Desktop app 0.2.0 — it reads your documents now
The 0.1.0 notes said plainly that the desktop app did nothing the web app could not already do — it was the same interface in a window, and it existed because a desktop app can go where a browser tab cannot. This release is those three places.
Download
SignsOfAI-Desktop-0.2.0-win-x64.zip — 79 MB, Windows 10 (1809+) or 11, 64-bit.
sha256 36c321d94fe1c862d8d56f1d8c6ac5f119bf3b73cc7be90ac55524213253829f
Unzip the whole folder somewhere and run SignsOfAI.Desktop.exe. Keep the folder together: the .exe needs the wwwroot next to it. No .NET install needed; the runtime is bundled. WebView2 is required and ships with Windows 11 and any Windows 10 with a current Edge.
It reads documents now
Open a file instead of pasting a passage: PDF, DOCX, ODT, EPUB, RTF, Markdown and plain text. The extraction runs in the app; nothing is uploaded and no converter service is involved.
This is the clearest thing a browser tab cannot do. The web app would have to ship a PDF parser to every visitor before they had any use for one, so it does not — SignsOfAI.Documents is referenced by the desktop host alone.
It scans a whole folder
Point it at a directory and it analyses every document it recognises, one at a time, with progress you can watch and cancel. A file it cannot read reports itself and the scan continues — a folder of two hundred submissions should not be ended by one corrupt PDF.
It reaches a local model
Ollama on localhost is a CORS wall from a web page and an ordinary HTTP call from here. The app detects the models you already have and uses them for the rewriting pass. As always, nothing leaves your machine — the difference is that now the model does not have to either.
It measures predictability by itself
Perplexity is computed by a model running inside this window rather than by calling a server. It is the same engine and the same calibration the hosted API uses — the library was extracted from that service precisely so the two could not drift, because a desktop app quietly reporting a different number for the same paragraph than the website does would be worse than not reporting one.
The weights download once, with progress, into %LOCALAPPDATA%\SignsOfAI\models — not next to the executable, because Program Files is not writable by the user running the app and that failure would land on exactly the people least equipped to diagnose it.
Two honest notes
It is bigger: about 79 MB against 64. That is not bloat, it is the four features above — an ONNX runtime, a PDF parser and a tokenizer's native libraries that the 0.1.0 build simply did not contain.
Windows will still warn you. The executable is not code-signed, so SmartScreen shows "Windows protected your PC". Click More info → Run anyway. We are applying to the .NET Foundation partly to fix this: a certificate is the one thing on their eligibility list this project cannot solve on its own. Until then, the source is right here and dotnet publish src/SignsOfAI.Desktop builds the same thing on your own machine.
What changed behind the download
This zip was built by desktop-release.yml on a clean runner from the tagged commit, with the tests run first — the 0.1.0 zip was uploaded from a developer's laptop. The checksum above is published, and attached as SignsOfAI-Desktop-0.2.0-win-x64.zip.sha256, so you can verify that what you downloaded is what this repository says it is:
Get-FileHash SignsOfAI-Desktop-0.2.0-win-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256Reproducible builds and Source Link landed in v0.2.1 alongside this, as part of a .NET Foundation application. Docs/dotnet-foundation.md tracks the project against every one of their criteria, including the one still unmet — which is the code signing above.