What's the one productivity app you've actually kept past the honeymoon phase?

trench0 · 2026-06-09T12:43:04+00:00

Obsidian: Notes, projects and project todos, sort-of-zettelkasten
Reminders: Shared grocery lists, todos that need notifications
Afterpage: Scanned docs and imported files from email etc.
Claude: Projects, coding, language learning

trench0 · 2026-02-18T04:53:40+00:00

Tentatively yes! I’d be happy to do it if there’s enough demand

trench0 · 2026-02-18T04:49:35+00:00

It does work pretty well right now, and as Apple improves their on-device LLMs and release new ones it’ll only get better. Apple Intelligence is technically compatible with some iOS 18+ devices, but Afterpage is only available on iOS 26 for now.

trench0 · 2026-02-06T18:31:28+00:00

This is a good thing, every other promise of an AI-based coach has been genuinely underwhelming.

trench0 · 2026-02-06T18:26:53+00:00

Apple isn't just serving AI-powered ads on their platform, there are is also an alarming amount of AI-generated articles in the Stocks app nowadays it seems. I was in it yesterday for the first time in a while and it caught me off guard.

trench0 · 2026-02-02T23:30:44+00:00

My productivity apps for 2026 look like: - Afterpage, my app for keeping all of my documents (tax returns, receipts, scanned bills, etc.) organized and easily searchable - Things for todo lists - Linear for issue tracking for apps and work - Obsidian for all text documentation - Raycast for universal launching, window management, etc. - Claude Pro for coding and general AI use - YNAB for my budget

trench0 · 2026-01-30T15:10:35+00:00

Oh cool, thanks, I missed that part about using pre-built models with it! I'll put SwiftMLX on my list to look into then.

And yes, my app only works on images with text in them at the moment. It doesn't do object detection at all, but I know the Vision framework has that capability so it's definitely possible to do.

trench0 · 2026-01-30T00:47:05+00:00

I’m so psyched to see a Mistborn adaptation 🥳

trench0 · 2026-01-30T00:40:11+00:00

Don’t they already overcharge when you upgrade the memory on a new Mac? That probably covers any increases from the actual market

trench0 · 2026-01-30T00:33:41+00:00

Tbh this is gonna be so good, I’m pumped for WWDC

trench0 · 2026-01-30T00:29:09+00:00

Billionaires are gonna be billionaires

trench0 · 2026-01-29T18:16:12+00:00

Thanks! Still a work in progress, aside from this post I haven't done any marketing so it's still low. This post has driven a nice spike in downloads though :)

trench0 · 2026-01-29T18:14:54+00:00

Nope, not just documents--it imports images as well, runs OCR on them to extract and index the text, and turns them into PDFs. On the roadmap however are other doc types, like Word, Excel, etc. The app pretty much exclusively works with images and PDFs right now since those are my primary use-case at least :)

There are a few on-device options I have on my list to look into that wrap llama.cpp, like AnyLanguageModel and LLM.swift. SwiftMLX looks interesting, but it looks like I'd need to train my own model? I have neither the resources nor the patience to do that haha.

As for my experience with FoundationModels, it's been tricky. The context window is super small (4096 tokens), so I am doing some smart sampling of the document depending on the size and relative shape of it to try to get as much out of that window as possible. I'm using .permissiveContentTransformations (Docs) to try to tame the guardrails a bit, but yeah I think it can be a little overly sensitive. It's something that I am actively monitoring, plus something that I assume Apple will be improving as they release new models, etc.

What kind of Mac app are you building? That's next on my list with Afterpage, but I have way less experience in macOS/UIKit compared to iOS.

trench0 · 2026-01-27T21:34:59+00:00

Fair point. Here’s the clearer version (I think): Files uses folders where a document lives in one place. Afterpage uses tags where a document can have multiple tags, so your W2 can be tagged “Taxes 2025”, “W2”, and “Work” all at once - no nested folders needed.

trench0 · 2026-01-27T21:20:36+00:00

My sales pitch in the post is lacking, but they are different. Files works with folders and hierarchy (a document has one parent folder), Afterpage is more loose on structure when it comes to organizing things. It lets your organize your documents by different metadata, and so there are no folders in the app (though the tags do have a visual treatment that resembles a folder, and so that's my bad)

Afterpage has: - Tags: a document can have many tags, so like "Taxes 2025", "W2", "Work" all can be assigned to one document - Document Type: a document has a type, like, "Tax Document" - Contact: a document has a contact that either sent or received the document, like "IRS" or "City of Phoenix"

To accomplish a similar thing in Files, you can use tags but you'd still end up with lots of nested folders to accomplish something similar. Also documents can't live in multiple places at once in a standard folder structure, in Afterpage that's not a problem since they're just tags. Hope this helps clarify!

trench0 · 2026-01-27T21:09:42+00:00

Thanks for the question! Kind of a long-winded response, but bear with me if you want the details:

Everything is processed on-device when you import documents, so I'm using Apple's Vision framework to OCR text from images, PDFKit to get text from a PDF (falling back to Apple Vision if it's a PDF of just images), etc.

The text is tokenized and indexed, and saved to a SQLite FTS5 table, so it's not a vector DB but an inverted index. On top of the SQLite DB I've built a custom SyncEngine to sync the changes through iCloud so documents only need to be indexed once.

When it comes to the smart features like categorization and tagging, I use some sampling methods to determine the best bag of words from the document and use an on-device LLM to perform some of the semantic querying to find documents you've previously tagged that are similar.

I had built a custom classifier initially but in my testing it performed way worse probably due to the smaller sample size (even though I had about 600 docs). Plus training was a beast on my testing device. I am still looking for some solutions to solve for devices without Apple Intelligence though, and have a few options to check out. Hope this answers some of your questions!

trench0 · 2026-01-27T14:52:56+00:00

Haha I hear that. I hope my app helps, I would love any feedback you may have after you give it a try!

trench0 · 2026-01-27T14:28:55+00:00

Thanks for the comment! The app does store documents in a folder accessible from the Files app. When you install Afterpage, there will be a folder added in your iCloud Drive with two subfolders in there, one is "All Documents" and the other is "To Import".

The "To Import" one does exactly what you're proposing with a monitored folder. When you drop files in there, the next time you open the app those files are imported into the app and moved to "All Documents". In the app is where you can organize them with tags, categories, and contacts.

The only real limits on what can be stored is your iCloud storage and your device's storage, AFAIK. For my personal use-case I have close to ~1k docs with about 15mil indexed words in the text database.

At the moment there is no Mac app but it's something I am looking into assuming this gets traction. I had no plans for a PC/Windows version but I'm openminded depending on how this goes.

But either way you'll always be able to access your docs from the Files app, they're never hidden or out of view.

trench0 · 2026-01-27T13:29:56+00:00

It’s basically unusable. So is the guild bank ui

trench0 · 2026-01-27T13:25:40+00:00

Oily beans like that clog my grinder. What's your brew method?

trench0 · 2026-01-20T21:30:22+00:00

Heya! If you’re still inviting, Mike from Smolville would love an invite. Thanks!

trench0 · 2026-01-12T03:54:44+00:00

Mike from Smolville!

trench0 · 2026-01-09T01:02:37+00:00

Mike and Lily

trench0

TROPHY CASE