A native macOS desktop app. Three layers inside: a Tauri (Rust) shell, a local Node server bound to 127.0.0.1 only (port 5181 by default; if it is taken the app picks a free one and remembers it), and a React interface rendered in that window as a page on localhost.
The idea: you paste a link to a clip, the app downloads the file to your own disk, pulls the metadata, identifies the music, and drops a card onto an endless canvas. Cards play on the board itself. Everything stays with you.
There is no account, no sign-up, no subscription and no trial. A licence key, entered once on first launch, is the only thing between installing ReelPile and using it. It is verified on your own machine and never contacts a server, so it works offline and cannot be switched off from outside.
First launch
A welcome screen, Welcome to ReelPile, reading "Start a new board, or bring across a library you already have", with Start fresh and Import library (the second copies boards and video files from another install; nothing is moved or deleted).
The app also seeds one board called Examples with four short clips — Harbour at dusk, Stairwell, top down, Pour, macro and Ridge line, wide. They ship inside the installer as files, not as links, so the board plays offline the first time it is opened, before anything has been pasted and before the machine has been asked for a network.
All four were rendered from scratch for this purpose and belong to ReelPile outright: there is no other rights holder and no licence to observe. That is deliberate. The demo board used to be four YouTube links fetched on first boot, which was the one place the app reached for YouTube before the user had pasted anything at all — and stock footage was considered and rejected, because those licences permit reuse but are silent on bundling a static copy inside a paid installer. Footage rendered here has nothing to be silent about.
Each of the four carries an invented author handle and invented view, like and comment counts, so a fresh board looks like a working one rather than four bare rectangles. That is honest only because the footage underneath is ours: no real creator is misattributed and no real engagement is faked on anybody's behalf.
Something here wrong, or something missing? Tell us — the manual is corrected against the app, not the other way round.