Openote 1.0.2

What's new

• Group anything with anything: Select elements then Ctrl+G, now they move together.
• Your pen's side button works, and lassoes by default with the ability to customise it.
• Highlight in any colour, not only the one yellow.
• Equations take formulas: F = m·a asks for m and a, and names the answer.
• Duplicate a page from the right-click menu, filed right beneath it.
• Touch input is more reliable: navigating around and zooming by touch is much more smooth, although still far from perfect.
• Try Openote in a browser at openote.org/demo.

All of it, in more detail

Group anything with anything. Select a text box, a graph, a picture and
some handwriting, press Ctrl+G, and they move, copy, cut and delete as one.
Ctrl+Shift+G takes them apart again, and both are on the right-click menu and
the button above the selection, for a tablet held with a pen in the other hand.
Every stroke is now its own mark, so group the strokes of a word and it is one
thing to pick up. A group is a relationship, not a container: nothing moves
when you make one or undo one, and you can still type into a grouped box.

The lasso selects, and stops rearranging. It used to weld everything it
caught into one new piece of handwriting, for good. Now it selects what it
caught — boxes, pictures and graphs too, not only ink — and changes nothing
else. What you lasso stays selected when you let go, and the pen drags it: a
press inside the selection moves it, a press anywhere else draws.

Your pen's buttons do what you told Windows they were for. The side button
never reached Openote at all — Flutter reports every pen touch as a plain
click. It is read directly now. A button your driver maps to the eraser
erases; the other kind lassoes by default, and Settings can make it Select,
Eraser or nothing. The eraser shows a faint ring of how far it reaches, even
while the pen hovers. Settings › Pen and touch test shows exactly what your pen
and fingers report, so a problem can be answered with evidence.

Highlight in any colour. The highlighter has a picker, like the text
colour beside it, and a highlight and a text colour are separate, so a word can
have both. In dark mode your colour is softened rather than swapped, so the
words stay readable and the colour is still yours. The text colour picker
opens with Automatic at the top, which is the way back to the default.

Equations take formulas, not just functions of x. F = m·a, v = u + at
and c = √(a² + b²) used to be refused with "unknown m". Evaluate is now a
button beside Graph; it asks for each letter in the order you wrote it and
names the answer — v = 14, not a bare = 14. There are prefilled sums,
integrals and limits, every symbol answers to its own name (\integral,
\infinity), and selecting part of an equation and pressing ( wraps it.

Pictures behave like pictures. Click one to select it; Backspace beside
one deletes the whole picture instead of leaving a long code behind; and a
picture keeps its own line while you type around it. A picture dropped on
empty canvas makes a box you can write under, and SVG drawings are drawn as
drawings, sharp at any zoom and in an exported PDF.

Touch. Dragging a finger across a box scrolls the page instead of
selecting its words. Two fingers zoom even when one lands on a box, the zoom
holds the point you started on, and a pinch that slides also pans.

Settings is one group at a time — Appearance, Writing and drawing,
Connections, Help, About down the left — with every description read again and
most of them shortened.

Smaller things that add up.

• Rename is on the right-click menu for pages, sections and groups.
• A new page takes its ruling, grid and paper from the page it is filed next to.
• Each notebook opens on the page you left it on.
• Board cards can be edited and deleted; a flashcard resizes with its box.
• Any text style combines with any other — bold and a colour, italic in bold.
• Dragged boxes keep up with the cursor at every zoom level.
• Clicking a page's title, or a box while another is open, takes one click.
• Paste a box you cut into another box, and its writing lands at the caret.
• An AI helper can now edit, move and delete, not only add — and Ctrl+Z undoes it.
• The folder picker names which Google Drive account each drive belongs to.
• "N devices" counts devices in use, and a crash no longer adds one.
• Moving or erasing older handwriting is no longer undone by the next save.

Before you update

Page templates are gone. A layout you want again is a page you keep, and
Duplicate copies it. Nothing you saved has been deleted.

A passcode now keeps AI helpers out entirely — a locked page is not listed,
searched, read or changed by one, even while you have it open. A page set to
ask "every time it is opened" can be unlocked again; before, it never could.
Passcodes are still a beta lock on Openote, not encryption of the file.

For the technically curious

Handwriting is now documented byte for byte in the ink specification, with a
worked example, so any program can read it without Openote. Strokes are stored
together and come back apart: 200 separate strokes take 26 KB, the same as
when a word was one object, instead of the 123 KB they took apart.

The web demo found two bugs no desktop could show. The browser had no zlib to
inflate a stroke, and dart2js turns integer bit operations unsigned, so every
backwards stroke decoded as a line about 268 million pixels long. Both are
fixed with code that gives the same answer on every platform.

Over 4,000 automated tests run on every push.

Downloads

• Windows: openote-*-windows-x64-setup.exe — the installer.
  Installs for your user only, so it never asks for an
  administrator password. (Prefer no installer? The
  …-windows-x64.zip is the same build — unzip it anywhere and run
  openote.exe from inside the folder it extracts.)
• Linux: openote-*-linux-amd64.deb on Ubuntu/Debian/Mint, or
  openote-*-linux-x86_64.rpm on Fedora/RHEL/openSUSE. Double-click
  it, or install from a terminal — then Openote is in your
  applications menu like any other program. To open a notebook from
  your file manager, double-click the Open this notebook file
  inside the notebook's folder; whether double-clicking the folder
  itself opens Openote depends on which file manager you use.
  (Neither package fits? The .tar.gz runs from anywhere: extract
  it and run ./openote inside. It has no package manager to ask
  for libmpv, so if you want video to play in the page, install
  mpv-libs on Fedora or libmpv2 on Ubuntu/Debian yourself —
  the app says so too.)
• macOS: openote-*-macos-universal.dmg — drag Openote to Applications.

---

Both warnings below are expected. Here is exactly why.

Openote is not code-signed. Signing certificates cost a few hundred
dollars a year each, and while the project is this young that money
is better spent on nothing at all. Nothing about the warnings says
the software is unsafe — only that we have not paid to tell your
operating system who we are. Every build here is produced by the
public workflow in this repository, from the tagged commit, and you
can read both.

Windows: "Windows protected your PC"

Click More info, then Run anyway. SmartScreen shows this for
any installer it has not seen often enough to have an opinion about.

macOS: "openote is damaged and can't be opened"

Gatekeeper quarantines unsigned downloads. After copying to
Applications, clear the flag once:

xattr -cr /Applications/openote.app

Your notes never leave your machine either way — see the project's
local-first principles.

What's Changed

• Machinery to publish the browser demo by @icmric in #29
• Route /demo from the site Worker, and keep PDFium in the demo build by @icmric in #30
• The PDFium check was reading base64 and looking for a word by @icmric in #31

Full Changelog: v1.0.1...v1.0.2