Syft Notes 0.23.0

New

• The Syft look. Syft Notes now wears the colours of its pixel-s logo, light or dark: ink and paper, coral when you're recording, lilac for what's picked, sky for progress. The old teal is gone.
  • Buttons are the logo's square cells.
  • The recorder is the same on Mac and Windows.
  • The menu-bar dropdown (the tray on Windows) shows what's recording and your recent lectures.
  • Instead of twenty colour themes there's light, dark or follow your computer. A theme you picked before still loads, in the new look.
• Smaller updates that never ask for a password. Syft Notes now installs and updates a new way, so each update brings only what changed. You don't need to do anything: your next update moves you over by itself, and your lectures, settings and AI apps stay as they are.
  • On a Mac, the app is now called Syft Notes in your Applications folder (it was "Study Stash"). It renames itself the first time it opens.
  • On Windows, the first time Syft Notes is idle after this update, it moves to its new home and opens again within about a minute. Your Start menu entry, taskbar pin and start at login come with it.
  • On Linux, the download is now an AppImage.
• Gemini sign-in works with Google's code. Signing in to Gemini ends on a Google page with a code to paste. Syft Notes now has a box for it, right where you signed in.
• One "Are you sure?" Every question, like deleting a lecture, now opens over the window you're in. The safe button comes first, and Escape always answers no.

Fixes

• No more crash when you stop a recording a few seconds in (Windows with a graphics card). The speech models now take turns loading.
• Ask gives due times in your own time zone. An assignment due at 10:15 AM is no longer called overdue at 2:15 AM.
• The AI you sign into during setup shows Connected in Settings straight away, with no second Connect.
• Gemini's Google sign-in opens in your own browser, where you're already signed in, instead of an empty one.
• Canvas setup counts the classes it brings in, so "found" and what you get always match.
• Pressing Record on a nearly full disk says so, even with Syft Notes' notifications turned off, instead of doing nothing.
• With no AI chosen, Listen, review cards and exam prep say to choose one in Settings → Your AI, instead of pointing you to install Ollama.
• Ask says it plainly when something goes wrong: offline, it says Gemini couldn't be reached, and it never shows an AI's raw error text.
• Signing in to your AI: Claude's Sign in waits until you've really signed in again; after a plan problem, Try again lets you use another account; and on a Mac, Gemini's real reason for refusing a sign-in is shown.
• Downloading a lecture includes what you typed, even when no notes were written.
• Keep recording shows the lecture's class the whole time, not "Unsorted".
• Quick search takes you to the moment that matched, not the start of the passage.
• Attached files are listed under "Attachments", and typing "- " on a bulleted line no longer adds a second bullet.
• Removing a class no longer changes the other classes' colours.
• Settings only mentions Ollama once you choose it, and names the right model for your computer.
• Canvas: which courses come in as classes now follows Canvas's own course details, so a real class is never left out; a past assignment with nothing to hand in leaves "To hand in"; and on Windows an assignment shows "Open in Canvas" once.
• Exam prep knows the exam's day in your own time zone.
• Formulas keep their hyphens and plus signs together (k-means++).
• Math in a note's Definitions keeps its terms (no more "-means" for "k-means").
• "The microphone didn't start" no longer shows up with a working microphone while Syft Notes is busy, for example just after it opens.
• Listen no longer closes the app when a lecture plays to its end.
• On Windows, the background library starts again if it ever stops unexpectedly, so your AI apps can keep reading your notes.
• On Windows, an AI's change to a lecture can always be undone. Sometimes it wasn't recorded, so Undo couldn't bring the lecture back.
• A follow-up question asked the moment an answer finishes is no longer refused as "still answering".
• Phone photos go with the right lecture when you keep recording, or a planned lecture starts.
• Home no longer says "No notes yet" when Syft Notes couldn't reach your notes. It says what went wrong.
• A page that takes too long says so, instead of quietly showing nothing.
• "Rewriting…" no longer gets stuck when the library drops out for a moment.
• Moving or renaming a lecture keeps your edits. Changes you had made to a lecture's notes file could be lost when the lecture was moved to another class or renamed, and a move could write over a file of your own with the same name. Neither happens now.
• After moving a note, pressing Undo, and moving it again, the "Moved · Undo" message stays for its full time.
• Progress bars are a deeper blue, so you can see them at a glance.
• Class names stop at 60 characters wherever you type one, so a long name can't fail later.

Good to know

• On Linux, some systems need FUSE before an AppImage will run: install libfuse2 (or libfuse2t64 on Ubuntu 24.04). Until then, your current copy keeps working and says what to install.
• On a Mac, if you kept Study Stash in your Dock, its icon may show a question mark after this update, because the app is now called Syft Notes. 0.23.1, a few hours behind this update, fixes it by itself.
• On Windows, the installer still shows "unknown publisher" for now.
• Needs: on a Mac, macOS 15 (Sequoia) or later, Apple silicon or Intel; on Windows, Windows 10 or 11; on Linux, a desktop with PipeWire or PulseAudio.
• Updating: installed copies update themselves within a few hours, when nothing is recording and you aren't typing in a lecture's notes. To update now, use Settings → General → Updates → Update now.