Zapp! A Tiny Interface for Big Intentions

There’s a very specific kind of digital exhaustion that doesn’t come from the big things — writing long papers, managing large projects, coding late into the night. It comes from the small stuff. Copying a quote. Moving a screenshot. Saving something to your notes. Jumping between apps just to do something that should take two seconds.

It’s death by a thousand context switches.

We all live in this friction. Not because we want to, but because the tools around us evolved around apps, not actions. Everything is optimized for containers, not flows. The OS doesn’t know what you were trying to do — just what app you’re in. And while AI is supposed to make things smoother, most of it sits behind clunky chatbots or aggressive automation that assumes way too much.

That’s what led to Zapp.

Zapp is a floating, on-demand, intent-native interface. You highlight or select something, click the Zapp bubble, type what you want to do in plain language — and poof, it’s done. No context switch. No hunting through menus. No digging through 6 tabs to get back to where you were.

Zapp is built to make the obvious easy.

Why This Exists

I didn’t start building Zapp because I love productivity tools. I started because I kept losing ideas to the cracks between tools.

Let me give you a real example: I was reading a research paper on transformer efficiency. There was a single line I wanted to save for later — maybe for a blog post, maybe to tweet, maybe to drop into my notes. I paused, copied it, opened Obsidian, pasted it, then realized I needed to tag it. Forgot my tagging scheme. Switched to another tab to check. Got distracted. Closed the paper.

End result: I did everything but save the idea in a way that’s actually usable.

Multiply that by fifty times a day, across different types of content — text, images, links, code snippets, calendar events — and you get a system that eats your attention while pretending to help you manage it.

That’s the tension Zapp is designed to cut through.

What Zapp Actually Is

Zapp is not a note-taking app, not a clipboard manager, not a universal inbox. It doesn’t replace your apps. It replaces the steps between them.

Here’s how it works:

1. You select something — text, image, link, etc.

2. A tiny floating bubble appears next to your selection. That’s Zapp.

3. Click it. A minimalist prompt opens up.

4. You type your intent, in natural language:

   • “Save to blog ideas”
   • “Send this to Jay on Telegram”
   • “Summarize and archive”
   • “Copy to phone clipboard”
   • “Add to reading list with tag ‘llm’”

5. Hit Enter. Done.

No setup, no mental tax. Just one action across boundaries.

Zapp is intentionally small. The point is not to build a new interface paradigm. The point is to get out of your way.

The Interface Is a Door, Not a Destination

The Zapp bubble is like a little door that appears next to anything you care about. And when you open it, you’re basically saying: “Here’s the thing I’ve selected. Let me tell you what I want to do with it.”

Zapp listens — not just to the command, but to your patterns. Over time, it can start to autocomplete common intents, suggest defaults, or remember that “blog ideas” always go to Notion, while “save quote” means append to your Markdown file in Obsidian.

But the critical thing is: you still say it. Zapp doesn’t try to guess too early. It waits for you to tell it what to do. That way, the intent is always yours.

We didn’t want to build another tool that shouts, “I got this!” and then files your idea in a black hole. Zapp’s job is to be humble, quick, and completely reversible.

Why It’s Not a Chatbot

You might be wondering: Why not just use ChatGPT to do this?

Because a chatbot isn’t designed for instant action in a flow. It needs prompting. It requires opening a new window. It doesn’t know what you’re doing or looking at unless you feed it context manually. Even the best browser-integrated assistants don’t feel native — they feel like you’re still switching modes.

Zapp is not a chat. It’s an interface. And because it’s right there next to your selection — no tabs, no mode-switching — it feels like part of the environment. Not a different place. Not a different frame of mind.

On-Device, Private, Fast

Zapp runs locally. No login. No cloud sync. No "accounts." No uploading of your data to some mystery server to “improve results.”

If you type “send to Rahul,” that intent is executed with the services already on your machine (or your phone, if Zapp is synced). You’re never sending the content somewhere for analysis.

This isn’t just about privacy — it’s about performance. The delay between selecting content and acting on it needs to be milliseconds, not seconds. That’s only possible if the intelligence lives where you are.

Also, being local makes Zapp yours in a real way. It learns your shortcuts. It’s not trying to generalize across millions of users. It’s specialized on one: you.

Cross-Device Is Table Stakes

One of my favorite things about Zapp is this: You can zap something from your browser on your laptop and immediately have it show up in your clipboard on your phone.

No AirDrop. No intermediary apps. No opening Google Keep and syncing it to get one quote. It just shows up. The way it should.

We're using a privacy-preserving relay model under the hood (PGP + local tokens), but the user doesn't need to know that. You zap. It's there. This opens up some really exciting use cases — like starting a draft on desktop and finishing it on mobile, or collecting quotes during a lecture and syncing them live into a notes doc.

Why I Think This Category Needed to Exist

Here’s the honest reason Zapp exists: I got tired of having powerful devices that still needed me to do all the glue work. I don't want to write another Zapier automation or IFTTT rule every time I want to save a quote. I don’t want to manage another inbox for “saved items” I’ll never revisit.

What I really want is a system that lets me act on my intentions in the moment I have them, without friction, and without remembering some workflow I set up six months ago.

Most apps today want to organize your life. Zapp just wants to move your intent forward one step at a time.

What’s Coming

Right now, Zapp lives as a browser extension. It’s still in active development, but here’s what’s next on the roadmap:

• Desktop tray app (for full cross-app coverage)
• Mobile companion app (for clipboard sync, media capture, etc.)
• Plugin system to define your own intents and targets
• A memory layer (optional) to trace what you’ve zapped and retrieve it
• "Smart defaults" that infer probable intents based on your history

Call to Action, or Lack Thereof

Not asking you to install it today.
You probably can’t yet. And that’s okay.

But if you’ve ever hit that weird pause — when your brain knows what it wants to do, but the interface just doesn’t — that’s the moment Zapp is built for.

Not a search bar. Not a shortcut. Not a clipboard manager. Something simpler. More... obvious.
Like a bubble. A line of text. And just enough magic to get out of your way.

Postscript: If you’re the kind of person who builds custom workflows, has way too many notes scattered across systems, or has ever said “I wish I could just…” — you’ll probably like Zapp. I’d love to hear how you’d want to use it.
Or, better yet, what you wish existed in that moment right before you forgot what you were doing.

Let’s build for that.