Case 03 · Own product
A command palette for the whole desk
A macOS launcher for engineering teams — deploys, reviews and links, three keystrokes away.
- Role
- Founder, design & engineering
- Year
- 2025
- Duration
- Ongoing
- Client
- Own product
- Stack
- SwiftAppKitRustSQLite
01 — Problem
My own day was a dozen tabs deep: CI, previews, pull requests, dashboards. Every existing launcher was built for opening apps, not for acting on the things inside them.
02 — Process
- 01
Latency budget first
Before drawing a pixel I set a budget: 16 ms from keystroke to first result. The index lives in SQLite on disk, fuzzy matching runs in Rust, and the UI only ever renders what fits on screen.
- 02
Keyboard grammar
Every action follows the same verb → object → modifier grammar, so learning one command teaches the rest. Shortcuts are displayed as keycaps next to each row until you have used them five times, then they fade out.
- 03
Hardware, just for fun
A small batch of four-key macro pads ships to paying teams — one key per favourite Relay command.
03 — Result
Relay is used daily by 2,100 engineers across 140 teams. It pays for itself and for my coffee.
- median keystroke to result
- 11ms
- daily users
- 2,100
- paying teams
- 140
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