Love it! The name, the design, the concept, the open source codebase, everything! It’s less like a note taking app and more like a diary writing app. I think that’s very neat and has its own niche.
Love the local-first, browser-based nature of it. If you ever consider making a native app for it, consider looking at antinote (https://antinote.io/). Been using it for over a year. It’s the only notes app that I haven’t uninstalled or forgotten about. I think the simplicity of it is what draws me to it. I feel it aligns with your philosophy for this app!
That’s fair. I was offering Buzee for free! The inertia is real. As much as they appreciated the speed, it seemed like they didn’t really want to find their files faster.
Did you download from the link on this page? [1] That should download the v0.1.1 build. So long as you install it with admin privileges and ignore the security warnings, it shouldn't have an issue.
In case it doesn't work still, I'd suggest trying to build from source. I wouldn't be surprised if your machine is an edge case for Windows that I missed.
Yes. That is the standard business model to follow. But I never reached that point because of my novice programming skills and the fact that this was a hobby project.
My intention was to make it free for individuals (search on desktop + personal cloud) but charge business users who would want shared access on a network. Any AI features would also be free if it runs locally or chargeable for Claude/GPT. I wanted to leverage Mac and Windows’ built-in AI/ML capabilities as much as possible. The OCR on both systems is actually really powerful! Even my ten year old Asus laptop was able to OCR PDFs and images very quickly and reliably.
The only product I have seen do well is Glean [1] but they are B2B so not exactly consumer-grade software.
I think the everyday person works better with the separation of concerns that comes with using multiple services. For me personally, I vaguely recall that I came across this file/info on WhatsApp or on email or on Google Drive. Then I go use the search built into those services and it works well most of the time.
Buzee really helped me with local files (of which I had several thousand) but if you don’t have too many of those, Spotlight and Windows Search combined with some pragmatic file management seems to do the job fairly well.
So the pain point isn’t all that painful and the inertia of switching to a new omnichannel search interface is much higher.
This is why I kept imagining Buzee’s _real_ USP to come from a layer built on top of the file search engine. Imagine a personalised LLM trained on your files and organisation patterns only. Or a service that creates structured data out of the mess of your files. Or a butler service that organises data from every single service you use (goes beyond files to HN, Reddit, Spotify, Netflix, Strava etc.)
We’ll probably get something like that in a couple of years with a strong vendor lock-in. A privacy-first open source alternative seems difficult.
Getting everything to work reliably. This was my first time handling a software with so many moving parts. If I could get the search query to work, I would break the date range filter, if that worked, the document indexing flow would stutter, or I’d discover a new bug caused by an edge-case.
Since I built this application in an exploratory manner (branching out without a larger architectural design), it often became unwieldy for a solo hobbyist like myself.
Plus, I wasn’t able to really get going with user feedback. Reached out to family, friends and colleagues but faced the Windows roadblock and got demotivated. In the end, built it for myself and used it by myself. I am happy with that!
I feel I gave up early too but oh well, I sat on it for too long. I hope somebody else can make something good out of it!
Once I had a more reliable foundation, I planned on adding a tiny LLM that can run locally and parse user’s natural queries in a manner that the app can understand.
I didn’t really have a workflow to do anything since I am not a professional developer. I would just hack around in a dev branch, merge it with main and create a build when I was happy with it.
I paid Apple $99/year for code signing on Mac but at least it worked seamlessly. On Windows it seemed like the code signing process varies depending on where you buy the certificate from!
Omg hi Simon! Big fan. Your work on datasette and generally using SQLite for solving problems was one of my main motivations behind Buzee. Thank you for all your work and for documenting it all!
I tried Parallels with like three different accounts :)
But I also found that a native Windows machine throws a lot more errors than a VM. For example, having a sqlite3.dll ended up being critical on the Windows 10 machine but not on the Parallels VM. Not sure why!
I named Buzee after my pet dog. I guess I am unaware of what you’re referring to, English isn’t my native language after all. Hope it isn’t a slur or something!
Funny you say that. Legal and invoice were actually the two avenues I actually explored! There definitely is an opportunity there but I found that there is an intense status quo to fight.
Thanks! Search wasn’t the most difficult problem here. I found SQLite’s FTS5 to be quite powerful. Later combined with Tantivy, I think it’s a superb combination to tackle pretty much any local search needs.
You are 100% correct. I focused on Mac because my personal machine is a MacBook :)
That was part of my failure. I wanted to solve a problem for Windows but didn't have a decent Windows machine myself! Had to rely on a 10-year old laptop to do testing and building, which inevitably didn't work well.
Of course, Alfred and Everything are more mature products. My motivation was:
(1) Build something on my own
(2) Build a dedicated full-text search only product
Love the local-first, browser-based nature of it. If you ever consider making a native app for it, consider looking at antinote (https://antinote.io/). Been using it for over a year. It’s the only notes app that I haven’t uninstalled or forgotten about. I think the simplicity of it is what draws me to it. I feel it aligns with your philosophy for this app!
Thanks for sharing Ichinichi with the world!