Tether · in development
You said you’d do this.
The same app is work, and it isn’t.
Blockers judge by application, so they block the documentation you need and wave through the wrong project. Tether judges the window against the sentence you typed.
| You said | What’s on screen | A blocker | Tether |
|---|---|---|---|
| edit the launch video | Premiere Pro: colour grading — YouTube |
Blocked | On task 0.53 |
| edit the launch video | Try not to laugh: cat compilation — YouTube |
Blocked | Off task 0.03 |
| research how rivals position themselves | "shelf app" — Search / X |
Blocked | On task 0.93 |
| research how rivals position themselves | Home / X |
Blocked | Off task 0.34 |
| finish the settings panel | InvoiceRow.swift — Billing |
Allowed | Off task 0.28 |
Nineteen labelled cases, three runs each, all within their acceptable verdicts. About $0.002 to check.
It asks three things.
Four short strings go out — your goal, the app name, the window title, and whatever background you gave it. No contents, no keystrokes, no screenshots.
Serves the goal
A probability, not a yes. Two thresholds, and the band between them is unclear — no nudge, and the time is reported on its own rather than filed as either.
Kind
So the account at the end is grouped by what you were doing, not by which app was frontmost.
Pull
A feed gets a shorter rope than a reference page. Forty-five seconds instead of ninety.
⌥Space, anywhere.
A line appears beside the pointer. Type the thing you sat down to do and it starts tracking — over another app, over a full-screen video, without taking your keystroke.
Then it stays out of the way. When you have genuinely drifted — ninety seconds of it, not one bad glance — a small panel shows your own sentence back to you next to what you are doing instead. One nudge, then five minutes of quiet.
It reads two things.
The frontmost application, and the title of its focused window. That is the whole of it.
Password managers
A password manager’s window title is the name of an account. Those apps are recorded by name only — the title is never sent, never cached, and never written to disk. Add your own to the list.
Titles can be switched off
Leave app names only. The judgments get coarser and the app says so rather than pretending otherwise.
Sessions stay local
Plain JSON in your Application Support folder. The key lives in your login keychain, not in a preferences file. Privacy policy