Finances and Contracts are for me the same folders.
Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Demo is not that convincing. Also, I need multilanguage support, and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this. (Which again, needs beforehand knowledge of which language the document might be in?)
But, cheap, and pay once and offline. Will keep an eye on it.
woadwarrior01 · 13m ago
The Python 3.13 virtualenv you're bundling with the app is 357MB, while the ONNX model is only 90.4MB.
onnxruntime has Swift bindings[1], consider using that. Or better yet use CoreML. You'll also be able to support x86 Macs with either of those.
Presale pricing is weird, or at least unclear. I am totally fine with pricing strategies where you buy a perpetual license for the current major version only but this seems like less than that. It appears that for $10 we can have something available for free that may be updated some unknown amount, but probably without any significant new behavior, and then we’ll get a discount that could very well be less than the $10 we put in.
You could improve the situation by presenting some kind of roadmap and indicating the limit of presale or stating clearly the amount, or a minimum amount, of discount on V1 offered to presale purchasers.
I haven’t yet tried the thing but it looks interesting. It also looks reminiscent of quickly implemented Whisper or GPT-3 front ends released a couple years ago. I’d like to better understand the value you’re providing over Apple Intelligence provided APIs.
bobnarizes · 2h ago
Thanks a lot for the thoughtful feedback — I’ll definitely add a roadmap and make the presale terms clearer (e.g. version limits and minimum discounts). That’s very fair.
Regarding Apple Intelligence: you’re right, Apple is integrating more AI features at the OS level, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still quite limited. For example, semantic search are not really handled in a way that solves the problem. Fallinorg is built to work fully offline, across any file type, and with deeper control/flexibility than what Apple currently exposes through their APIs.
Put simply: if Apple ever does this well, great — but right now, I think there’s still a lot of room for a tool that is private, offline, and purpose-built for file management.
bobnarizes · 3h ago
Hi HN,
Fallinorg is a local macOS app that organizes files by their meaning, not just their name or type.
Problem: My Downloads and Desktop folders kept filling up with cryptically named, duplicate, or unrelated files. Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Solution: It uses Sentence Transformers (SBERT) to understand the content and context of files, then automatically groups them. It runs fully offline, so you can safely classify sensitive files (finance, medical, personal, etc.). On Apple Silicon, it parses, tokenizes, and categorizes a file in about ~1.2 seconds.
Current version: Supports .txt and .pdf files in English; I’m working on adding more formats and languages.
Looking for feedback on: Classification accuracy, speed, pricing ideas, and potential bulk operations or integrations.
I first launched a few weeks ago and have been rapidly adding features based on early feedback. Happy to answer questions and share implementation details.
cj · 1h ago
> Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
I feel like we’re entering an age where there is going to be increasingly more data in every day lives. (Just think about every chat in your ChatGPT account)
I guess one solution is to make everything searchable and try to organize everything. Or start treating things as ephemeral.
There’s probably no right answer. E.g. the difference between people who like having 50+ tabs open in Chrome, and needing features to organize and search tabs, versus people who treat tabs as ephemeral and short lived. I’m in the latter camp, but maybe just a matter of personal preference.
Has anyone coined the term “digital hoarding” yet? :)
cosmic_cheese · 53m ago
> Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
Hazel[0] works well for this, but automatic download folder cleanup feels a lot like it should be a stock Finder feature.
I'd recommend adding a video or gif that demonstrates how it works for organizing files. I kinda get it but would prefer to see it in action before downloading
bobnarizes · 2h ago
The video will be displayed at the top of the homepage. Since I’m hosting it on GitHub Pages, the server might occasionally be overloaded.
Given that this is a Mac app, have you considered taking advantage of the considerable amount of metadata for files (sometimes including full text content) made available by QuickLook? It could extend functionality for many file formats without requiring the app to be able to parse them.
bobnarizes · 1h ago
That's brilliant thank you I will investigate on this! I haven't thought about it.
IOT_Apprentice · 1h ago
This becomes interesting once you support epub, cbz, cbr.
vinnymac · 27m ago
Have you considered offering a Command-Line version as well? I would use something like this if it wasn't just an app and worked on Linux.
Would be neat if it studied your existing organizational patterns and tried to fit any changes to match it.
bobnarizes · 12m ago
If there were a CLI version, what would your ideal workflow look like? For example, would you want it to run as a one-off command on a folder, or as something you can integrate into cron/jobs/pipelines/...?
bapak · 2h ago
This is the kind of things Apple should focus on. Automatic file organization is right up Apple's alley, if they were ever to wake up the Finder's dev team from the 20-year hibernation.
ttul · 1h ago
I would guess that using an efficient embedding model to organize files is probably forthcoming in the next year or two.
Rather than moving similar files into folders, I can see the OS suggesting related files based on similarity to another file, or permitting search by concept rather than keyword.
dv_dt · 1h ago
I have has a couple of macs that randomly do not show "Recent" files in the recent folder so I take that as one signal among many that Apple is not paying a lot of attention to the experience in desktop environments beyond some minimal maintenance effort
r00t- · 2h ago
"Download Pre-Sale" is a bit sketchy. Why not just make a trial?
bobnarizes · 2h ago
I wanted to validate whether there’s real market interest and if people would actually be willing to pay for a tool like this, since it solves a real problem.
There's definitely a real market. I'd recommend adding office documents next. And then user defined categories.
bobnarizes · 1h ago
Thanks oidar, out of the big three (word, excel, PowerPoint) do you use another ms office documents?
Can you please elaborate more on how would you set up a user define category?
oidar · 45m ago
User can give example documents... have sbert test against dewey decimal classifications, or library of congress, also categories for home users (bills, manuals, bank documents, etc) and standard business categories (HR, production and so on). User verifies categories.
Onboarding would ask user about their work, research, hobby interests. LLM could generate word lists asking user if it matches their understanding. And so on.
Also open document format (CSV, TSV too).
Hamuko · 2h ago
It seems to be less of a "file organizer" than it is a "document organizer" since it only supports plain text and PDF files.
Personally, I don't think I have that many PDF and text files that organizing them manually would be a pain. The organization logic also is a miss for me, since I don't really organize my documents in buckets like "Legal & Contracts", but rather I have folders like "Car" (for my car's service records, bill of sale, owner's manual, etc.) and "Mortgage" (mortgage quotes, contracts, etc) that's housed under "Apartment".
Doesn't help that most of these documents are not in English.
bobnarizes · 2h ago
You’re right — at the moment it’s limited to text and PDFs, but this is just the starting point. Support for more file types, more languages, and full customization (so you can define your own categories, folder names, and destinations) will be rolled out next.
I’d love to learn from your use case: what are the top 5 file types you find yourself storing most often on your Mac?
Also, spaces in folders will absolutely break my legacy scripts on `~` at a future time when I re-run them.
Demo is not that convincing. Also, I need multilanguage support, and am not clear if OCR for PDFs before running is done by this. (Which again, needs beforehand knowledge of which language the document might be in?)
But, cheap, and pay once and offline. Will keep an eye on it.
onnxruntime has Swift bindings[1], consider using that. Or better yet use CoreML. You'll also be able to support x86 Macs with either of those.
[1]: https://github.com/microsoft/onnxruntime-swift-package-manag...
You could improve the situation by presenting some kind of roadmap and indicating the limit of presale or stating clearly the amount, or a minimum amount, of discount on V1 offered to presale purchasers.
I haven’t yet tried the thing but it looks interesting. It also looks reminiscent of quickly implemented Whisper or GPT-3 front ends released a couple years ago. I’d like to better understand the value you’re providing over Apple Intelligence provided APIs.
Regarding Apple Intelligence: you’re right, Apple is integrating more AI features at the OS level, but from what I’ve seen, it’s still quite limited. For example, semantic search are not really handled in a way that solves the problem. Fallinorg is built to work fully offline, across any file type, and with deeper control/flexibility than what Apple currently exposes through their APIs.
Put simply: if Apple ever does this well, great — but right now, I think there’s still a lot of room for a tool that is private, offline, and purpose-built for file management.
Problem: My Downloads and Desktop folders kept filling up with cryptically named, duplicate, or unrelated files. Over time, cleaning up and finding the right file became a pain.
Solution: It uses Sentence Transformers (SBERT) to understand the content and context of files, then automatically groups them. It runs fully offline, so you can safely classify sensitive files (finance, medical, personal, etc.). On Apple Silicon, it parses, tokenizes, and categorizes a file in about ~1.2 seconds.
You can download and test it now for free: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/tag/1.0.0-b...
Current version: Supports .txt and .pdf files in English; I’m working on adding more formats and languages.
Looking for feedback on: Classification accuracy, speed, pricing ideas, and potential bulk operations or integrations.
I first launched a few weeks ago and have been rapidly adding features based on early feedback. Happy to answer questions and share implementation details.
Alternative solution: treat your downloads folder as ephemeral and delete everything every few weeks.
I feel like we’re entering an age where there is going to be increasingly more data in every day lives. (Just think about every chat in your ChatGPT account)
I guess one solution is to make everything searchable and try to organize everything. Or start treating things as ephemeral.
There’s probably no right answer. E.g. the difference between people who like having 50+ tabs open in Chrome, and needing features to organize and search tabs, versus people who treat tabs as ephemeral and short lived. I’m in the latter camp, but maybe just a matter of personal preference.
Has anyone coined the term “digital hoarding” yet? :)
Hazel[0] works well for this, but automatic download folder cleanup feels a lot like it should be a stock Finder feature.
[0]: https://www.noodlesoft.com
You can also access the video directly here: https://fallinorg.com/assets/demo.mp4
Would be neat if it studied your existing organizational patterns and tried to fit any changes to match it.
Rather than moving similar files into folders, I can see the OS suggesting related files based on similarity to another file, or permitting search by concept rather than keyword.
That said, I’d love if you give it a try, here's the download link: https://github.com/taranntell/fallinorg/releases/tag/1.0.0-b...
Can you please elaborate more on how would you set up a user define category?
Onboarding would ask user about their work, research, hobby interests. LLM could generate word lists asking user if it matches their understanding. And so on.
Also open document format (CSV, TSV too).
Personally, I don't think I have that many PDF and text files that organizing them manually would be a pain. The organization logic also is a miss for me, since I don't really organize my documents in buckets like "Legal & Contracts", but rather I have folders like "Car" (for my car's service records, bill of sale, owner's manual, etc.) and "Mortgage" (mortgage quotes, contracts, etc) that's housed under "Apartment".
Doesn't help that most of these documents are not in English.
I’d love to learn from your use case: what are the top 5 file types you find yourself storing most often on your Mac?
Thanks for the feedback!