Shelf for students
Keep everything you learn this term.
Lecture slides. Screenshots of a whiteboard. PDFs. Notes typed fast. A diagram someone drew. A paper you'll need in six weeks.
Studying isn't only reading. It's being able to find the thing you read.
Where it starts
Where did everything for this essay go?
- 01Week 2Lecture slides on selection pressurePDF, 42 pages
- 02Week 3Whiteboard photo of the derivationRead as text
- 03Week 5Paper set as background readingHighlighted
- 04Week 8Your notes from the seminarThree paragraphs
- 05Week 11Essay question that needs all fourFound in one search
What comes back
One search in week 11 returns the whole term's material on selection pressure.
The problem
The material is never missing. It's just unfindable.
By week nine, coursework lives in slides, PDFs, photos of boards, notes and browser tabs, named things like lecture4final2.pdf.
Shelf keeps all of it in one memory you can search in plain language, including the text inside photos and slides.
- Whiteboard photos you can't read the filename of
- PDFs downloaded twice with different names
- Notes in one app, slides in another
- A paper you remember reading and not saving
Search a term's worth of material at once.
Shelf reads text inside images and PDFs on your Mac, so a photo of a board is as searchable as a typed note.
What you remember
Drawn on a whiteboard. Boxes and arrows. Something about encoding.
Clues Shelf can use
- Text read in the photo: “encoding”, “retrieval”
- Visual characteristics: a hand-drawn diagram, pale background
- Context: kept during week 3
- Text inside the image
- Words on the board are readable.
- Visual similarity
- A pale board with drawn boxes and arrows.
- Saved around this time
- Week 3, with that lecture's slides.
Kept nearby
- Slides, week 3 · Same lecture
- Seminar notes · Same subject
Through a term.
Your work is yours, and it stays on your Mac.
Coursework, unsubmitted essays and your own notes are read and indexed locally. Nothing is uploaded to make search work, and your work isn't used to train anything.
Optional features that call an external model are marked and off unless you turn them on.
Learning is easier when nothing you kept is lost.
Keep the whole term.
Slides, papers, boards and notes, searchable in plain language when the deadline arrives.
Keep exploring
Shelf V3 is out now
Shelf V3 is the current build. Shelf does not use automatic updates, so download the latest build here and install it over your current version.
This is intentional. Shelf is built around a local-first, privacy-focused philosophy. An automatic updater requires additional background processes, network connections, update infrastructure, and another system with permission to modify the app. We prefer to keep Shelf’s network footprint and background activity as small as possible.
Manual updates keep the process explicit: Shelf only checks the internet when a feature actually needs it, and you decide when a new version is downloaded and installed.