Hourglass

Native macOS search and analytics for your iMessage history.
Everything runs locally — nothing is uploaded, sent, or shared.

  

Changelog  ·  MIT License

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What it does

• Sub-second search across every message you've ever sent or received — operators like with:Henry, last:7d, type:image, regex, AND, OR
• Spotlight-style hotkey panel — ⌃⌥Space from anywhere (rebindable in Settings)
• Dashboard analytics — top contacts, sent/received over time, top group chats, brushable timeline
• Optional natural-language search — local Qwen 2.5 via MLX, fully offline after a one-time model download
• Signed, notarized, sandbox-friendly — clean Gatekeeper install, Full Disk Access is the only permission

Build it yourself

brew install xcodegen xcbeautify create-dmg
git clone https://github.com/ammesatyajit/hourglass.git
cd hourglass
./scripts/generate.sh     # XcodeGen → Hourglass.xcodeproj
./scripts/build.sh        # Debug build → build/Build/Products/Debug/Hourglass.app
./scripts/test.sh         # ~500 tests, ~1 second
open Hourglass.xcodeproj  # or just iterate in Xcode

Requires macOS 15+ and Xcode 26+. Apple Silicon recommended.

Or hand the repo to a coding agent and say "set this up locally and run the tests." The project is XcodeGen + SPM with a hermetic test suite (synthetic fixture, no real data), so most agents figure it out.

Contributing

PRs welcome. Run ./scripts/test.sh before sending; everything should be green. For larger changes, file an issue first so we can talk about shape.

The one hard rule: no new network calls. Local-only is the core promise. The one existing outbound is the optional first-run Hugging Face model download for NL search — and it's gated/opt-in.

License

MIT — fork it, audit it, ship your own version.