This is great – I built almost the same thing. It's eerie how similar it made that footer on the public websites! Your app definitely looks a bit nicer than mine though! https://belfry.robgough.net
I actually started with a Mac app primarily, as I wanted to have an easier way to switch sessions with the mouse and see Claude Code's status at a glance (I had herdr envy, but wanted to keep tmux). I then figured why not do the iOS/iPad version while I was at it.
Highly encourage you to build out a Desktop version, I'm now using mine as my only terminal and wouldn't go back. Working across machines feels seamless.
I built my own because I was frustrated with a lot of the free options. Largely because a lot of them had an upsell to be able to do the secondary post-processing step with an LLM. And it wouldn't pick up things like emojis properly or say numbers. Because of that, I left quite a lot of options in there for customising and adding additional steps, etc. Feel free to take a look: dictator.robgough.net
My initial Mac version actually had three additional steps that you could toggle, obviously at the cost of some speed. That is what the website talks about, although nowadays for my own use I've reduced that to just one step and found that it's pretty great. I've got a new version in test to tidy that up, but still lets you define as many steps as you want.
I think that's parakeet doing its job there. That is a closer reflection of what you've actually said. The trick is then throwing that output through some additional deterministic and non-deterministic steps to tidy it up however you prefer. It's exactly what I do with my free and open source dictation app (dictator.robgough.net) for Mac+iOS. And of course, everything stays entirely on-device. Gemma E4B is really wonderful for that second step, it's great at language – but takes up 6-7GB RAM.
Site could identify our device and send iOS visitors to the iOS page (or maybe that’s against the vibe and we should tap it ourselves).
App might be able to launch the keyboard settings directly but I suppose Apple doesn’t like devs using those undocumented URIs (uhg but maybe can understand part of it).
Keyboard, given manual app switchbacking + manual pasting, is less convenient for some of my use cases compared to an action button shortcut. (Reference Spokenly w/Local-Only Mode.)
Separating dictation and the history, and having a syncable scratch pad, are some welcome innovations!
>Gemma E4B … takes up 6-7GB RAM.
Google has a spyware-adjacent dictation app (maybe not really, but they demand to connect to servers after you enable their offline toggle). Just like yours, they thought of a cute name too (Google AI Edge Eloquent). Do you know what language model they install on the iPhone? Not a very good one but I’m sure over the next year or two…
I really wanted to have background audio and make it so the keyboard would directly record audio etc, but my first pass didn't make it through app review (and that was just keeping background audio listening AFTER you'd already started a recording). I could maybe have fought it, but figured if I was already butting up against app review there was little point as they'd likely reject in a future release anyway.
Re: analytics, It is quite weird having no idea how many people are using the app. It does leave you a little blind, but I figure people will get in touch if they have big enough problems with it.
For the Google app, I believe Gemma E2B and E4B both have audio input, so I suspect they're using one of those.
Analytics: if you generate them on my device, and bury an option to manually send them to you when I have a bug--or...
you instead bury an opt-in to automatic telemetry, and let us CC ourselves each ~month when the analytics get sent in to you (so we can verify it's all boring data)...
It's hard for me not to opt in to stuff like that, at least periodically. If I'm opted-in by default? Ehhhhh.... I totally get it, weird "flying blind" (quoting a different dev w/similar philosophy), but I guess I'm still weird myself and hence looking for that autonomy or something? Oh and if somebody makes something opt in, and then certainly if they furthermore stick the option somewhere slightly off the beaten path, that seems pretty darn trustworthy.
(I wonder if we'd have enough public data for a decent statistician to calculate a likely number range of how many users you have by extrapolating from the 1% to 10% or 20% of users who'd chose to opt in...)
PS: "bury" concept likely not actually important :)
It pairs quite nicely with agentic development as it has a history of plenty of open-source projects published on GitHub, which means they have learned to work with Rails et al. rather well.
It also helps to have a "boring" framework with strong opinions and strong community standards etc.
I wouldn't claim it to be the best as I'm not sure how you'd measure that, but I can say that in my experience it is letting me build things to a decent standard really rather quickly.
If you're building something new today, I'd generally recommend starting with a framework that you already know. But for those of us who already know Rails, it continues to be a wonderful choice. I'm playing with Phoenix LiveView for some projects, which is letting me build real-time UI's really easily – but they have some real-time requirements which Rails can do but is not it's strength. For anything a little more CRUD, it's a no-brainer.
What makes you think your usage is getting cut by 50% post July 13th? It's just that you can use up to 50% of your usage on Fable right now, and that is what is going away.
I'm going to miss Fable too, I found it surprisingly tough going back to Opus when we lost Fable first time round, but paying API costs is simply out of the question for me right now.
I'm a big tmux fan, but admittedly I've found myself switching between a lot of sessions recently and wishing it was a little bit more mouse friendly.
If you're a Mac user, and can forgive the shameless plug, you might find belfry.robgough.net useful. Connects to local and remote machines entirely through tmux, ssh and libghostty - populating the sidebar from tmux session info, and optionally adds a little Claude visibility in there for good measure.
There's even an iOS/iPadOS version – though for the moment you'll need to build that yourself. Source is all on Github.
Can you explain what you struggle to do in tmux with the mouse? I'm using it as we speak and everything is clickable, panes are resizable, right clicking a windows give you a context menu... Not sure what else is missing?
Quickly switching between multiple sessions, and seeing which sessions are waiting for input.
I generally run a session per project. Then within each session, a window for Claude, a window for running whatever dev server/logs, a window for neovim, and finally a plain terminal window for things like kicking off deploys etc.
C-b + s or C-b + w for switching sessions is most convenient for me, but if I am running multiple sessions I would usually just open a new tab in my emulator (iTerm2) which can be clicked or hotkeyed between.
Anyway, I think multi-session management is a reasonable thing that this thing might improve over tmux, so fair enough.
I've been surprised by how far my motivation has taken me. I have multiple projects now that are so much further ahead than I have ever managed before. I would get stuck on some small issue or key-decision and then would struggle to move past it.
Certainly, I still have those tendencies, but it's easier than ever to push through and build a throwaway version with code that might not be what I end up shipping, but is enough to help me understand the final shape of the solution. Once that happens, I'm unblocked and away I go again.
The mental cost of building throwaway code has essentially dropped to zero for me. Of course, I keep working now until light mode comes on automatically on my Mac, but that's a whole other problem.
To be clear these projects made it way further than they could have without AI. But any blocker that takes me out of the flow can easily become the thing that ends it. Not even necessarily because it’s a difficult problem, but just because I’m no longer getting that AI high.
did miss it until now, cool to see it on device and first party. as soon as it lands I will see the impact on apfel.
but i definitely feel flattered, either my little project inspired them or that I reached the same conclusion at a similar time as a team at apple that "hey, this is totally missing"
but only when it is actually available we will see if it's a clean drop-in vs. just "chat-completions-ish".
one of my learnings from apfel is that is is very easy to get a kinda openAI api compatible server, and a lot of work to get it really totally compatible. sometimes i wonder if even the openai implementation of openai's api is openai api compatible to the core....
> sometimes i wonder if even the openai implementation of openai's api is openai api compatible to the core….
It's a similar situation with "Arca-Swiss compatible" tripod plates in photography. There is really no such thing — Arca-Swiss didn't make a standard, so they didn't have to stick to it themselves, and while most things using this "standard" fix to most things, some things just won't fit, or won't stay put. Everyone implements it, and if they don't, people complain "why didn't you just put an Arca standard foot on it?" and then you have to sit them down and tell them.
They've said there are limits, and increased limits for those on iCloud+ ... so it seems that Apple is in the selling LLM access game now. I don't think there are any details yet on the nature of those limits, and whether they can be increased as required etc.
I'm fully expecting an updated foundation model of some kind, but I would bet money they don't utter the words "Google", "Gemini", or "Gemma" even once.
I actually started with a Mac app primarily, as I wanted to have an easier way to switch sessions with the mouse and see Claude Code's status at a glance (I had herdr envy, but wanted to keep tmux). I then figured why not do the iOS/iPad version while I was at it.
Highly encourage you to build out a Desktop version, I'm now using mine as my only terminal and wouldn't go back. Working across machines feels seamless.
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