Hello everybody! This is the first alpha release of Sage.
Sage is a free and fully featured chat tool for AI language models, powered by your own inference server or API credits. You can use most common provider APIs, or connect to OpenAI style API endpoints for local/custom model support.
Sage was designed specifically for PowerPC Macs. It supports OS X Leopard and the unofficial PPC Snow Leopard alpha. It is a very lightweight application and should work fine on most G4/G5 Macs.
You can find the first release of Sage (0.2a) on my GitHub. I plan on releasing the source code at some point in the near future as well.
Releases · doctashay/sage
An AI chat frontend for PowerPC Macs. . Contribute to doctashay/sage development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Notable features:
- Supports OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, and custom OpenAI-style APIs (LM Studio etc.)
- Markdown formatting support with code syntax highlighting (supports 12 languages)
- File and image attachment support - upload images, PDFs, binary files, source code, etc. for analysis
- Image generation support
- Conversation history with import/export
- Tunable model - adjust system prompt, temperature, etc
- All features free to use, no ads, no paywalls
You will need to install curl through MacPorts (for now) or use barracuda's prebuilt curl installer before using.
Snow Leopard curl: http://macos-powerpc.org/PPCPorts/curl-SL-8.13.0-uni.zip
Leopard curl: http://macos-powerpc.org/PPCPorts/curl-Leopard-8.13.0-ppc_ppc64.zip
Work in progress features include:
- Streamed response support
- Agentic code editor with support for reading and modifying files directly on the system
- Support for more APIs (OpenRouter, Groq)
- Web search support
- Tunable image parameters
- Video generation support
I built Sage after being underwhelmed with some of the other AI frontends for PPC Mac, gating features behind paywalls, etc. Sage has provided a huge usability boost to my PowerPC Macs and closes a big part of the web browsing gap - I've used it for fetching recipes, editing code, as a general copilot when installing and using other applications, for generating icon images.. there are a lot of great use cases out there. Since it has the ability to run local models, I've mostly switched away from using APIs, so my main PC's GPU is subsidizing most of my requests. It works quite well using any of the available API providers however and in my testing most models are fairly cheap to use for basic tasks ($0.02-0.20 USD per query, model dependent).
Sage should have great compatibility with G4s and G5s, and has been tested by me on Leopard and Snow Leopard using an iBook G4, PowerBook G4, iMac G4, and PowerMac G5. If you're using a G3 with a hacked Leopard installer, it might work, but good luck - this is an app with features targeted for end-of-life era PowerPC devices. I probably will not be able to implement Tiger (or lower) support in the future due to being dependent on too many Leopard-specific APIs.
Eventually with web search support you'll be able to fetch up-to-date news, retrieve information from forums or other online resources, and cite sources for accuracy.
I'm releasing this alpha with the intention of gathering feedback and bug reports. If there is a feature you'd like to see added, please let me know and I'll see what I can do!
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