I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?
Design Philosophy Create apps that feel premium, polished, and worthy of being featured on Dribbble's most popular shots. Every pixel matters. White space is your friend. Less is more, but what remains must be perfect.
Visual Design Principles
Color & Theming
• Use sophisticated, limited color palettes (2-3 primary colors maximum) ...even better if the apps are not electron bloated and mac-native.
Even though they portray some of the benefits of this app as unique to desktop apps, they're not (e.g. storing data on device, offline mode etc.).
Am not a hater. Love Raycast. Saw the post and opened the link intrigued what they came up with and was somewhat disappointed tbh. Good luck to them anyway!
I do have prior experience developing for iOS but that was pre-swift.
Having antigravity is useful because Gemini 3.1 is pretty good at generating UI sugar. Claude 4.6 Opus provides nothing to write home about. Their shadcn looksmaxxing hasn't generalized to writing good desktop UIs.
Raycast's only edge here seems to be the fact that they are obviously very good at Mac app development and probably have impeccable skills/documentation for building them.
Taking a step back, it's pretty clear that Raycast is angling for an Apple acquisition here with this play. If I'm Apple, the reason to buy a product/team like this is a no-brainer.
No kidding, although I think Apple would only be interested if it uses SwiftUI. (The marketing page doesn't say. Raycast itself uses React + Node for extensions, but its React components render to native widgets.)
Raycast recently made a Windows version. So perhaps they aren't as Apple-centric.
My first thought was, "So, Replit and ilk?", seems they expected that comparison:
> How is Glaze different from Lovable, Replit, or v0?
> Those tools build for the browser. Glaze builds for your desktop. That means your apps can access your file system, your camera, keyboard shortcuts, menu bar integration, and background processes. Things a web app can’t do. It’s a different category entirely.
Pretty sure modern web apps can do all of those (sans menu bar). (If anything they do background processes better since you can send a very long task off to a server and shut off your computer, come back later and pick up where you left off.)
Also, as others mentioned, this just seems like Claude Code with extra steps, unless they managed to nail some sort of design standard enforcement they feel is better than what most people can get out of it.
The quick publishing is kind of nice, but it immediately made me think it would be more interesting to have a way to quickly remix other people's creations, similar to the Figma Community tab: you can take someone else's work, break it apart to see how it works, then tweak it how you want it.
My feeling is that it's intended for a less-technical audience than Claude Code.
Well yeah, isn’t that criticism we’ve had every LLM wrapper for years now? “Show me the prompt!” But that doesn’t mean these types of products are useless.
If you're on Chrome and give them permission, or stuff them into Electron and friends, they can. The workflow isn't as smooth as with native applications, though.
On the other hand, the web browser does protect you from some of the risks this essentially "trust me bro" curl2bash-as-a-service product inherently comes with.
that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat
1. macOS and Windows require installation of Xcode and Visual Studio respectively, and if in Apple's case you kinda can install these tools headlessly and choose to install only the "build tools" package, Microsoft's creature is gonna daze and confuse you with a crap-ton of checkboxes and no easy "just install whatever is minimally needed to compile my code" button, and I don't recall if there is way to install build tools on Windows through terminal.
2. what is going to be distributed? source code itself or actual binaries? and what will the security model of Glaze store be? same as extensions, "everything is open-source and undergoes Raycast's and community review"?
3. Glaze is going to come to Windows and Linux, if we trust the Q&A section at the end. what will Glaze build upon? separate frameworks and languages for each platform or something multi-platform [1] like Tauri or Kotlin Multiplatform? or are you going to copy the Raycast extension model - just run Node, expose some platform integration, and parse React render trees through "Glaze Runtime"? I've been working on a bug in Vicinae [2][3], and I've seen this model in action. it's very hard to make it perform well, but all it takes to achieve native look and feel is to just map React render trees to whatever system component OS offers. (in Vicinae's case, it's Qt. bet that it's done with SwiftUI on macOS and WinUI 3 on Windows.)
[1]: there is a difference between "cross-platform" and "multi-platform". "cross-platform" means "I behave equally across platforms and have no awareness of native look and feel" (e.g. Electron, Unity, Flutter), while "multi-platform" means "I can adapt across platforms to the degree you need" (e.g. C/C++, Rust, KMP)
ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users
On the other hand it is kind of the perfect name for Yet Another AI Website Maker (YAAWM?).
A better replacement to iStat Menus.
A local-only voice to text whisper.cpp transcriber I can globally use while holding ctrl-semicolon.
A menubar app that manages blocky and can easily turn it off or change dns.
A tool like hammerspoon but I configure it via nix-darwin and it has no cruft.
All of these are apps that use 30MB memory and are better than the apps they replace, and I can make changes any time I want. That's far better than using someone else's software and giving it privileged access to my machine.
Also, perhaps the best point is that so much software is junk that is obsoleted by someone with better UX intuitions even if they are vibe-coding it. Being written by hand by an engineer means basically nothing when it comes to "is this a good app?" Which is why product-minded people are the biggest winners in the new AI era.
lorenzoguerra•1h ago
thomaspaulmann•33m ago