What “private” should mean
Privacy is useful when it changes the working experience. Palm is designed for a founder who wants to shape an idea on the Mac before turning it into a public launch. Keep the rough notes, positioning questions and early decisions close to the project. Avoid adding a customer database, team workspace or complex setup before the idea has earned one.
Private does not mean isolated from reality. You still need to speak to people, test the words and make the result easy to try. It means the messy part of thinking does not need to become a public feed.
A better input than “make me an app”
Start with a sentence that names a person, a recurring problem and the useful outcome. “Make an app for runners” is a category. “Make a quiet Mac tool that turns a runner’s weekly notes into a next-session plan” is a direction. Palm can use that direction to propose a small feature boundary, a first screen sequence, a store promise and a launch checklist.
“Make a private Mac app for indie developers who check sales across App Store and payment dashboards. It should produce one daily revenue view and one question to investigate.”
What the first output should contain
A useful first pass has five parts: the audience and their moment of need; a promise that can be understood without a demo; the smallest workflow that proves the promise; a short list of things deliberately left out; and a distribution test that can run before a full build.
This prevents a common failure mode of AI app builders: a convincing interface attached to an unclear reason to exist. The interface is evidence only when it helps somebody complete a job.
How to test the brief
- Read the promise aloud and remove adjectives that do not change the outcome.
- Ask three people who recognise the problem what they would do today instead.
- Turn one repeated workaround into the first workflow.
- Publish a short explanation and measure a meaningful action, not just impressions.
Where Palm fits
Palm is for the step between an idea and a disciplined first build. It can help generate a product direction, launch assets and a practical test. It does not replace customer conversations, engineering judgement or App Store review. That boundary is a feature: the goal is a sharper start, not an inflated promise.
Create a free Palm launch brief
Local model or connected AI provider?
When Palm is configured to use a local model through Ollama, the prompt and model processing stay on your Mac, subject to the local software and network setup. If you connect a hosted API provider, the prompt is sent to that provider to generate a response and is subject to its terms and data controls. Check the selected provider before entering confidential material.
What “local-first” does—and does not—promise
Local project files mean your generated source code is kept in your Mac project folder. They do not automatically mean every optional integration is offline: model APIs, source control, app-store services, or publishing connections may communicate with their respective providers when you choose to use them. Review those connections individually.
A practical privacy checklist
- Choose a local model for sensitive early exploration when your Mac can run it well.
- Use hosted models only when you are comfortable with the prompt being processed by that provider.
- Keep credentials out of prompts and generated source; use each service’s secure credential store.
- Review exported files and connected integrations before sharing or publishing.
Palm is designed to give Mac users control over that choice—not to imply that a cloud API is local. For the actual workflow, read the one-sentence app guide.
If an idea is commercially sensitive, the simplest protection is not to send it anywhere you have not chosen deliberately.
Questions people ask
Does private mean offline?
Not always. It means you know where your prompts and files go. Check what any tool sends to a model provider.
Do I need an account to use Palm?
No.
Where are my projects stored?
As files on your Mac.
Can I use the code elsewhere?
Yes. It is a standard Xcode project.