The desktop Brain app

The Brain is now a real Mac app: a signed, notarized DreamLayer.dmg you double-click, living in the menu bar, serving a cinematic control panel in its own native window. Underneath it is the same open Python server (host-python/src/dreamlayer/ai_brain/) — anything in this chapter also works from a plain python -m dreamlayer.ai_brain.server on any OS, in any browser.

Every screenshot below is the actual panel, booted from this repository and captured headlessly with a seeded index.

Getting it

• Download: the site's "Download for Mac" buttons point at the latest notarized dmg in the public dreamlayer-releases repository. CI builds it on every version tag: py2app bundle, every nested library signed, hardened runtime, Apple notarization, stapled.
• On first launch it mints a pairing token, starts the server on port 7777, begins the folder watcher, brief scheduler, and calendar sync, and sits in the menu bar (no Dock icon): a status dot, Open panel, Sync now, and Incognito. State lives in ~/.dreamlayer; the app never writes inside its own bundle. A login LaunchAgent is one flag away.
• Open panel opens a native window (a WebKit view onto the same localhost page); off macOS, or if WebKit is unavailable, it falls back to your browser. Same HTML either way.

The app layout — nine views

The panel is now a real application layout: a left sidebar, one view at a time.

Home

What's connected (Brain, model, cloud, incognito, phone, index) polled live, a first-run nudge when upgrade packs are available, and the Plan card: "Free - local & open" — with the honest framing that every feature in the app is free, and a working notify-me waitlist for DreamLayer Cloud. Home also carries "Your memory is a file" — the panel's Memory Grep card: where the SQLite memory store lives, a one-click read-only browse (Datasette, local-only), and an export-a-copy button, so owning your data needs no terminal.

Your day

The morning brief (compose on demand; the extended long brief adds sections — Today, Due, Waiting on you, Messages spelled out, Yesterday — cached at GET /dreamlayer/brief/long/latest and rendered by the phone's Brief screen), the agenda with macOS Calendar sync, the unified people list (the dossier registry merged by name with the glasses' social memory — relationship, notes, owed-favor chips, a "met on Halo" badge), and Reminders.

Intelligence

Folders it reads (server-side browser, drag-and-drop, filters, reindex), Ask your stuff, and the Model card — now multi-provider: the local model is Ollama with per-model status and one-click pulls, and the cloud tier speaks seven provider presets across three wire formats — OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, OpenRouter, Ollama-local (key-free), the DreamLayer Cloud preset, and Custom for any OpenAI-compatible endpoint (LM Studio, llama.cpp, and friends). Beside the cloud wiring sits the trust centerpiece, "What the cloud can see" — rendered live from GET /dreamlayer/cloud: what the server currently holds (with no cloud configured, honestly nothing) and the three things it can never see — your memories, who you are, what a figment means. See DreamLayer Cloud.

Connections, Privacy

Pairing (one QR), the cloud and incognito switches, and message relay. The Privacy view keeps the token, the egress counter, backup/restore, and erase — plus the purge contract: the phone's "Erase all memories" now reaches all the way here (POST /dreamlayer/memories/purge), dropping every saved place while deliberately leaving people and reminders, which are mirrors of their own surfaces.

Plugins

Installed plugins with their permissions, what this Brain can grant, per-plugin remove, and sideloading through the same validation gate — plus the door for people who don't write code: "Build a lens →" opens the Lens Builder served by this very Brain at /dreamlayer/build, where deploys land one click away. Phone installs are real now too: the phone fetches the package from the registry and sideloads it here, surfacing this Brain's actual verdict.

Capabilities

The live capability report: all 42 optional capabilities grouped by tier, each with a status dot (active / off / missing / unsupported / external), an impact rating, and either a one-click Turn on / Turn off or the exact pip install to get it — plus the five capability packs (Total Recall, Sharp Ears, Clear Eyes, Guardian, Operator) with honest download sizes and one-click install on a source-run Brain. The sealed .dmg ships two starters baked in: LAN auto-discovery (zeroconf) and Ed25519 signing (cryptography); it cannot pip-install into itself and says so.

Learn, Advanced

Learn is the in-app explainer gallery — eight real HUD cards (Juno, brief, truth gauge, face recall, object recall, proactive memory, caption, veil) as tappable chips. Advanced holds the activity feed and Health & schedule (quiet hours, brief hour, retention).

Running it from source

pip install -e "./host-python[profile-mac]"   # or plain -e ./host-python
python -m dreamlayer.ai_brain.server --token <token>   # port 7777, any OS

A bare run binds 127.0.0.1 only (the secure default). To pair a phone over the LAN, pass --host 0.0.0.0 — and if no token was set, the server mints a random one and prints it for pairing; an unauthenticated network-visible Brain is no longer possible.

The dmg packaging lives in host-python/packaging/ (py2app setup, launch shim, entitlements) and .github/workflows/build-macos-app.yml; the menu-bar app and native window are ai_brain/menubar.py and webview_window.py, both cleanly absent off macOS.