You're taking meeting notes wrong. This Mac app knows it.

I spent last Tuesday watching a product manager fight a transcript tool.

She was scrolling through 47 minutes of AI-generated text, hunting for the part where someone actually decided something. The tool had captured every um, every awkward silence, every "let me circle back."

But not the decision. That's the fundamental problem with meeting transcription.

Enter Trace. It's a new offline Mac app that launched on Hacker News this week, and it does one thing differently: you can flag moments during the call.

Most people think you need full transcripts to remember meetings. That's wrong. According to a 2023 Microsoft study, workers spend 57% of their time in meetings just re-reading or searching for key info.

The real value isn't recording everything. It's capturing the right things.

Trace runs entirely offline on your Mac. No cloud, no privacy concerns. During a meeting, you hit a keyboard shortcut to mark a moment — boom, it's saved with context.

A Bloomberg analysis from earlier this year showed corporate spending on meeting tools hit $18 billion in 2025. Most of that went to Otter, Fireflies, or built-in Zoom transcripts.

But here's the twist: none of those let you intervene mid-call. They're passive. Trace is active.

The founder posted on HN that the app uses Apple's on-device speech recognition — so everything stays local. No subscription, no data leaving your machine.

This matters more than you think. Privacy isn't just a feature; it's the entire architecture.

When your meeting notes live on a cloud server, someone else controls them. When they live on your Mac, you do.

The counterargument is obvious: offline transcription is less accurate than cloud models. Apple's speech recognition has improved dramatically, but it still stumbles on jargon or accents.

Trace solves this by letting you correct flagged moments after the meeting. You don't need perfect transcription for everything — just for what matters.

That's the insight that most tools miss. They optimize for completeness. Trace optimizes for relevance.

A New York Times piece from last month noted that knowledge workers now spend 23 hours a week in meetings. That's up from 18 hours in 2020.

We're drowning in talk. What we need are lifelines.

What this means for you: if you're still recording every meeting and hoping you'll find the good parts later, you're doing it wrong. The future is selective capture.

Trace is free in beta right now. The HN thread shows real users already swapping tricks for custom flagging shortcuts.

I'd bet the next wave of productivity tools will follow this pattern — less recording, more marking. The tools that let you think while you talk, not search after.