Joseph Humfrey

Joe's blog

Joseph Humfrey is co-founder of inkle & Founder of Selkie Design

Introducing Substage: A natural language command bar for Finder

18th March 2025

I made a Mac productivity app! 🎉

Substage puts a command bar underneath your Finder windows and lets you use natural language to convert media, manage files, perform calculations, and more!

Although Substage translates natural language into Terminal commands, I’m hoping it finds a broader audience beyond developers. The number one use case I’ve found for it is converting media—quickly resizing images, re-encoding videos etc. But it can also handle file management, metadata inspection, and general tasks like web requests and calculations.

How It Works

1️⃣ Converts your natural language request into a Terminal command.

2️⃣ If it’s potentially risky, it asks for confirmation first.

3️⃣ Runs the command and summarises the output for you.

I'd love to hear what you think! You can grab it right here, and take it for a spin:

👉 Try Substage for free

What About Hour by Hour?

In case you're wondering, my iOS time-planning app Hour by Hour is also still in development!

More Posts

The Selkie Design blog is now Joe's blog

14th October 2025

Substage Predicts...

31st July 2025

Substage ❤️ Setapp

2nd July 2025

The Shortcut to integrating Private Cloud Compute into my app

20th June 2025

Substage update: Bring Your Own AI & One-off purchase out now!

25th March 2025

Hour by Hour has been named!

13th January 2025

Playful visual design for indie apps

3rd December 2024

Exploring CloudKit and CKSyncEngine for my SwiftUI App

16th November 2024