thatgurjot

That’s fair. I was offering Buzee for free! The inertia is real. As much as they appreciated the speed, it seemed like they didn’t really want to find their files faster.

You make my day. Thank you. This sort of validation makes my inner child really happy. :)

Used the operating system’s native OCR APIs for parsing text from PDFs and images. Does that count? :)

Yes. That is the standard business model to follow. But I never reached that point because of my novice programming skills and the fact that this was a hobby project.

My intention was to make it free for individuals (search on desktop + personal cloud) but charge business users who would want shared access on a network. Any AI features would also be free if it runs locally or chargeable for Claude/GPT. I wanted to leverage Mac and Windows’ built-in AI/ML capabilities as much as possible. The OCR on both systems is actually really powerful! Even my ten year old Asus laptop was able to OCR PDFs and images very quickly and reliably.

Local and privacy first was my core principle.

Getting everything to work reliably. This was my first time handling a software with so many moving parts. If I could get the search query to work, I would break the date range filter, if that worked, the document indexing flow would stutter, or I’d discover a new bug caused by an edge-case.

Since I built this application in an exploratory manner (branching out without a larger architectural design), it often became unwieldy for a solo hobbyist like myself.

Plus, I wasn’t able to really get going with user feedback. Reached out to family, friends and colleagues but faced the Windows roadblock and got demotivated. In the end, built it for myself and used it by myself. I am happy with that!

I feel I gave up early too but oh well, I sat on it for too long. I hope somebody else can make something good out of it!

Once I had a more reliable foundation, I planned on adding a tiny LLM that can run locally and parse user’s natural queries in a manner that the app can understand.

I didn’t really have a workflow to do anything since I am not a professional developer. I would just hack around in a dev branch, merge it with main and create a build when I was happy with it.

Makes sense!

I’d presume they’re referring to boozy (like booze/liquor) but not sure if that’d qualify as “colorful slang”

Yeah, it’s weird on Windows.

I paid Apple $99/year for code signing on Mac but at least it worked seamlessly. On Windows it seemed like the code signing process varies depending on where you buy the certificate from!

Omg hi Simon! Big fan. Your work on datasette and generally using SQLite for solving problems was one of my main motivations behind Buzee. Thank you for all your work and for documenting it all!

I tried Parallels with like three different accounts :)

But I also found that a native Windows machine throws a lot more errors than a VM. For example, having a sqlite3.dll ended up being critical on the Windows 10 machine but not on the Parallels VM. Not sure why!

I named Buzee after my pet dog. I guess I am unaware of what you’re referring to, English isn’t my native language after all. Hope it isn’t a slur or something!