I Built a macOS App Because I Was Tired of Fixing My Own Typos

I write a lot. Emails, proposals, Slack messages, code comments, commit messages — you name it. And I make typos in all of them.

Not the kind you catch immediately. The kind that slip through because you're focused on what you're saying, not how you're spelling it. The kind where you hit send, look at your screen three seconds later, and feel a small but very real wave of shame.

For years, my workflow for fixing text was ridiculous:

1. Select text
2. Copy it
3. Open ChatGPT / some grammar tool in the browser
4. Paste it
5. Wait
6. Copy the result
7. Go back to the original app
8. Paste it over the old text
9. Realize I lost whatever was in my clipboard before

Nine steps. To fix a typo.

At some point I stopped and thought: I'm a developer. This is a solvable problem.

What I Built

WunderType is a macOS menu bar app. It sits up there quietly, doesn't take up dock space, and does exactly one thing well: you select text anywhere on your Mac, press a keyboard shortcut, and the text gets corrected in place.

No browser tab. No copy-paste dance. No losing your clipboard. Select, shortcut, done.

It uses the macOS Accessibility API to read the selected text from whatever app you're in — Mail, Slack, VS Code, Terminal, Notes, Chrome, anything — sends it to an AI model, and replaces it with the corrected version. If the Accessibility API doesn't work in a specific app (looking at you, Chrome), it falls back to clipboard-based replacement and restores your original clipboard afterward.

The whole thing is less than 5 MB. Native Swift.

The AI Part

Here's where it gets interesting. I didn't want to force anyone into a subscription or lock them into one provider. So WunderType gives you two options:

Ollama — completely local, completely free. You install Ollama (also free, open source), download a model like Gemma 3 4B, and WunderType talks to it on your machine. Your text never leaves your computer. No API key, no subscription, no limits.

OpenAI — if you want GPT-4.1 quality for more complex writing tasks, you bring your own API key. It's stored in your macOS Keychain — the same encrypted storage your Mac uses for passwords. Direct connection to OpenAI, no intermediary server on my end.

I wanted people to choose based on what matters to them: privacy and cost, or raw output quality. Both work. Both are fine.

See It In Action

Here's the before — a paragraph full of typos, grammar mistakes, and awkward phrasing:

One keyboard shortcut later:

Same text. Every error fixed. Tone preserved. No app switching.

It's Not Just Grammar

The app ships with five built-in modes:

• Correct Grammar — fixes spelling, grammar, punctuation. Doesn't touch your tone.
• Improve Writing — goes further, enhances clarity and flow.
• Make Concise — strips the fluff. Good for when you've written three paragraphs where one would do.
• Make Formal — rewrites in business tone. For when you need to sound like you're wearing a suit.
• Make Casual — the opposite. For when the suit is too tight.

But the real power is custom prompts. You can create unlimited ones — each with its own keyboard shortcut. Translate to German. Summarize. Rewrite for a specific audience. Turn notes into an email. Whatever transformation you need, you can build it.

And here's the result — the entire text translated to German with a single shortcut:

The Privacy Thing

I'm genuinely proud of this part.

WunderType has zero analytics. No telemetry. No crash reporting. No Sentry, no Firebase, no Crashlytics. No backend server. No accounts. No data collection of any kind.

If you use Ollama, your text literally never leaves your Mac. The AI runs on your hardware, processes your text on your hardware, and the result stays on your hardware.

I built it this way because that's how I'd want it as a user. A writing tool sees everything you type — emails to clients, messages to friends, notes you'd rather keep private. That data shouldn't go anywhere I can see it. So it doesn't.

Why It Has Its Own Domain Now

WunderType started as a page on wunderlandmedia.com. A side project living under the agency umbrella.

But it's not really an agency project. It's a standalone product. It has its own identity, its own audience, its own reason to exist. Keeping it as a subpage of my agency site was like keeping a grown kid in the basement — technically functional, but not right.

So now it lives at wundertype.com. Its own home. $8.99 on the Mac App Store.

The Honest Part

Is this going to replace Grammarly? No. Grammarly has thousands of engineers and a browser extension ecosystem I can't compete with.

But Grammarly also doesn't work in your Terminal. It doesn't work in VS Code without an extension. It doesn't run locally on your machine with zero data leaving your computer. And it definitely doesn't cost a one-time $8.99.

WunderType is for people who want something small, fast, private, and system-wide. People who live in their text editor or terminal and want corrections without context-switching. People who care about where their text goes.

If that's you — check it out.

If it's not — that's fine too. I built it because I needed it. Everything else is a bonus.