Amber

Keep what you learn from fading — preserved like amber.
Concept flashcards, markdown notes, mermaid diagrams and a daily planner in one local-first macOS app,
powered by the AI CLIs you already pay for.

_{Everything lives on your machine as plain text. No server, no accounts, no API keys stored. English and Korean — AI output follows your UI language.}

Features

🧠 Concept flashcards Paste a raw AI Q&A transcript and your connected AI turns it into a reviewable card — title, summary, detailed note, tags — that you edit before saving. Confidence dots (● ○ ○) and a graduation ("learned") model keep the deck focused on what you haven't internalized yet. Augment any card later with a one-line instruction like "add example code".
📌 Desktop sticker widget An always-on-top mini window cycles through the cards you're still learning, lowest-confidence first — so new knowledge keeps reappearing until it sticks. Flip through cards, bump confidence, or mark one learned right from the widget.
📝 Markdown notes Real folders and files are the source of truth — no DB lock-in, friendly to git and external editors. Edit with a live side-by-side preview (⌘S), read with a floating scroll-spy table of contents, and render mermaid code fences inline. Select any sentence to ask the AI about it — answers are stored in a sidecar file and shown as Notion-style highlights, never bloating the note. AI drafting streams in live, and edits arrive as a git-style diff you review before applying.
📊 Mermaid diagram studio Keep ERDs, flowcharts and sequence diagrams as plain .mmd files organized in folders. Pan/zoom canvas (wheel zoom · drag pan · double-click zoom · fit-to-screen shortcuts), live render while editing, and automatic recovery from common mermaid syntax mistakes. Paste raw CREATE TABLE DDL and the AI turns it into a house-style ERD — solid lines for real FK constraints, dotted for logical ones, nullability, indexes and enum values carried in the column notes.
✅ Todos & day timetable A per-day checklist with unlimited nesting and drag reordering, a mini month calendar, and a Google-Calendar-style timetable: drag to create time blocks (15-minute snap), drag or resize to adjust, day/week/month views, and a live "now" line. Put any todo into the next free slot with one click, then let the AI write your daily report from todos and activity.

Also in the box

• Works fully without AI — notes, diagrams and todos never require a connection
• English & Korean — picked from your system language, switchable in Settings › Appearance. Generated notes, reports and diagram labels follow the same language
• Light / dark theme — follows the system, one-click toggle, synced across windows
• Safe deletes — files go to the macOS Trash, not into the void
• Saved prompts — store your frequent AI instructions and reuse them as chips
• One-click backup — Back up in Settings exports a consistent snapshot of your vault and database. Don't copy amber.db by hand: it runs in WAL mode, so a raw copy of a running database can miss recent writes

Supported AI CLIs

Amber connects to the AI CLIs you already use — it auto-detects them from your login shell PATH on first launch, and reuses each CLI's login session. No API keys are ever stored in the app.

CLI	Notes
Claude Code	Full support incl. streaming responses
OpenAI Codex CLI	Supported
Gemini CLI	Supported

How your data is stored

Local-first, files-first. Long-form content is plain Markdown/text owned by the filesystem; only volatile metadata (card status, todos, settings) lives in SQLite.

~/Library/Application Support/dev.jhzlo.amber/
├── amber.db                      # metadata — cards, todos, time blocks, settings
└── vault/
    ├── concepts/<ulid>/index.md  # concept detail notes
    ├── notes/**/*.md             # notes (+ *.comments.json Q&A sidecars)
    └── diagrams/**/*.mmd         # mermaid sources

Install

Amber is distributed as source — clone and build it yourself.

Requirements

• macOS
• Node.js 20+ · pnpm
• Rust (stable)
• Optional, for AI features: one or more of the CLIs above, installed and logged in

Run

pnpm install
pnpm tauri dev      # development
pnpm tauri build    # production .app

First launch shows an onboarding that auto-detects installed AI CLIs. The widget's transparent window uses macOSPrivateApi, so Amber is not App Store-eligible — which is fine, since you build it yourself.

License

MIT