Release notes

Draw in a note, read it in another language, and know who said what.

A note stopped being only text and a tape. This release adds a full-screen sketch pad on both platforms, a saved translation that never overwrites what was actually said, and speaker labels on a recording with more than one voice in it.

• New

  Drawing, on the phone and in the browser

  The toolbar's pen opens a full-screen canvas: four instruments — pencil, brush, highlighter and fountain pen — eight ink colours, an eraser, and undo and redo the whole way back. The phone draws on Skia with a real finger or a stylus, the browser on a plain canvas, and both work the same way a camera does: sketch, confirm, and what lands in the note is a flat image. A dot grid sits under the strokes as a guide and is never part of what is exported.

• New

  The drawing is an attachment, so it behaves like one

  A finished sketch goes into the same private storage as a photo or a PDF, and the note stores its path rather than a link — so it renders on the other device, survives an expiring URL, and is deleted with the note when the trash is emptied. Nothing new to learn: it is a card in the document, and you can remove it like any other.

• New

  Translate a note

  Pick one of the nineteen languages — or type the name of one that is not on the list — and the note comes back translated, saved beside the original. It is written to its own column, never into the transcript, because a translation is a reading of what was said and not a replacement for it. Dismiss it and the note is exactly as it was.

• New

  Speaker labels on a recording

  A recording with more than one voice in it is split into turns, so a meeting reads as a conversation rather than as one long paragraph. The words are still Nia's; only the turn boundaries come from the diarizer.

• Improved

  Attachments open properly

  Images open into a full-screen viewer on the phone, video and audio play in place, and a document card carries its name, its type and a download. An image holds its own height while it decodes, so a note with pictures in it no longer reflows twice on the way in.

• Fixed

  iOS launches, and wears its own icon

  The app adopts the window lifecycle iOS 27 requires — the earlier build ran fine and showed a black screen over it — and both platforms' launcher icons and splash screens are now the product's own artwork rather than the template's.

The phone caught up with the browser, and it can be reached.

Everything the web app does to a note, the phone now does to the same note: the same editor, the same attachments, the same summaries, the same settings. And a device can be notified.

• New

  Push notifications

  Permission is asked once you are signed in — not on the login screen, before the app has done anything worth being notified about — and a token belongs to the handset rather than to the account, so a shared phone cannot put one person's notifications on another's lock screen. Signing out hands the token back.

• New

  Settings, and a profile inside it

  Recording language, sound, haptics, theme and the account itself in one place on both platforms, opened from the row that finally says who is signed in. A display name saves on blur rather than behind a button, and a profile picture can be taken, picked or removed — stored privately and signed per render, so a link that expires costs one request rather than leaving a dead image.

• Improved

  Pictures are resized, not refused

  A phone photo is four to twelve megabytes and the bucket stops at five, so the browser re-encodes to a square before it uploads and the phone crops to one in the picker. A HEIC with no MIME type — which is most of them, on a Mac — is now recognised by its name instead of being rejected under a line of copy promising HEIC.

• Improved

  Folders

  Create one, rename it, drop notes into it, delete it. The notes inside a deleted folder are not deleted with it.

Rich text, colour, and files inside a note.

A note stopped being a transcript in a box. The editor is a real document on both platforms, and it round-trips between them without losing anything.

• New

  A real editor

  Headings, bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, inline code and code blocks, links, bullet, numbered and task lists, quotes, dividers and alignment — from a sticky toolbar, a bubble menu on the selection, and the keyboard shortcuts you already know. Edits autosave after a pause; ⌘S forces it and ⌘N makes a blank typed note.

• New

  Text and highlight colour

  Eight hues each. A document stores the name of the colour rather than the colour itself, so a note written in red at night is still readable in the morning when the app is light — and the phone renders exactly the same hues.

• New

  Notes hold files

  Images, video, audio and documents, added from the paperclip, a paste or a drop onto the document, up to 50 MB each. They upload straight from your device to private storage, and the note keeps the path rather than a link.

• New

  Links have an affordance again

  Clicking inside a document places the caret, so pointing at a link now shows where it goes, with open, edit and remove. They are real links, so middle-click and copy-link-address work.

• Improved

  Every wait has a shape

  The workspace, the sign-in card and the note list draw the thing they are about to become — the same insets, the same columns — instead of a blank page or a spinner, and every one of them stops moving under Reduce Motion.

Finding a note, and asking about all of them.

• New

  Ask your notes

  ⌘J on the web, the top of the Library sheet on the phone. A question ranks your whole library, answers in prose, and cites the notes it used — every citation opens the note behind it. Nothing is written: a question is not an edit. When the question matches nothing, the answer says so rather than assembling one out of whatever was to hand.

• New

  Search — a palette, not a filter

  ⌘K searches every pane, including the two you are not looking at, and a hit from the archive or the trash says so on the result. Opening it moves the view as well as the selection. It matches on every word you have typed and finds “meeting” before you have finished typing “meet”.

• New

  Archive, trash, pin — all reversible

  Deleting and archiving are soft and undoable from a toast, and both are real views with per-row restore. Emptying the trash is the one action in the app that asks first, because it is the one that cannot be taken back.

• New

  Summaries and action items

  One click writes a summary, a list of actions and — only if the note has no title of its own — a title, in the language the note is in. A recording summarises itself the moment it is saved, quietly, because you did not ask for it.

Nia Notes, and a homepage whose demo is the real recorder.

The first public build: live transcription that keeps its tape, an account system of our own, and a site you can try the product on without one.

• New

  Live transcription in nineteen languages

  Speak and the words appear as you speak them. Pinning the language makes the decoder three to five times faster than auto-detect, and auto is there when you want it. Your browser opens the connection to Nia directly — the audio does not pass through our servers on the way.

• New

  The tape is kept

  Most voice notes throw the audio away once they have a transcript. Yours stays with the note and plays back from it, on both platforms. It is saved after the note is committed, so losing the recording can never cost you the transcription that produced it.

• New

  Three free takes, on the homepage

  The recorder on the front page is the recorder in the app, not a typewriter animation. Nothing said into it is written anywhere — no note, no transcript, no audio — and a take stops itself at 45 seconds.

• New

  Accounts, sent from our own mail server

  Sign up, confirm, sign in, forget a password and set a new one. Confirmation is six digits typed back into the tab that asked for them rather than a link that opens a different browser — the older shape ended at “check your email”, which is a screen with no way forward.

• New

  Your notes are yours at the database level

  Every row and every file is protected by row-level security keyed to your account, so a note you did not write is not something the service is able to return. Recordings, attachments and pictures live in private buckets and are signed one request at a time.

• New

  Light and dark, and sound

  One token set, two themes, and no component that hardcodes a colour out of either. Arming the recorder and stopping it are the same two notes in opposite order — synthesised, not sampled — and sound is a per-device preference.

• Improved

  Still to come

  Semantic search and batch summarising across a whole library, tags, two-factor authentication, and end-to-end encryption in which the server could not read a note even if it wanted to. All four are wanted; none of them is here yet.