What Glaze Can Build
Glaze can build a wide range of real Mac apps, from quick personal utilities to polished tools you'd share with others. They use the same native features as any other app on your Mac, run local-first, and look and feel native rather than like a website in a window.
What to Build
Glaze shines when you have a specific job in mind and want a tool shaped exactly around it. The apps people build tend to fall into a few groups:
Personal trackers
Keep tabs on the things you care about: a habit or workout log, an expense tracker that charts a CSV you drop in, a reading queue, or a daily journal.
Menu bar apps
Always-on tools that surface what matters the moment it changes: a CI or build monitor, an on-call status light, a stock or crypto ticker, or a focus timer, a click away in the menu bar.
Internal tools
Software shaped around how your team works: a support console wired to GitHub and Slack, an on-call view pulling Linear issues, or a release tracker, shared privately to your Team Store.
Workflow automations
Apps that watch and act on their own: auto-rename and sort screenshots as they land, or batch-convert and compress files you drop onto a window.
If you can describe the task, the agent can build an app for it. When you're not sure where to start, open My Projects, click New Project, and describe the problem rather than the solution. The agent can suggest an app idea back to you.
Native Powers
Your apps aren't web pages in a window. They're real desktop apps that can use the same native features as any other desktop app on your Mac. You ask for these in plain language, and the agent wires them up:
- Files and local data: Read, write, and organize files, and keep their own data on disk so your work is there next time.
- Devices and permissions: Use the camera, microphone, or location, asking macOS for permission the same way any app does.
- Notifications, menu bar, and tray: Post system notifications, run from the menu bar, and show status in the tray.
- Windows and layout: Open multiple windows, float a small utility on top, or use a frameless custom design.
- System integration: Register global hotkeys, associate file types, and handle drag-and-drop to and from Finder.
Local-First
Glaze apps are local-first. They run on your Mac, in their own window, like anything else you've installed. The agent does its building work online, but most finished apps keep working without an internet connection, since your data lives on your machine rather than on a server you have to reach.
An app only needs the network for the parts that genuinely depend on it, such as fetching the weather or connecting to an external service. See Core Concepts for how projects, apps, and the agent fit together.
Worth Knowing
Glaze is good at a wide range of desktop tools, but a few things are worth setting expectations on:
- It builds desktop apps, not websites, mobile apps, or browser extensions.
- The agent works best on focused, well-described apps. Very large or sprawling products are harder to get right in one pass, so it helps to build them up in steps with follow-up prompts.
- Connecting to an external service depends on that service having an API you can reach.
When something doesn't come out the way you expected, the fix is usually another prompt. See Iterating, and Version History if you want to step back to an earlier version.
Where It Runs
Glaze builds Mac apps currently, so others will need Glaze to install the apps you've shared. Support for Windows and Linux is coming down the road.