.
    • hetsaraiya 1 hour ago
      I haven't read about how the Codex Appshots work yet, but this can be used to extract text properly. I guess. How does this idea look to you?
      • Dramatize 54 minutes ago
        Appshots is fine for what it is, but not great for building ambient context about your daily usage/work.
        • hetsaraiya 27 minutes ago
          But we can clean that extracted text from Appshots.

          UPDATE: As i just checked it is also using Accessibility API. So i guess we will have access to the same set to data.

    • Dramatize 2 hours ago
      Yeah don't get your hope up too much. I need to push through more cleaning up of what's captured. Let me know how it goes, keen for some feedback
    • zahlman 1 hour ago
      One of the reasons people like TUIs is because the text is always just right there.
      • ShinyLeftPad 1 hour ago
        Not if it's rendered on GPU, I guess?
  • alec_builds 1 minute ago
    [dead]