Discussion

Desktop apps,reimagined by you.

lorenzoguerra: I cannot bring myself to trust unreviewed software enough to install it on my own machine with arbitrary permissions. I understand the push for AI-generated websites, because the code running in my browser's sandbox is gonna have very limited permissions to do anything evil, but desktop apps are a completely different story

thomaspaulmann: I feel you! We thought about this and all apps will have a permission model. So you can limit it to specific file disk locations, domains for network requests, and so on.

sporksmith: I thought this must be a joke at first. "Glaze" is in pretty heavy use as recent slang for "when someone excessively praises another person in a way that feels over-the-top." https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users

giraffe_lady: Maybe a quietly dissenting PM snuck it by. If so, nice.

ultropolis: It's so much worse. Your link fails to mention that the "Glaze" in question is a cough bodily fluid. Yes that one. Have I seen politicians use "glaze" recently? Yes. Gross.On the other hand it is kind of the perfect name for Yet Another AI Website Maker (YAAWM?).

peyton: Nah it’s from Dunkin Donuts [1].> First you said all you want is love and affection / Let me be your angel and I'll be your protection / … / Thought I was a donut, you tried to glaze me> I ain’t gotta tell you I had a Dunkin' Donuts fetish back in the day. I used to get a dozen donuts every day, man. So it was one of the things that was on my mind[1]: https://genius.com/1716467

jFriedensreich: Just what absolutely no one needed: another locked down and non web platform with horrific security that tries to digitally enslave people just the tiniest level above what they can accept now. I don’t see any future where raycast can survive and i would say its a good thing.

adamtaylor_13: I understand some of the skepticism towards this product, but are you saying this will somehow negatively impact Raycast (the company)? Raycast the tool is incredibly useful, so I'm surprised to see this sentiment.

jsheard: > https://creativesimiles.com/glaze-meaning-slang/Kids these days are always saying "snaoƨd" and "foʀarir"

cdrnsf: I can't imagine trusting these apps with access to my camera, file system or any other sensitive permissions.

Cthulhu_: Related, "glass" or "glassing" can also refer to stabbing someone in the face with broken glass or decimating a world in nuclear holocaust.

break_the_bank: It is interesting how so many different companies end up converging to some sort of AI coding.Raycast -> Glaze AirTable -> Lovable Competitor Retool -> Lovable CompetitorEven those early in the journey are converging towards coding.

autoexec: > Written By Lucas GrayThere is no way a human wrote that page. If Lucas Gray even exists, he should probably reconsider that last image, and his life more generally.

s__s: Can you explain how the permission model works?

Mongoose: Not to be a curmudgeon, but why are they spending time on this? As an enthusiastic Raycast user, I would prefer to see them focus on making Raycast better, not finding new ways to jump on the AI bandwagon.

femiagbabiaka: the first scenario that came to mind is that they built it for themselves and then open sourced it

lintimes: I had the same reaction. They've had Raycast releases paused for some time to focus on large feature improvements, but I wondered if it was partly for this.

foo4u: Claude Code is pretty good at Swift + Swift UI. I created and have been iterating on a menubar app for myself that I plan to share with a small team. I'd prefer to do this native than go through a 3rd party solution.I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.

dewey: I'm also just working on my first iOS Swift app (Mostly for myself, don't know yet if I'll make it public as it's just a clone of Swarm / Gowalla but based on OpenStreetMap data) and it works really well with Claude Code.I'm not using the Xcode integration and so there's still some rough parts where build errors show up in Xcode and I then have to paste them into my Terminal.When you are used to backend work...it's kinda fun to see an app come to life and run on your phone though.

mabedan: I don't understand how these type of projects are still tried and get any traction... anyone who has tried them will 100% know it won't go beyond a happy path demo. If they want to seriously use/publish the app beyond playing around, it'll require weeks of iteration via AI, which will cost you an arm and a leg in tokens.

caro_kann: I haven't used v0 or replit before, I have the same feelings as you. But I've been thinking about building macOS apps for my personal use for a long time now. Also I'm a long time Raycast user. I have a bias here, so I've joined the waitlist, I can't be sure until I try, right?

thomaspaulmann: Founder of Raycast here so obviously biased but you’ll be surprised. You get a working app one-shotted pretty much all the time. Sure if it is something more complex you might need a few more prompts. Just to give you some examples on what we’ve seen: - Our support team runs on Glaze apps to review Raycast extensions. It connects to GitHub, checks out code locally, gets realtime updates and so on. - The sound agency build a functioning synthesiser for the launch video. It works even with MIDI. - We’re about to cancel a team-wide subscription and replace it with a Glaze app.Not everything is possible yet and sure more complex things need more prompts but you’ll be surprised what Glaze is capable of already. It’s day one…

gms: Does it generate native apps, or just Electron?

vintagedave: This sounds promising. If I may take advantage of you being here, what language does it write in? Does it build genuine native apps (Cocoa, WinAPI or WinUI, etc) or Electron?The FAQ was light on technical details. But I am someone keen to read all the technical details :)

Imnimo: My metric for this kind of stuff is: Did Glaze build the Glaze app?

1propionyl: No thanks.As an interesting counter-proposal to wasting time with this... look for older less popular/downloaded/featureful apps written by people for their own education, edification and enjoyment.They may not work the way you wish they would, but you can learn a lot from them, be inspired by them, and leave feedback.That's how you actually encourage more people to get started and continue making their own tools.

Those tools build for the browser. Glaze builds for your desktop. That means your apps can access your file system, your camera, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration, and background processes. Things a web app can’t do. It’s a different category entirely.

twalichiewicz: It's certainly a nice promotional website.My first thought was, "So, Replit and ilk?", seems they expected that comparison:> How is Glaze different from Lovable, Replit, or v0?> Those tools build for the browser. Glaze builds for your desktop. That means your apps can access your file system, your camera, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration, and background processes. Things a web app can’t do. It’s a different category entirely.Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those (sans menu bar). (If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.)Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it.The quick publishing is kind of nice, but it immediately made me think it would be more interesting to have a way to quickly remix other people's creations, similar to the Figma Community tab: you can take someone else's work, break it apart to see how it works, then tweak it how you want it.

pelagicAustral: I took a few shots at building desktop apps with Tauri, Wails and Electron using Claude Code, and the results where not very good at all. In fact, they were by far the worst results I've gotten with the tool. I can easily clone one of my boilerplate repos in Rails, or Django and prompt away, and the results are consistently good, as in, functional MVP in a few hours. This was never the case for the desktop tools I mentioned.This looks like a highly specialized tool for desktop that actually works. I watch the demo and I am assuming the apps are actually made with some kind of technology a la Tauri, or Electron, thus making the apps cross-platform.I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.

thewebguyd: > I don't think we are anywhere near a tool like this for native, but that's a lost battle anyway.I hope it's not a lost battle, tbh. I was hoping with AI & Vibe Coding we'd see sort of a resurgence of native first desktop apps, but so far it's just all been a continuation of the web app & web tech hegemony.Maybe not for Windows as their native GUI story is a lost cause now, but for sure macOS and I had hopes of it leading to a renaissance of desktop linux apps in GTK instead of electron, but that (the Linux) community seems to be hostile to any AI generated code at all for now.

mcintyre1994: > If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.I think it's fair to say that's a benefit of web apps over native apps in many cases. But for the kind of business app use case they're talking about, it's also a tradeoff. I can imagine a lot of business apps where you don't want to send the data to the server of a Replit etc. and doing all the processing local is a benefit.

pelagicAustral: Well, to be fair, I do have an experience working on a Windows Forms app from scratch. App connects to a very specific scanner via customs drivers and makes use of a remote API for data tasks. The app works, it's stable, but I'm not going to lie, AI assisted coding for this particular stack does require a very large amount of nurturing, it is just not the same experience you get with web apps. Nevertheless, it did it.

rev_vehicle: I’ve had a totally different experience. I’ve coded 3 different Tauri apps and 1 Wails app with Claude Code and it was some of the easiest work I’ve done with AI assisted coding. That said, the local features that Rust is handling in the Tauri app is not anything heavy, just moving files around, some regex matching, and some SQLite stuff. All of the headache I had in these apps was the React frontends and Node issues. The Rust features all worked pretty much first try every time.

general_reveal: You mean “fork” other apps.