LiveDeveloper ToolsmacOS App
Snapbak
Lightweight Mac Screen Recorder & Dictation
A 10 MB Mac app for screenshots, polished screen recordings, GIFs and offline dictation.
The problem
Popular capture and dictation apps install at 400 MB to over 1 GB, and most dictation tools send your voice to the cloud. I wanted one app that does both, stays around 10 MB, and keeps your screen and voice on your machine.
The approach
- Rust core inside a Tauri v2 shell, so no browser engine ships in the installer.
- The parts that are always on (capture overlay, the notch island, hotkeys) are native Swift and AppKit. The editor and library are React screens that open on demand and are destroyed on close, which gives their memory back.
- Speech-to-text runs NVIDIA's Parakeet model through Core ML on the Neural Engine. The model downloads on first use instead of shipping in the installer.
- Smart Redact finds emails, card numbers and API keys on the device and blurs them before a screenshot is shared.
Impact
About 10 MB installer, macOS 15+ on Apple Silicon
About 2.3% word error rate on LibriSpeech test-clean, measured on the shipped engine
Median of half a second from key-up to text on an M4, with no network traffic
v0.1.2 is out and free for the first 100 users
What I learned
- An empty Tauri app already uses about 96 MB of RAM on macOS. Keeping web views off the idle path mattered more than any single optimization.
- Small on-device language models scored poorly on punctuation and grammar cleanup, so text polish moved to a server while the audio stays on the Mac.
Tech
RustTauriSwiftSwiftUIReactCore MLSQLite