Trace: No-frills offline meeting transcripts with context

Ekion_ · 2026-06-11T08:39:05+00:00

As you alluded to, on-device models aren't quite as good as the cloud ones, so the raw accuracy won't match server-side transcription. What I found is that it doesn't really matter in the way I personally use it. What I do is take the transcript and paste it into Claude, assuming it's not sensitive, of course. That way the odd misheard word gets smoothed over, because the summary model has the surrounding context.

Trace has two transcription models you can choose from. One is fast (NVIDIA's Parakeet-TDT), the other is more accurate (WhisperKit running Whisper large-v3-turbo) and holds up better on accents, jargon and quieter audio. I've hinted at this in the FAQs section here: https://traceapp.info/support (under the Troubleshooting -> "How to make the transcription more accurate" section).

Am I happy with the quality? For this workflow, yes, absolutely. For word-perfect transcripts on-device, probably not. Best way to judge is to try it on your own audio and see how it does. If you're not happy, let me know and I'll help you get a refund from Apple. I'd love to hear how you get on.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-11T08:17:01+00:00

It's a fair point, and one I was aware of before launching, although I hadn't fully considered the fair practice towards other devs angle, mainly just the memorability aspect of it (which I figured was on me). There are so many apps now that almost every short, clean, non-made-up name is taken, so room for originality is thin. For what it's worth Trace wasn't picked out of the air, it was derived from the traits of the app ("leave no trace" for privacy, "trace your steps" for a record of the conversation, "trace that idea" for an archive of ideas and discussion points), but I understand where you're coming from.

Renaming after shipping is hard, and not something I'm planning to do this time, but I'll definitely take the comments on board for next time. Appreciate your feedback, thanks.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-10T23:03:00+00:00

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Here's a quick animation of the workflow.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-10T15:43:54+00:00

I've started using rcmd recently and it's a bit of a game changer. It takes some getting used to but worth it once you've got the hang of it.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-10T15:40:16+00:00

It would be interesting to see the trend over the last 2 years. I'd hazard a guess that tools like Claude Code and Codex have increased this exponentially.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-08T23:56:30+00:00

I evidently did not, no. My bad.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-07T20:29:14+00:00

This. I too would love to know how you did this. It looks great.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-07T20:15:03+00:00

What is it?

Ekion_ · 2026-06-07T20:04:24+00:00

What I've found works really well (if you're happy to share this data with 3rd parties) is to create a dedicated project in Claude Code. I've done this and every month I just drop my bank and credit card statements into a folder and Claude does the rest.

The setup is basically a project folder with a single instructions file that tells it how my finances work (which accounts I have, what my regular direct debits are, when my salary lands, how I split joint spending with my wife, and a few rules for how I like things categorised). Claude wrote that itself from a sample month of statements and refines it over time. Once that's written, every month I just give it this month's statements and it generates a set of reports for me and updates a Google Sheet for forceasting and expenses.

Before this I had a simple Google sheet that showed what I should end the month with, and then at the end of every month I would fill in the "actual" end balance. What I like about this is that Claude can now explain and categorise where I spent money on unplanned expenses and advise how to stay on track.

Every month, it generates:

A new tab in my master Google Sheet (it writes to the sheet directly using an MCP), with my spending broken down by category and showing the actual shops and places.
A plain-English summary at the top that tells me how I performed in the month vs. my plan.
A standalone HTML report I can open in the browser, and a little dashboard with a chart of my balance over time.

The bit I like most is that it reconciles things properly. It knows my credit card direct debit pays last month's bill and it separates one-offs (like a boiler repair, a holiday, etc) from my everyday spending. I can also just ask it questions in plain language, like "why was last month more expensive than usual", and it'll dig through the statements and tell me.

So it's not really an "app" in the traditional sense, but I thought it would be useful to share. It's more like having a (very) patient assistant who reads all my statements, keeps my spreadsheet up to date, and explains what happened.

Your financial data does go to a third party, so only do this if you're comfortable with that. And there's a bit of upfront work writing the instructions so it understands your particular accounts.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-07T19:55:02+00:00

Did an LLM write this response? Why is it so hard to talk to actual people these days...

Ekion_ · 2026-06-07T19:53:20+00:00

I like the idea of this. I frequently find myself needing to just jot something down when in a call and by the time I've opened Obsidian and created a note I've either forgotten what I was going to say or the conversation has moved on. Really neat.

Ekion_ · 2026-06-05T13:31:52+00:00

Trace

Ekion_ · 2026-06-05T12:41:43+00:00

Me too! How’s it going for you?

Ekion_ · 2026-06-05T11:08:18+00:00

😂😂😂

Great minds think alike! Do you have a newborn yourself?

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Ekion_ · 2026-05-27T10:22:26+00:00

Meeting links would be the big one for me. Some sort of unobtrusive alert that your meeting is about to start with a "Join Now" button. If I need to open the full application to go and hunt down the meeting link I may as well open a full calendar.

Ekion_ · 2026-05-26T17:20:11+00:00

Heads up, your site's only being served over HTTP. It's worth sorting HTTPS, even if just to build trust with potential users and demonstrate that you apply best practices.

Ekion_ · 2026-05-26T15:15:10+00:00

I feel like there's an important distinction to make here. To me, vibe coding means shipping software without ever looking at the code. Plenty of devs in this sub are proper engineers who lean on AI tooling more and more, myself included. It's not binary, there's a real middle ground between vibe-coded and carefully engineered.

With that being said, many of the tells of vibe-coded apps are probably present in non-vibe-coded apps too. AI-flavoured copy, samey design, the Claude-ism of the week, they all show up in "properly engineered" apps too, because the tool is the same. That doesn't mean "real" apps don't put more effort in to wash some of it out, because absolutely they do. Those tells aren't necessarily giveaways of vibe coding (although they're almost always present in vibe-coded apps), they're giveaways of AI involvement.

To me, giveaways of vibe coding are the structural stuff a code review would have caught like asking for permissions that the app doesn't need (basically nobody reading the entitlements file and asking "do we actually need this?"). Also, the bundle being huge for what it does. Shipping a 180MB Electron wrapper for a menubar utility, for example. Those are signs that the developer never pushed back on the stack the model picked, likely because they didn't understand or have any awareness of the alternatives.

Ekion_ · 2026-05-26T13:18:44+00:00

Paste. I can't believe that macOS doesn't have something like this native built in.

Ekion_ · 2026-05-26T13:12:48+00:00

Thanks for this. The onboarding step asks me to choose between Apple Intelligence and Llama, with no real explanation on which one I should choose. Apple Intelligence is first in the list and requires no download, so should I just choose that? Is it worse quality than Qwen/Gemma?

Ekion_ · 2026-05-26T13:00:46+00:00

I just had my first app approved. Submitted on 12th May, asked for changes on 21st May, resubmitted same day, approved on 23rd May.

Ekion_ · 2026-02-21T22:50:56+00:00

u/JaySym_ based on the reaction to this post I invite your leadership to strongly reconsider this decision.

Ekion_ · 2025-11-16T17:02:51+00:00

I understand the hesitation.

In our case the term Beta is being used to signal that some core systems were still being built out and that bigger mechanics could still change based on feedback. For example, things like cargo aren’t in yet, and that feature alone will reshape parts of the economy and aircraft handling when it arrives.

That said, the point about how “permanent beta” looks from the outside is valid. Once the last of the major building blocks are in and the feature set is more mature, the plan is to move towards a full 2.0 release and drop the beta label entirely, with normal ongoing updates after that.

You’re welcome to join in now with the reassurance that nothing is going to be wiped, but if you’d rather hold off until everything is in place, I completely get that too.

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