Just a small note that I’ve decided to start off the new year by officially ending development of Hypatia, an application I developed that was supposed to mimic the “quick look” functionality you’d get on macOS and other operating systems. It would give you summary of any term you put in the search box, as well as a definition and a portion of a Wikipedia article (if one existed). It also supported automatically pulling terms from the clipboard, and could be triggered by a keyboard shortcut for quick lookup functionality.

I’ve marked it as end-of-life for a few reasons:

  1. I feel much less comfortable shipping queries off to various APIs when you can get the same, or better, results locally now.
  2. There are better apps that replace it, namely Wike and Wordbook. There’s also Alpaca if you’re not opposed to LLMs that use local models and processing.
  3. It’s so strongly tied to English-only services that internationalizing it is nearly impossible.
  4. There just aren’t many people who ever used it.

Thanks to everyone who used Hypatia over the past few years!