Connections
A saved thing is rarely just a thing.
It belongs to a moment. It belongs to a project. It belongs to a chain of thoughts you were having that week.
Shelf keeps those belongings. That's the graph: not a diagram to admire, but the reason a search returns a memory instead of a file.
01 · It belongs somewhere
Three sentences that explain the whole idea.
It belongs to a moment: a day, an hour, a mood, a deadline.
It belongs to a project: the work that made you keep it in the first place.
It belongs to a chain of thoughts: the thing before it and the thing it led to.
Storage records none of that. A graph records all three, and recall becomes a matter of following one edge to the next.
02 · Kinds of connection
Fourteen reasons two things belong together.
Some of these are recorded the moment you save. Some are read out of content. Some are still being built, and we say which.
- Same day
- Things saved within the same hours are almost always about each other.
- Same application
- Everything you grabbed out of one tool, tracked without tagging.
- Same website
- One source, followed across months of saves.
- Same project
- The strongest link most people have, and the one folders keep breaking.
- Same document
- Pages, excerpts and screenshots that all point at one PDF or page.
- Same folder
- Where you did file something, Shelf keeps that as a signal rather than the whole truth.
- Same company
- Names read from content, drawing a thread through unrelated-looking saves.
- Same person
- Who sent it, who's in it, who it's about. Early, and improving.
- Same meeting
- A concept we're building toward: a moment with several artefacts hanging off it.
- Similar appearance
- Screenshots that look alike, from layout to density.
- Similar read text
- Text Shelf read inside images and PDFs, overlapping across items.
- Similar title
- Near-duplicates and revisions, held together instead of scattered.
- Shared entities
- Products, places, tools and names that recur across your library.
- Shared keywords
- The plain version of the same instinct, still useful, never sufficient alone.
Live today: day, application, website, project, document, folder, similar read text, similar title and shared keywords. Growing: people, companies, meetings, shared entities and visual similarity.
Nothing here is filed. It's simply remembered in context.
03 · The graph
One screenshot, and everything it belongs to.
04 · What it's for
The graph is invisible, on purpose.
You won't be asked to maintain it, name it, or admire it. It shows up as better results, as the related items beside anything you open, and as older material returning when it becomes relevant again.
It's built on your Mac, from your library, and it stays there.
Next thought
When connections repeat, they stop being links and start being collections.
See semantic collectionsIf this idea interested you…
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.