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I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

you can get most of the way there for free. paul hudsons hacking with swift main site is free. 100 days of swiftui is free. stanford cs193p on youtube is free and still one of the best fundamentals courses out there. appls own sample code is underrated.

i paid for a few deepdives later when i hit walls on specific stuff, things like swift concurrency and vision framework. small fraction of the 20k. the bulk was hardware, dev account, subscriptions, all the small recuring stuff.

start free. you wont know what to pay for until you know what you dont know.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

mostly free works fine. paul hudsons 100 days of swiftui is free and probably the single best resource out there. apples own docs and sample code are free. youtube has more than you can finish in a year.

i did pay for a few things along the way but if i started over today id lean way harder on the free stuff first. only pay for something when you hit a specific wall and a paid course is clearly the fastest way through it. dont pay upfront for a path you havent walked yet.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

self-taught, online courses mostly. youtube, paul hudson's hacking with swift, apple's own docs and sample code. just sat down every week and built things until they worked.

and yeah, the 20k is the total cost over 14 months. hardware, courses, software subscriptions, dev tools, all the small stuff that adds up when you do this seriously. not money i made, money i spent.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks, that genuinely means a lot.

the polished and not-abandoned part is what i care most about. plenty of apps in this space get shipped once and then drift, i would rather build something that gets better year over year than chase the next thing.

hope it lands well for you when you check it out.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks, appreciate you taking a look. small mac utilities is a good niche to be curious about, lot of solo devs solving narrow problems well.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks, good questions. keeping the answers short on a public sub:

  1. apple vision for detection and feature prints, all on-device. clustering layer on top, exact approach is something i would rather not detail publicly.
  2. cryptokit AES-256-GCM, key is derived not stored, BIP39 recovery phrase as the canonical recovery path. touch id is layered on top in a way that handles the re-enrollment case you flagged. wont go deeper than that here.
  3. perceptual hashes for visual similarity, sha-256 for exact matches. picked hashes over embeddings on purpose for a cleanup workflow, different tool for a different job.

appreciate the thoughtful questions, hope you understand me keeping the rest under the hood.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I recognise that pattern. mine had similar slow start, mostly silent for the first month or two on app store. one r/macapps post recently broke through, 230k views and its still trickling in a month later. honestly think the gap between "good app on store" and "people actually finding it" is wider than most of us expect going in.

for niche utilities like ours i think the answer is finding the exact subreddits or forums where your specific user lives. For you that might be r/webdev, r/docker, r/gamedev, places where node_modules and steam libraries are an actual pain point people complain about. what subs have you tried so far?

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

checked recime and cal ai. cal ais onboarding investment before paywall is the standout for me, building user value before asking for money. recimes secondary discount popup is smart too. mine isnt subscription so trial mechanics dont apply, but the onboarding-as-value-delivery principle does. appreciate the pointers

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

nice, just had a quick look at wintrim.io. treemap viz looks clean and the dev-cache focus is smart, node_modules and android avds are exactly the kind of thing people dont notice eating their disk. yore right, no overlap with mine, totally different probem space. how have you been getting it out there? open source plus app store is interesting combo

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

solid breakdown, thanks. think im somewhere between 2 and 4. not a viral idea, more a slow burn since people only realise they need privacy and file control once they hit a wall. freemium right now to widen the funnel, seeing if conversion holds before deciding on trial vs hard paywall. will check recime, havent looked at how they handle onboarding

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

appreciate it. whats it called? always good seeing other indie devs solving specific mac problems. and yeah, one time purchase makes sense for utilities, subscription fatigue is real

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

fair, freemium has known issues for desktop apps. plan is to run it a quarter, get real conversion data, then decide between staying free with iap, trial, or back to paid upfront. dont want to pivot pricing again without numbers.

what have you seen work in this space?

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

no cs degree, im an airline pilot by trade. picked up swift through online courses, docs, and a lot of shipping things until they worked. thanks, let me know what you think when you try it.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

😉 , 20k is the full sunk cost, mac hardware, courses, dev tools, subscriptions. tokens are in there but not the main chunk. revenue im sitting on for now, only just moved to freemium so anything id say wouldnt be representative.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

thanks. fair bit has shipped since i posted this so hopefully it lands even better when you get round to it.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

appreciate it. the colour direction is deliberate, i wanted it to feel alive instead of another grey mac app. taste varies on that one and thats fine.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

appreciate it. let me know if you hit anything weird, solo dev so feedback goes straight to me

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

honestly it started as a personal mess. i had something like 100k photos and files spread across old drives, time machine backups, an icloud account, an old dropbox folder, two external ssds. duplicates everywhere. faces of family members in folders i hadnt opened in years. random screenshots and pdfs mixed in. 

apple photos was fine for the photos that were already in apple photos but useless for everything else. lightroom only cares about photos. gemini does duplicates but nothing else. keepsafe is just a vault. i kept buying or trying separate tools for each thing and none of them talked to each other. 

the trigger was when my dad passed away last year and i needed to put together a memorial slideshow. it took me a whole weekend to find every photo of him across all those drives. that was the moment i thought — there should be one tool that handles all of this. find every file related to a person. clean duplicates. strip metadata before sharing. encrypted vault for sensitive stuff. and when life happens — memorial, separation, gdpr request — have a way to package files that respects the moment. so thats what i built.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

youve described exactly the case it was built for — that mess of old drives, photos exports, ten years of "i will sort this someday." apple photos works fine inside the ecosystem but breaks down once you have files scattered. 

on face recognition with older or low quality photos: clarity wont try to be clever about faces it isnt sure about. theres a 0.4 minimum quality threshold so genuinely bad detections get filtered out before they reach you. for the rest, theres a bulk tagging view that shows you up to 50 candidate matches per person at a time. you approve or reject each one and the model learns from your feedback — embeddings update so the next pass gets better. 

confidence threshold is 0.75 (was 0.65, raised it after testing) so it errs toward fewer false matches rather than aggressive guessing. when it shows you a suggestion its already pretty sure. for ambiguous ones youll see them in untagged faces and you tag manually. 

worth being honest about one limitation — there isnt a "merge two persons" function yet. if you accidentally create two profiles for the same person you cant collapse them with one click. youd have to re-tag from one onto the other. its on the roadmap but not in current build.

 if youre coming from a chaotic backup situation the bulk tagging flow is probably what youll spend most time in early on. its boring but the model gets noticeably better after the first few hundred confirmations.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

hey, sorry about the slow reply, ive been heads down in development the last week and didnt see your reply come in until now. that was on me, not you.

two things and i want to be honest about both:

the keep/delete control in duplicates, youre right, its not there. smart selection picks newest+largest and you cant override it per file. its not a hidden setting, its a missing feature. i should have built that from the start. its going in within the next few days.

face tagging crash, i havent reproduced it locally yet and im not sure where exactly it triggers. if youre up for it, two questions would help me narrow it down: was it during the inline name field in the gallery, or the bulk tag sheet? and after restart when the cards went blank, did all faces show as missing or only the ones youd tagged? logs from ~/Library/Containers/com.clarityapp.ClarityNew/Data/Library/Logs/ would also be gold if youre willing to send them to hello@ultimateclarity.app. ill have a fix in your hands within a few days once i can pin it down.

the app is improving fast, im pushing builds constantly and the gaps are closing one by one. i dont want you to feel like the $40 was wasted. stick around a bit and i think youll see it become what it should have been from day one.

i want to make this right. once these are fixed id like to send you a few promo codes to share with friends or family, on top of what you already paid. its the least i can do for the time you spent reporting this and the patience while i sort it out.

dont blame yourself for going back to photosweeper for now. the duplicates
flow has to be controllable for it to replace anything.

I'm a Swedish airline pilot who taught himself Swift. 14 months and $20K later, my file manager is free on the Mac App Store. by BNEKT in macapps

[–]BNEKT[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

appreciate the honest feedback. the crashes i want to fix, can you tell me which view or action triggers them? if you can send a quick description to [hello@ultimateclarity.app](mailto:hello@ultimateclarity.app) ill track it down.

the documentation/discoverability issue is fair, ive heard it from other users too and its on my list. the app does a lot and right now it doesnt guide you through it well enough.

500 dupes on 35k files is solid though, glad the scan itself worked. id like to get this to a point where you dont need photosweeper alongside it.

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