CHANGELOG

What changed, in plain words.

Including the things we got wrong and fixed. Newest first.

1.0.0 LAUNCH PENDING

Kepter started as a cloud product: your things copied and held across three cloud providers, with a restore promised if you ever lost your Mac. That plan changed. Kepter reads what you save where it already sits and keeps no copy of its own, which means there is nothing to restore if the original is gone. The code changed months ago. Some of the words in the app took longer to catch up, and this release is largely that catch-up, done in the open.

• Settings used to say your saved things were "tied to this account, so it can be restored on a new device." The printed Recovery Kit said your things would come back and pointed at a Restore button that was never built. Neither was true. Both now say what is actually real: the Recovery Kit decrypts Kepter's memory of what you saved, not the things themselves.
• Kepter can now check for its own updates and install them, so a mistake we ship gets fixed automatically instead of sitting in every copy until someone notices and re-downloads by hand.
• Voice memos are transcribed on your Mac or not at all. Before this, a Mac without on-device transcription would quietly send the audio to Apple's servers instead, which contradicted the point of keeping everything local. An untranscribed memo is still saved and still findable by name.
• Scanned PDFs (the kind with no real text underneath, just a picture of a page) are now read page by page, not just the cover. Old scans already in Kepter get upgraded the next time they're touched.
• The minimum requirement is now macOS 26 on Apple Silicon, and Kepter says so up front instead of installing anyway. Before, the app would install on older Macs and quietly fall back to plain text search with none of the plain-language finding it's built around. Now it says no rather than pretending to work.
• Sign in with Apple is gone from the direct download at kepter.app. Apple does not support it outside the App Store, so it built, signed, and notarized cleanly and then silently failed to open. The direct download never needed an account anyway; a purchase is tied to a private code instead, shown and copyable in Settings, carried across reinstalls and new Macs through iCloud Keychain.
• Pricing is final: free for 30 days, no card required. After that, $2.99 a month, the founding price, kept for life even after the price rises to $4.99. Or $39 once, for life.
• Settings now says your plan status plainly: days left in the free month, the price, or that your access has ended. Never a dead button pretending to work.
• Added: delete your account from inside the app. It's complete the moment you tap it, because the server never held a record of you to begin with.
• The search box in the main window now answers, not just filters. Ask a plain question and the same fact card that used to live only in the quick search palette now appears above your results in the window too.
• A Stack's totals used to only work in the demo screenshots; a real Stack you built opened to a bare, unsorted list. Now it shows its own real total, or an honest count of how many of its items had a number to add when they didn't all have one.
• The menu bar now shows what Kepter actually saved today, and the last thing it kept, so you can tell it's working rather than just sitting there.
• A review pass caught and fixed several real bugs before they shipped: a failed save could look identical to an empty library and invite a reset that would have wiped it for real; a blocked folder could leak memory over time; sign-in would have failed in every release build; the sandboxed build could not open a network connection at all; and the purchase key was being read from a place a double-clicked app never has, which would have shipped billing broken from day one.

0.1.10 AUGUST 12, 2026

• Fixed: plugging in a second display could leave Kepter stranded in the middle of the screen with its edge handle detached from it. Both now recover automatically when your displays change.

0.1.9 AUGUST 9, 2026

• The mint color is now used consistently for the one action that matters most on a screen. It used to be pink in three places that didn't agree with the rest of the app, including the loudest button in the whole reader.

0.1.8 AUGUST 9, 2026

• A more reliable download build, with fewer moving parts behind the scenes.

0.1.7 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed: the Settings window could fail to appear, or get left behind when you switched desktop Spaces. It now opens reliably from anywhere and stays with you across every Space.

0.1.6 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed a launch crash on a freshly set-up Mac. If Kepter never opened for you on a clean machine, this was why. Every release from here on is smoke-tested against a fresh, quarantined install before it ships.

0.1.5 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Fixed: closing the full window didn't always hand you back to the small edge drawer. It does now, every time.

0.1.4 AUGUST 9, 2026

• Kepter now lives as one handle on the edge of your screen. Click it and the drawer slides out; open the full window and the handle steps aside until you close it again, instead of two separate things both trying to be on screen at once.
• Settings opens reliably from anywhere in the app, and Pause now lives there too, not only in the menu bar.
• Space-bar previews now use Kepter's own preview panel, so they behave the way they do in the Finder: tap space to peek, double-click to open fully, space or Esc to close, wherever your keyboard focus happens to be.

Early August 2026

Work in the days before the first numbered build.

• The full window opens and stays open reliably, instead of occasionally failing to appear or closing itself.
• The minimum requirement moved up to macOS 15.
• The separate Private room was retired. Marking something private now happens quietly, right where you're looking, instead of needing its own space to manage.
• Pinning something now shows it in a Pinned section immediately, instead of waiting for the next refresh.

July 2026: building Kepter

Kepter's first weeks. Summarized rather than itemized: this was daily, sometimes hourly, work.

• Kepter began as a cloud backup idea, copying what you saved across three cloud providers so it would survive losing a Mac. That plan was cut. Version 1 became local-only: the cloud code was disconnected, and the app and its copy stopped claiming things were "safe in two places" once that was no longer true.
• The part of Kepter that reads and understands what you save moved on-device: Apple's on-device text recognition and on-device models, instead of a call to a server.
• Find, Stacks, and a way to mark things private were all built: search in plain words, related things grouped into Stacks with their own math, and a way to keep sensitive things out of the ordinary view.
• Every common kind of thing you save gets read properly: PDFs open as real, scrollable documents; images show at full resolution instead of a blurry stand-in; audio and video get on-device transcripts; Pages, Keynote, and Numbers documents are kept without breaking their format.
• The app runs sandboxed, asking permission for each folder the way the Finder does, and deleting something in Kepter sends it to the same Trash macOS uses everywhere else. Recoverable, not gone.