Hello world

This is jeffs.tools, a small collection of Mac apps I've built, plus a bonus blog I'm going to try to update regularly - partly to get better at expressing myself.

I work as a visual researcher, and a year or so ago I started building Mac apps to solve problems at work and automate the tedious parts. It turned out I liked making apps more than I expected, so I've kept it up.

This site is where I'm putting them. Most of the apps are pretty niche because they all started as real-world problems for me. Some of these tools are pretty much just fancy UIs over some FFmpeg commands. People who work with media files shouldn't have to understand complex technical processes just to get their work done. I think of these apps as labor-saving tools first and foremost. Some of the apps will be more fully featured. One I'm working on is a semantic search tool for media files - you search a picture or a phrase and it finds matching frames or dialog in a film. It uses a local LLM, so there are no API costs.

Media and media management are the problems I'm usually trying to solve, but not all of my apps will be media utilities. For example, I'm working on an iOS music player for people who have large libraries on a local HDD and only want to listen to the songs they actually like - because that's an app I really want myself, and it's missing from the App Store.

The blog is where I'll write about whatever I'm thinking about, and sometimes that will be tool-related, sometimes not.

If you download something from here and you think it could be better, please let me know.

When I'm not working you can find me riding my bike, watching movies, listening to music, and chasing my toddler around. In fact, today he pooped in the toilet for the very first time!