Native on purpose. All the way down.

The whole UI, end-to-end.

Every view, every animation, every state holder. @Observable for state, NSViewRepresentable for the handful of AppKit bridges, .glassEffect for Liquid Glass on macOS 26 with a graceful fallback below. No Electron, no web wrapper.

Real macOS, where SwiftUI needs a hand.

Drag a tile out and it's a real NSFilePromiseProvider — Finder, Mail, OBS, Discord, all just work because it's the native API. NSWorkspace sets your desktop wallpaper, reveals files, and reads the accessibility flags so the app respects Reduce Motion and Increase Contrast.

Files in. Files out. Correctly typed.

Drag-out promises serve the file's real UTType so receivers get the right content. Drag-in destinations only accept the types they can handle. The vocabulary is Apple's, not ours.

Real players. True loops. No hacks.

Every tile is a real AVQueuePlayer with an AVPlayerLooper running across the loop boundary — the same primitives Apple uses for Live Photos. A PlayerPool warms a small set of these and recycles them across cells; URL swap is replaceCurrentItem / insert(after:nil), with mute-and-volume-reset before each swap so you never hear a click.

iCloudHelper.isKnownLocallyAvailable(url) gates recycling — files mid-download are never selected.

Hardware decode, by way of Apple's pipeline.

Every video cell decodes through VideoToolbox under the covers — that's what AVPlayerLayer is for. The frame-processor primitives are also wired up for future neural-upscale and motion-blur work on Apple Silicon, gated at runtime so the path stays off when the hardware can't honour it.

Frame-processor effects ship on macOS 26 + Apple Silicon — checked at runtime, off otherwise.

LUTs, palettes, and dominant-color tints.

Color-cube LUTs run through CIColorCubeWithColorSpace. CIAreaAverage gives the dominant color for a cell's adaptive padding. CIKMeans extracts palette swatches without ever painting an entire frame. One shared CIContext — sRGB working color space, GPU-rendered.

Zero-copy hand-offs between frameworks.

IOSurface-backed CVPixelBuffers let Vision hand a mask straight to Core Image without a CPU round-trip. VTFrameProcessor reads and writes the same buffer type. The fewer pixel copies, the smoother the wall stays.

Aspect ratios with zero pixel decoding.

CGImageSourceCreateWithURL reads EXIF metadata without touching the pixels — width, height, all eight orientation cases. That's how a five-thousand-photo folder opens instantly. Subsampled thumbnails decode only the target resolution, never the full image.

One render, four answers.

Letterbox detection, brightness classification, monochrome detection, and composite/collage detection all read from a single CGContext render — one RGBA buffer, four analyses, one GPU-to-CPU copy. The naïve version is four. The considered version is one.

ePub and PDF, beside the grid.

The side-pane reader is the real PDFKit and the real WebKit — not a custom renderer. Night-mode invert, four fonts, three themes; the documents your Mac already knows how to open, where you'd want them.

Fourteen detectors. On every photo. On-device.

The new Swift Vision struct API (no VN prefix) — faces, bodies, hands, poses, text, animals, scenes, aesthetics, attention saliency, objectness, barcodes, feature print, lens smudge, horizon. All fourteen kick off concurrently via async let against a single CGImage. A separate one-render block tacks on four pixel-domain analyses for free.

DetectLensSmudgeRequest is macOS 26+. Foreground mask is Apple Silicon-recommended.

Smart Captions, on-device, by Apple.

SystemLanguageModel.default writes a natural-language caption for each clip. A specialized .contentTagging variant returns lowercase tags. Sessions are cached by instruction hash so warm context stays warm. The model lives on your Mac; nothing about your library goes over the wire.

macOS 26 + Apple Intelligence enabled. Surfaces .available, .unavailable, .temporarilyUnavailable(.modelNotReady) states to the UI.

Reads the room — at the kernel level.

MemoryMonitor calls task_info for resident memory and walks task_threads / thread_info for per-thread CPU. The same data source Activity Monitor uses. Three pressure tiers — normal, elevated, high — with hysteresis so the engine doesn't oscillate. Crossing into high trims caches, sweeps orphaned players, and pauses pricey Vision passes.

Actors, not locks.

VisionAnalyzer, MetadataCache, FoundationModelService and ConcurrencyLimiter are real actors with strict isolation. Vision dispatches its fourteen detectors with async let and gathers them in one block. The main thread is for SwiftUI; everything heavy lives somewhere else.

Your library, in Spotlight.

Opt in and CSSearchableIndex.default() indexes every scanned item — filename, AI caption, scene labels, OCR text, aesthetics rating, semantic mood. Find a clip from anywhere on macOS; flexgrid://open?id=<itemID> routes the click straight back into the right folder.

Off by default. Three opt-ins: master enable, OCR text, faces flag.

Nine Shortcuts and Siri actions.

Shuffle, Next Page, Previous Page, Toggle Playback, Set Grid Size, Open New Window, Toggle Blackout, Toggle Freeze, Switch Persona. Wire any of them to a Focus mode, a Stream Deck button, or a Siri phrase. FlexGridShortcutsProvider registers the spoken-phrase variants.

One-time purchase. No server.

Plus is a non-consumable StoreKit 2 IAP. Modern async/await transaction loop: Transaction.currentEntitlements on launch, Transaction.updates listened in a long-running Task. Restore is built in. No third-party backend, no receipt-validation server, nothing for you to maintain.