We have a super early form of runnable code, called "Surflets". More info here: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md

Basically you can supply input context and a runnable file will generate & run in your document. Useful for creating interactive charts or small applets.

Our philosophy is that if you want to update it, you should be able use your local code editor, not be stuck in Surf!

(we have work to do to make this solid)

We took inspiration from analog notebooks as a tool for thought, but wanted something for multi-media. We also see NotebookLM as the closest mainstream product to Surf.

Related -- some people who have seen Surf's Applets feature have also called Surf "Jupyter for normies".

More on Surflets: https://github.com/deta/surf/blob/main/docs/SURFLETS.md

for all the screen recordings we use Screen Studio by Adam Pietrasiak. Really a all in one workhorse for everything screen recording related.

The main teaser video was made by our incredible video editor Célestin (https://www.celest.in/) who is working with After Effects, Premiere and Blender.

We recently introduced a sidebar (after the video was made) which has them organized as you mention.

We actually had a chatbot, but our explorations showed that notes were a more effective in many cases!

An example of local data is that "Applets" made in Surf can be opened / updated from your local code editor, they're just HTML files.

Not (yet) super usable, but for photos we have local OCR running, with Surf creating additional metadata (e.g. the link from where the photo was downloaded).

Can imagine some use cases -- off the top of my head, suggesting the right photos to embed in a note in response to a user query.

Surf is built entirely on editable WYSIWYG documents, NotebookLM's main AI is built on chat. Surf is built to be a bit more open, NotebookLM was a bit locked down for our taste.

An example I'd highlight is taking notes against a PDF.

NotebookLM will convert the PDF to simple text, and the chat responses are read only. NotebookLM also has a lot of strict walls between chat, artifacts & sources. You have to "save" responses as (read only) notes, and move notes to sources.

With Surf you can generate notes that deep link to specific pages in the PDF, and Surf will open those pages in the original PDF. You can remove the fluff you don't want in your notes. The intention is to be a little more open -- all notes are sources from the get go, you don't have to save or migrate anything.

Yes, we support any endpoint that supports the completions API. And yes, Ollama might be the easiest to setup. The images should also work with qwen3-vl.

But if you run into any issues, please feel free to submit a bug report https://github.com/deta/surf/issues

Edit: fixed github issues link

Don't know too many, unfortunately. AI Tinkerers organizes a few a year: https://berlin.aitinkerers.org/

We think there are a lot of value added services that can happen when you need servers, but they should be user aligned & optional (Mobile app, sync, publishing, backups, remote jobs, collab).

We want Surf's client to be independent & open, but offer some of these on top -- for people who want them!