Rust workshop · macOS & Windows

The native apps I'm building

Five apps written in Rust, each built to replace a everyday tool that got slow, bloated or invasive. Source code stays private, but binaries are Apple-signed and notarized as soon as an app is ready (Windows build available for some).

QuickPaint

v0.19.0

Touch-friendly drawing & photo-editing app for macOS, 100% local.

Available

As simple as Paint, with the core of PhotoFiltre (light photo retouching) and the fast composition of Canva, built on the foundations of the big editors: a tiled raster engine (GIMP/Photoshop), always-editable vector objects (Illustrator), non-destructive adjustments. No account, no cloud, no telemetry.

What it does

Vector brush with stylus pressure sensitivity, Catmull-Rom smoothing
Tiled raster engine: clone stamp, healing brush, flood-fill paint bucket, one-click cutout
Local retouching: dodge/burn, sponge, blur/sharpen, smudge
Shapes with linear/radial/conic gradients, path booleans (union/subtract/intersect)
Bézier pen with node editing after the fact
Rich text: outline, drop shadow, text on a curve

Download the .dmg (5 MB)Download for Windows (4.6 MB)

Apple-signed and notarized, it opens with no Gatekeeper warning.

Unsigned Windows build: SmartScreen will show a warning, click "More info → Run anyway".

PapyrusPDF

v0.1.0

Native macOS PDF editor/viewer, home-grown PDF engine, no pdfium, no MuPDF.

Available

PDF parsing and rendering written from scratch: lexer, COS object parser, classic xref and cross-reference streams, page tree, stream decoding (Flate/LZW/ASCII), content interpretation, font resolution (TrueType outlines) and rasterization. The pipeline is tested against PDFs generated by reportlab/pikepdf, not just artificial fixtures.

What it does

Zoom, accent-insensitive full-text search with highlighting, thumbnails, dark mode
Annotate: highlight/underline/strikethrough, free text, replace existing text
Reorder, delete, rotate, merge, extract pages by drag and drop
Open encrypted PDFs (RC4, AES-128, AES-256)
PKCS#7/CMS digital signature verification, tested end-to-end with pyHanko
Multi-document tabs

Download the .dmg (4.5 MB)Download for Windows (5.2 MB)

Apple-signed and notarized, it opens with no Gatekeeper warning.

Unsigned Windows build: SmartScreen will show a warning, click "More info → Run anyway".

Bigview

v0.1.0

Giant CSV/log viewer for macOS, opens in seconds what Excel refuses to open.

Available

Excel and Numbers plateau at ~1 million rows and saturate RAM; regular text editors load everything into memory and freeze; fast CLI tools (xsv, csview) stay command-line only. Bigview is the native macOS GUI for opening and filtering multi-gigabyte files without ever choking.

What it does

Near-instant opening of multi-gigabyte CSV/log files
Filtering and search without loading everything into memory
DataFusion query engine for large files
Native Apple Silicon (arm64)
Automated test suite covering the indexing engine

Download the .dmg (41 MB)Download for Windows (40 MB)

Apple-signed and notarized, it opens with no Gatekeeper warning.

Unsigned Windows build: SmartScreen will show a warning, click "More info → Run anyway".

Needle

v0.1.0

Local full-text search for macOS, find any sentence, in any file, in under 100ms.

Available

Spotlight misses files, silently excludes folders, and gives no control over how it searches. Needle builds its own index (built on tantivy), fully independent of Spotlight, behind a native window summoned with a single keystroke.

What it does

Instant search-as-you-type, highlighted snippets in context
Global hotkey to summon the window from anywhere
100% local: no network calls, no telemetry, strictly read-only
Native menu bar app with visible indexing status

Download the .dmg (13 MB)

Apple-signed and notarized, it opens with no Gatekeeper warning.