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Fair point! I've actually thought about that before; I've tried to be extremely clear in the project's README with a disclaimer that this is a non-commercial hobby project and is not affiliated with the official Raycast team in any way.

The name is just for identification, as the project's goal is to be a compatible, open-source alternative for the Linux community, a platform they don't currently serve.

That being said, I'll definitely keep it in mind. Thanks for bringing it up!


That shouldn't matter. They might even have a Linux version in the works, given they are doing Windows now. They are within their rights to ask you to get rid of it. You also seem to be using their brand assets like the logo. I get your intention and love what you were able to accomplish but if you intend for this to grow, you are better off doing this now.


> They are within their rights to ask you to get rid of it.

Only the logo and name. The functionality side should be perfectly fine, there are oodles of precedent for reversing a workable program from someone's commercial API: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_LLC_v._Oracle_America,_....


True, but a cease & desist will likely include the demand that they cease all operations, and they might be willing to fight that in court, possibly seek damages, etc however likely or unlikely it is that it would hold up. They can pay for a few hours of a lawyer's time to intimidate the OP.


But prolly can still go after if you resemble it closely enough in terms of looks? I get the API point though, thanks.


Eh, probably not. There are any number of things that look like it. The appearance is the natural outcome of its functionality.


It should matter that it's a non-commercial hobby project. It's nice to see the light pushback.


They use react-native, no? One of the main issues is that all react-native implementations are half baked and dead.


The launcher UI is AppKit while the extension APIs allow third-party developers to write them in TS and a React subset. They have a custom renderer for React that turns that into AppKit primatives. So similar in concept but custom and specific to their usecase.


That makes sense -- I'll go figure something out, thanks for the explanation!


“Just for identification” is the point — the name Raycast identifies their product, and it’s their trademark. You can’t use it without permission, even with a disclaimer in the readme.


> The name is just for identification

That’s precisely what they’d dislike about it. You’d be creating “brand confusion” by using their trademark in your own name. You couldn’t make “My Cola (Recreating Coke)” without getting an expensive and inconvenient letter from their legal team.


It's worse than that -- "Recreating Raycast" is just the blog post title, the project is called "raycast-linux".


It's also worse than that. It uses the Raycast logo directly in the launcher itself. Which is odd because just above this, OP says:

"I've actually thought about that before; I've tried to be extremely clear in the project's README with a disclaimer that this is a non-commercial hobby project and is not affiliated with the official Raycast team in any way."

Clearly a bright kid, but that's quite a fumble. Among my ideas for being extremely clear about not being affiliated with Raycast I would have to say using their name and using their logo together would be the worst way to communicate that.


Oh dear. Yeah, that’s guaranteed to end badly.

OP: please do change this ASAP so that the Raycast gang doesn’t protest the really neat project you’ve made!


I've had to look into for my own side projects, you don't want to include brand names, trademarks, etc in your own projects' names and you should be very wary about how you use them in your marketing if you choose to do so at all.


I propose cast-a-ray (sounds like castaway and goes along with FOSS wink+tonge-in-cheek style). Or maybe waycast?


I'm sorry, but in my accent (speech impairment?) "cast-a-ray" sounds almost like "castrate", so I can't back your naming idea. :P


One of the reasons people take notes is that you’re processing the information while taking the notes. This is removing that important step, and I would argue it means these notes are less effective than manually taking them in the first place


I absolutely agree, taking notes yourself is a key part of learning. This isn’t trying to replace that. It’s more of a backup for when lectures are long, fast-paced, or you just can’t stay fully engaged the whole time.

The idea is to support the process — help with review, fill in gaps, and make it easier to revisit and actually use what was said in class.


In my opinion, HDR is another marketing gimmick -- the average layman has no idea what it means, but it sounds fancy and is more expensive, so surely it's good.


Back in 2010, this "require[d] a decent graphics card"

Now, my phone's integrated graphics can run it very smoothly. Moore's law at play.


I remember this running well on a low end macbook pro back then.


Here I am running just fine on a 3 year old phone


Everyone forgets what machines are capable of if you actually optimize. This game did everything shown here in real time on phones 14 years ago https://youtu.be/JDvPIhCd8N4


Have you heard of KKrieger? So yeah, if you optimize enough, machines can do quite cool stuff!


I think KKrieger required pretty beefy specs for the time. It's a different kind of optimization they were aiming for (code size Vs execution speed)

Although a friend of mine ran it on an integrated intel GPU recently and it performed great.


It's running fine (not too smoothly but ok) on my 8 years old Xiaomi MI6.


My old phone is running it at exactly Uncaught Error: This demo requires the OES_texture_float extension fps


Same on a not-old Pixel 8


Works well for me even on a 50€ (fifty euro!) chinese tablet I bought a few weeks ago.


The in suit battery driven hamdwarmer he invented it!


I think one of the main selling points of Cursor, as an investor-backed company, is that it's cheap. For $0.04 per prompt, I can get Claude 3.7 Sonnet to use 25 tool calls. In comparison, one of the images in the article shows either one prompt or a conversation that cost $7 (a third of Cursor's monthly subscription).


Very true! but sometimes the $0.04 and 25 tool calls, cannot get you to the right solution no matter how many times you re-prompt. And that's where Cline has been better for me.

It's almost like hiring. Would you pay a premium for the very best dev, or would you pay less for an average dev. :)


This is really cool! Just a small nitpick: on a low-powered device, the hero globe is really laggy (it's fine if I scroll past it, though).


Even with it working I initially thought it was trying to convey some meaning, but it's just a bunch of logos not really doing anything.


And it doesn't work at all if you have WebGL disabled, just shows "Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information)."


Thanks for letting us know - made a Linear ticket


Have you seen duckdb? https://duckdb.org/

It's basically what you're building, but more low-level. Really cool, to be honest -- serves the same market too. Do you have any significant differentiator, other than charts?


TextQuery actually uses DuckDB under the hood :) DuckDB is no doubt an excellent piece of software already. The differentiator is that GUI client is just a good lever to make many things easier.

In context of TextQuery: you can use tabs you can work on multiple queries. With Table editor you can edit multiple field values at once. During import, you can have better control over what the final table would look like (select/deselect columns, define data/time format etc.)

Again, it's a personal preference. Some people swear by psql, and some can't live without TablePlus/Postico.


They're also developing a gui: https://duckdb.org/2025/03/12/duckdb-ui.html


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