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What it is

When I got into vibe coding, ideas about new things to try out or tweak would come to me from left and right, but I'd scramble to record them fresh. I had running lists of project notes and to-do's in Apple Notes mostly, but that was cumbersome. Eventually I crammed all of them into a single note wedged between others: my grocery list, a shared list of songs a friend and I were preparing for a gig, my workout note... Surfacer is what I made to pull the whole spread onto one surface that follows me across my OS.

• Bulletin board, two views — every idea I'm chasing lives as a card on one board, color-tinted by status (active / paused / shipped / idea), filterable by tag. A bulletin view for the whole spread at a glance, and a scroll view for the days I'm juggling several at once and want every project's cards open side-by-side.

  Two ways to see the board — bulletin view (left) for the whole spread; scroll view (right) for juggling several at once.

• Inside a project — click any project to open it in place as a glass-tinted modal with columns of freeform cards: things you're doing, thinking about, things to come back to. Tags travel with cards. Drag works everywhere. When I need room, the modal expands full-frame.

  Project modal — opened in place over the board, then expanded full-frame for room.

• Menu-bar popover — a small Su icon in the menu bar opens a frameless popover from anywhere on macOS, including over full-screen apps. Quick-add a card, jump back into a project in the full app, or spin up a new project — all without leaving what you're doing. Surfacer is integrated into the OS, not living in a tab.

  Menu-bar popover — Surfacer from anywhere, including over full-screen apps.

• Screenshot routing — any screenshot I take triggers a frameless overlay to route it into a project as a card. The idea came from Austin Kleon's Steal Like An Artist: a swipe file — a working collection of scraps, clippings, and fragments you return to when developing an idea.

  Screenshot routing — every screenshot becomes a card you can route to a project.

• Status as identity — four states (active / paused / shipped / idea) drive accent colors across the entire UI, so the board itself reflects the temperature of what I'm working on. No per-project color theming; status is the color.

• Local-first — SQLite on disk in ~/Library/Application Support/com.surfacer.app/. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync, and no background server of any kind — the UI talks to a small native core over Tauri's in-process IPC.

What's next

Surfacer V1 is the daily driver I built for myself. A few things on my mind for V2:

• Mobile companion — capture cards from your phone, sync to the desktop board. Right now ideas only land in Surfacer if I'm at my Mac.
• OS-level screenshot extension — replace the file-watcher with a proper macOS screen-capture extension, so the route-to-project prompt feels native instead of bolted on.
• Multi-user boards — Surfacer is single-user today, but I'm excited to explore shared boards for collaborative project tracking down the road.

Install

Download the latest Surfacer.dmg from Releases, open it, and drag Surfacer.app into /Applications/. Or build from source.

The release is unsigned, so macOS will refuse to open it on first launch with "Apple cannot check it for malicious software." To open it anyway:

1. Right-click Surfacer.app in Finder → Open → confirm in the dialog.
2. Or open System Settings → Privacy & Security, find the message about Surfacer being blocked, and click Open Anyway.

macOS remembers after the first launch, so this only happens once.

Stack

• UI: Vite + React 19, TipTap (rich text), @dnd-kit (drag and drop), framer-motion, lucide-react
• Core: Rust + Tauri 2, rusqlite (bundled SQLite, no system dependency). No separate server process — the renderer calls #[tauri::command] functions over capability-gated IPC.
• Packaging: Tauri (npm run tauri build, Apple Silicon / arm64)

Build from source

# Requires: macOS (Apple Silicon), Node 20+, a Rust toolchain (https://rustup.rs)
git clone https://github.com/andrewmfoster/Surfacer.git
cd Surfacer
npm install
npm run tauri build   # → src-tauri/target/release/bundle/macos/Surfacer.app (+ a .dmg)

The first Rust build is slow (a few minutes — it compiles a bundled SQLite from source); incremental rebuilds are seconds. To run against a hot-reloading dev build instead, use npm run tauri dev.

Security & privacy

Surfacer runs entirely on-device. There is no server and no network listener of any kind. All data lives unencrypted on disk in ~/Library/Application Support/com.surfacer.app/. No accounts, no telemetry, no cloud sync.

I'm a UX researcher and hobbyist builder. Feedback and PRs welcome — if you spot something I missed, please open an issue.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.