The reviewer's reading room.
TextShelf for Mac is where a reader sits down with a stack of PDFs: highlight, comment, score against a rubric, and keep going without a network. Your files stay in your own iCloud. It is free, and it needs no account.
In TestFlight now. The App Store listing follows the beta. Ask for an invitation.
Made for reading, not for running a program.
A shelf is a document you own
Each shelf is a .textshelf bundle in your iCloud Drive: the PDFs, your highlights, your comments, your scores. Drag files in. Nothing is uploaded to us.
Highlights that survive re-reading
Highlights and threaded comments anchor to the text itself, in one of five categories, so they still land after the document changes. Orphaned notes are surfaced, never lost.
Score against a rubric
Build the rubric once, link highlights to criteria as evidence, and move each submission through your review states.
Private by design
No account, no tracking, no analytics. Sync between your own Macs rides your iCloud. TextShelf operates no server that receives your documents.
The program lives on the web.
Calls for entries, entrant sign-up, reader assignments, blind review, decisions, and billing all happen on textshelf.com. The Mac app is one reader's desk, not the office. A panel is rarely all-Mac, so judges who review in a browser lose nothing.
A packet out, the scores back.
Export a review packet from a shelf
From the shelf's Export menu on the web, download the review packet: every submission's file, named so the app can match them later.
Drop it on a shelf in the app
Unzip the packet and drop the folder onto a shelf. Read, highlight, and score offline, on a train, in a library, wherever the reading happens.
Bring the scores back
Judges who scored on the web are exported as a review inbox file the app imports as read-only external reviews, so one reader can see the whole panel beside their own notes. The flow is deliberately one-way: the web collects, the app reads.
Free, on every plan.
The Mac app is free for everyone, whether or not you run a program on the web. It is in TestFlight today; when the App Store listing is live, the link goes here. Ask for a TestFlight invitation, or see the web plans.