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u/SKMPE15

r/localfirst r/PKMS r/AppBuilding r/MacOSApps
Image 1 — Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback
Image 2 — Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback
Image 3 — Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback
Image 4 — Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback
Image 5 — Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback
▲ 15 r/localfirst+2 crossposts

Building a new study/research app— looking for feedback

For the past few weeks I’ve been building an app that is mainly for university students or like researchers oriented. Its a buy you own key (BYOK) Model for now, and what it does it like let’s say you have notes or pdfs that you’d want to organize or like just store and have an AI model give feedback answer questions or build on it— basically like Claude + Obsidian Setups but like this makes it easier and I’m making the friction less and less and trying to make it cheap hopefully :D
The pricing on the web page is like just dummy for now it’s free but in the future I’m planning a ton of features and a dedicated research mode

I’m just having one issue I just have no feedback so I’m kind of going in blind T_T I hope I didn’t violate any rules here

Anyhow, this is the link it’s only for MacOS only and can run from macOS 26+ I recently got it signed and notarized as well plus it’s open source for now

🌐 Here is the website: https://www.zirn.app/
I would love to hear any feedback :D (preferably in the discord server which is in the footnote of the website)

I know this is just another wrapper but I really want to make this useful and cheap for people :D

Also some screenshots these are outdated to an extent because I’ve been tweaking with the UI constantly rip

u/SKMPE15 — 6 days ago
▲ 0 r/PKMS

Built a local-first Mac app that puts AI inside your Markdown vault instead of a separate chat window— looking for feedback

I kept running into the same problem with my own notes: ask ChatGPT something, copy the answer into my vault, forget it’s there a week later. So I built Zirn, a native macOS app where notes live as plain Markdown in a folder you control, and AI is embedded directly in the writing flow instead of living in a separate window. AI can edit pages in place or just answer questions about the current page, there’s vault-wide chat grounded in everything you’ve written (semantic search pulls in relevant pages as context), wiki-style [[links]] with a graph view, smart link suggestions while typing, and auto-generated flashcards per page. BYOK — Mistral or DeepSeek, your own key in Keychain, no Zirn account or subscription yet. I plan to have an iPad port and an iPhone companion app if it gets traction.

I want to be straight about where this sits versus what a lot of you are probably already running: if you’ve got Obsidian set up with Smart Connections, Copilot, or an MCP server hooked into Claude desktop, you already have local vault + AI in a real, mature, plugin-extensible way and lwky that setup is more flexible than Zirn today since it’s built on an ecosystem instead of one dev’s roadmap. What Zirn is betting on is that bundling it natively (no plugin stack, no config files, AI that writes in-place out of the box) is worth it for people who don’t want to assemble that stack themselves. Whether that bet is actually worth the tradeoff losing the plugin ecosystem and going Mac-only is exactly what I’m trying to find out, not something I’m confident is true yet.

It’s a real shipped app notarized, signed, free DMG on the website, v1.4 with a few releases behind it.

I’m very early: a couple of testers, no real user base yet apart for 2-3 people. Some limitations: macOS 26+ only, you need your own API key. If you’re already deep in an Obsidian+Claude setup, I’d actually love to hear why you’d never switch, as much as I’d love feedback from anyone willing to try it.

Link: zirn
It’s open source as well for now :D

reddit.com
u/SKMPE15 — 11 days ago