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Comment by w-m | Hacker News Reader

Downloaded, saw "Sign in to start your free trial", which turned me off immediately unfortunately. So I'm probably not the intended audience - I'd like to have a fast, reliable Mac UI to use with my OpenAI API key.

So far I've been using Machato (https://untimelyunicorn.gumroad.com/l/machato), which has the perfect feature set for me, but despite its claims of being a native app, is just infuriatingly slow. You can't at all scroll in the app while it's producing text, and switching between conversations feels worse than using Slack.

So the search continues. What makes it so hard to produce a responsive native app, that there are so few of them out there?

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Recently, I created a native mac software. I have not encountered any performance problems so far. It is still in the Beta version. It will be released here later. You can download it here for a trial first https://chattab.app

Machato is the closest I've found as well, other than CLI / console tools or "roll your own".

Ability to set (and save) system contexts is critical. It's unclear to me why most apps don't enable this.

I can't get by without Machato's other innovation of suppressing earlier parts of the history I no longer need later in the conversation, making it straightforward to have 64k interactions with the 8k model.

Ability to fork and file conversations, as well as the cost monitoring, are gravy.

- https://untimelyunicorn.gumroad.com/l/machato

- https://github.com/sigoden/aichat

I love Machato but I don’t understand why it’s performance on my M1 Mac is so abysmal

Hi there ! Machato dev here.

Honestly, this is my first macOS app and I'm a bit out of ideas when it comes to performance. If anyone has tehcnical knowledge about SwiftUI and how I could improve performance, please do contact me ! (contact@machato.app)

My experience has been that the SwiftUI Profiler shows that almost all processor time is spent deep inside SwiftUI/AppKit primitives, despite there being close to no updates to view properties.

I'm glad HN is enjoying the app despite those issues. I promise I'm doing my best !

Yeah, Machato is great and the rate that you update it with new features is impressive. Keep up the good work! Hopefully some Mac app dev can chime in on what may be causing the performance issues. :)

My aim with this app was to provide a sleek macOS ChatGPT/GPT-4 experience for users who couldn't be bothered to sign up for Open AI developer account. Of course, along the way I considered that there is a sizeable audience who would prefer to avoid any third-party proxy and use their keys directly. Unfortunately, as mentioned by DerJacques in this thread, it is not certain that allowing this would pass Apple reviews. However, we could try? If I see enough interest in "bring your own keys" model, it could be possible to offer this version of the app outside the App Store. Would you be willing to pay ~$30 one-time purchase for such an app?

As a person who is quite annoyed by slow websites, I'm really not that bothered by ChatGPT (as chat.openai.com). So a native ChatGPT Mac app would be a hard sell to me. I'm only interested in the API access, which OpenAI doesn't provide a UI for.

I payed 5€ for Machato, and would probably pay up to $10 to try out other apps. For me, $30 would already be in a territory that I would not pay upfront, but only after regularly using the app for at least a few weeks. That's pretty much what I paid for Apollo Ultra Lifetime, after many months of regular use. Oh dear.

> it is not certain that allowing this would pass Apple reviews

Release the app outside the store? Fuck apple and their monopoly abuse control system.

you might like mine! open source and compiling from source is encouraged. https://github.com/smol-ai/menubar

I'd be interested to hear why your app will beat others in performance. Looking at the repo, it seems to be electron-based, so it's not obvious to me on why I should try it, if I'm looking for responsiveness.

Edit: had a closer look, it's a multi-app for different AI chatbots. Fun, but not at all what I'm looking for (responsive Mac interface to OpenAI API).

:shrug: it works great for me lol. api is overrated. webview is the only way you'll get the full experience of all the chats

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