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.

Similar to how openclaw is exploring a “personal agent” that runs on your computer, this feels like a step toward personal software - tools that live locally, understand the context, and adapt to how we actually work.

Excited to see how this evolves, feels like an interesting direction.

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.

I wonder what it is actually building. Tauri apps, maybe?

Raycast -> Glaze AirTable -> Lovable Competitor Retool -> Lovable Competitor

Even those early in the journey are converging towards coding.

Have it create a swift app, unless extended permissions are needed it can compile withouy going into xcode.

Few simple util apps, disk cleaner, clipboard manager. Worked pretty well.

Had better results than using xcode's built in ai extension.

  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) ...

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)

[2]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae

[3]: https://github.com/vicinaehq/vicinae/pull/1158

that's would be Electron app, but without unneeded bloat

I am worried this is the start of them trying to diversify their product offering because revenue has stalled in the core Raycast product and VC demands more returns. I don't want to be jaded, but history teaches me to be. Here's hoping that Raycast itself is still a focus for the company.

As an interesting counter-proposal to wasting time with this... look for older less popular/downloaded/featureful apps written by people for their own education, edification and enjoyment.

They may not work the way you wish they would, but you can learn a lot from them, be inspired by them, and leave feedback.

That's how you actually encourage more people to get started and continue making their own tools.

ie the annoying way that LLMs interact with users