I’ve always found that thinking out loud helps me better understand things. Whether it’s something that happened at work, an idea I’m trying to articulate, or just thoughts I want to remember. The problem is that most of those thoughts disappear as soon as I’ve had them.
A little over a year ago, I decided to build a Mac app to do something about that. I called it Captain’s Log, after Star Trek. I’ve always liked the scenes where my childhood hero, Jean-Luc Picard starts with “Captain’s Log, Stardate 41153.7” and then simply tells the computer what’s been happening. I wanted something like that for myself.
I originally started building it as a kind of second brain, but soon discovered that just being able to talk to my computer and keeping a written record was useful enough. I now use it several times a week, for different things:
The app records your voice, transcribes it with Whisper, and uses a local language model (Qwen) to clean up the text. It fixes transcription mistakes, adds paragraphs, corrects names based on a personal list, and sorts your notes into categories.
Everything happens on your Mac. No accounts, no cloud services, and none of your recordings or notes leave your computer.
Another important requirement was that everything should be file based. Your notes are stored as Markdown files with metadata, so I can open them in Obsidian and keep working with them there. Captain’s Log fits into my existing workflow: I talk to capture my thoughts, then use those notes however I like.
It’s a fairly simple app, but I’ve come to rely on it. And although I originally built it just for myself, I’ve decided to make it open source and free for anyone to use or build upon. You can install it with Homebrew:
brew install --cask vnglst/tap/captainslog
Or point your favorite AI coding agent at the GitHub repository and have it build the app from source. I haven’t paid the Apple developer fee yet, so the Homebrew version isn’t notarized. Here’s a short video showing how it works.