Design Philosophy Create apps that feel premium, polished, and worthy of being featured on Dribbble's most popular shots. Every pixel matters. White space is your friend. Less is more, but what remains must be perfect.
Visual Design Principles
Color & Theming
• Use sophisticated, limited color palettes (2-3 primary colors maximum) ...even better if the apps are not electron bloated and mac-native.
Even though they portray some of the benefits of this app as unique to desktop apps, they're not (e.g. storing data on device, offline mode etc.).
Am not a hater. Love Raycast. Saw the post and opened the link intrigued what they came up with and was somewhat disappointed tbh. Good luck to them anyway!
A better replacement to iStat Menus.
A local-only voice to text whisper.cpp transcriber I can globally use while holding ctrl-semicolon.
A menubar app that manages blocky and can easily turn it off or change dns.
A tool like hammerspoon but I configure it via nix-darwin and it has no cruft.
All of these are apps that use 30MB memory and are better than the apps they replace, and I can make changes any time I want. That's far better than using someone else's software and giving it privileged access to my machine.
Also, perhaps the best point is that so much software is junk that is obsoleted by someone with better UX intuitions even if they are vibe-coding it. Being written by hand by an engineer means basically nothing when it comes to "is this a good app?" Which is why product-minded people are the biggest winners in the new AI era.
Vibe apps are different. They do exactly what you want, exactly the way you want it done. No more downloading an app that is mysteriously 180MB and requires watching a youtube video to learn how to make it change your background every 5 minutes to different dog pictures.
Desktop software is nowhere near good enough to consider random usecases "already done". Not that glaze looks particularly special, but there's so many improvements the desktop experience begs for.
An easy to use cross-platform GUI builder for one. Even something as basic as a calendar app doesn't have a clear obvious winner today.
In the DOS days, I would have whipped them up in BASIC. This was standard practice for PC users who were not "software engineers" by trade.
The complication of PCs over the past 30+ years have robbed regular users of this ability.
Tools like this close the gap, and that's awesome.
1. macOS and Windows require installation of Xcode and Visual Studio respectively, and if in Apple's case you kinda can install these tools headlessly and choose to install only the "build tools" package, Microsoft's creature is gonna daze and confuse you with a crap-ton of checkboxes and no easy "just install whatever is minimally needed to compile my code" button, and I don't recall if there is way to install build tools on Windows through terminal.
2. what is going to be distributed? source code itself or actual binaries? and what will the security model of Glaze store be? same as extensions, "everything is open-source and undergoes Raycast's and community review"?
3. Glaze is going to come to Windows and Linux, if we trust the Q&A section at the end. what will Glaze build upon? separate frameworks and languages for each platform or something multi-platform [1] like Tauri or Kotlin Multiplatform? or are you going to copy the Raycast extension model - just run Node, expose some platform integration, and parse React render trees through "Glaze Runtime"? I've been working on a bug in Vicinae [2][3], and I've seen this model in action. it's very hard to make it perform well, but all it takes to achieve native look and feel is to just map React render trees to whatever system component OS offers. (in Vicinae's case, it's Qt. bet that it's done with SwiftUI on macOS and WinUI 3 on Windows.)
[1]: there is a difference between "cross-platform" and "multi-platform". "cross-platform" means "I behave equally across platforms and have no awareness of native look and feel" (e.g. Electron, Unity, Flutter), while "multi-platform" means "I can adapt across platforms to the degree you need" (e.g. C/C++, Rust, KMP)
In many ways that's the same as Chrome apps, they have no code, they're just the Chrome binary, so there aren't any code signing issues.
that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat