Lecture Studio

A native macOS app for teachers and speakers who write slide decks from their reading sources.
Decks are Marp Markdown in a folder you own; the writing assistant runs on Oberik.

lecture.studio · Download · Oberik setup guide · Guides

---

Lecture Studio opens a git repository of courses and talks. You drop readings, papers, notes, and old slides into a sources/ folder, ask for an outline, and get a Marp deck that cites those sources. Then speaker notes, practice questions, and an instructor guide. Everything stays as plain files on disk, so the decks work with any Marp toolchain and any editor.

• Decks are Markdown. One .md file per deck, rendered live with Marp Core. Export to PDF or PowerPoint with marp-cli or any Marp tool.
• Every claim cites a source. Sources are indexed per course and per unit; the assistant searches them and cites them under the answer instead of writing from memory.
• Notes, questions, guide. Speaker notes slide by slide, retrieval questions, and an instructor guide from the same conversation.
• Conversations stay. Every course and every unit keeps its own chat history on your Mac; reopen an earlier conversation from the History button and carry on where it left off.
• Courses across terms. A course is a folder of numbered units. New terms copy the old one and redate it; terms can be compared unit by unit.
• Presenter mode. Audience window plus a presenter window with notes, the next slide, and a break countdown.
• Overflow scan. "Check slides" renders every slide and flags text past the slide edge and missing images.
• Your files, your folder. The app reads and writes a folder you choose. Commit, push, and pull from the git bar; nothing is stored in a cloud by the app.

Requirements

• macOS 15 Sequoia or later on Apple silicon.
• An Oberik project for the assistant (free to create; the assistant bills through the model provider you attach). The app works without it as a Marp editor and viewer.

Install

Download the DMG from the Releases page or from lecture.studio/download, drag Lecture Studio into Applications, and open it.

Builds from 0.1.1 on are signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so the app opens without a Gatekeeper warning.

Verify a download with:

shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/LectureStudio-<version>.dmg

The checksum of each release is listed on its release page.

Connect the assistant

1. Create a project on oberik.com and attach a model provider key. Oberik asks for a chat model and an embedding model.

2. Apply the project setup from a checkout of this repository. It sets the system prompt, the capabilities, the app's origin, and uploads the skill pack:

   npm install
   cp .env.example .env        # fill in OBERIK_PROJECT_ID and OBERIK_PROJECT_KEY
   npm run oberik:setup -- --dry
   npm run skills:publish
   

3. In the app, open Settings (⌘,) → Agent, paste the project id and key, and press Test connection.

The step-by-step version with screenshots is at lecture.studio/setup/oberik. The app never sends the project key to a web view; it mints short-lived tokens in Swift and hands those to the hidden agent page, which runs under the origin http://127.0.0.1:3005.

Build from source

You need Xcode 16 or later (Swift 6 toolchain) and Node.js 20 or later.

git clone https://github.com/ekremcet/lecture-studio.git
cd lecture-studio
scripts/build.sh          # bundles the JS core into Sources/LectureStudio/Resources, then swift build
swift run                 # launches the app
swift test                # StudioCore unit tests

scripts/build.sh -c release makes a release build. Open Package.swift in Xcode to work on the Swift side; run npm run web:watch while you work on the TypeScript side.

Project layout

Path	What it is
Sources/StudioCore	Foundation-only library: repo access, course and term metadata, templates, scaffolds, file index, sources, git, Oberik control plane. Unit-tested.
Sources/LectureStudio	The SwiftUI app: pickers, workspace, chat, presenter mode, git bar, sheets, settings.
Tests/StudioCoreTests	Tests for StudioCore.
web-core/	The browser-side core (Marp render, overflow scan, CodeMirror editor, Oberik agent bridge), bundled with esbuild into three WKWebView pages.
themes/	The Marp themes the app ships: ytu-lecture and ytu-talk.
skill-pack/	The Agent Skills plugin the assistant runs with, plus the system prompt. Uploaded to your Oberik project by npm run skills:publish.
scripts/	build.sh, package.sh (signed DMG, optional notarization), oberik-setup.ts (project setup as code), build-skill-pack.sh, make-icon.sh.
Packaging/	Info.plist, entitlements, and the app icon.

The material repository

Any folder that is a git repository works. The app reads and writes this layout:

studio.json                 presenter profile (name, contact lines, language, teaching style)
sources/                    shared sources, searched in every conversation
<course>/                   one course: studio.json, syllabus.md, AGENTS.md, sources/
<course>/week3/             one unit: week3-slides.md, week3-instructor-guide.md, assets/, sources/
<talk>/                     one talk: <talk>.md, assets/, sources/, studio.json with kind "talk"

The unit word is per course (week, session, module, lecture, day, or part). Existing folders keep their names.

Releases

Releases are built with scripts/package.sh <version>: release build, .app bundle, Developer ID signature with the hardened runtime, DMG, and, when NOTARY_PROFILE names a notarytool keychain profile, notarization and stapling. The script writes dist/LectureStudio-<version>.dmg and an unversioned dist/LectureStudio.dmg for the stable download link, and prints the SHA-256. Both files are attached to the GitHub release.

Contributing

Issues and pull requests are welcome. Keep the Swift side in Swift 5 language mode (the package sets it), run swift test before a pull request, and keep the JS bundle self-contained under web-core/.

License

MIT.