Every build that reaches testers gets a few lines here — what arrived, what was fixed, what you'll notice while working. No implementation detail.
How a new build reaches you
TestFlight tells you by itself. If it doesn't, open it and tap Update next to NotaBene. The build you have is shown in the app under Settings ▸ Welcome.
build 1166
Recording: choose the microphone, see the sound, transcripts in your region's language
Choose the microphone while you record. The microphone button in the recording bar lists Automatic — it follows AirPods in and out, as before, and names the microphone it means right now — and every other microphone the device has. The recording carries on in the same file, and the choice is remembered for the next one.
A red wave shows the sound as it records. Five seconds of nothing and the wave lies flat and grey and the bar says No sound — check the microphone — so a silent recording is noticed during the meeting, not after it. A recording with no speech in it says so on its card.
Automatic transcription follows your region's language. Czech in the Czech Republic, whatever language the iPhone is shown in. A Czech meeting used to come out as an English transcript. Not any more.
On iPhone the recording bar takes two rows, so the title and the time read whole at any text size. With larger text the time used to break a digit to a line.
A web address pasted or typed into a note becomes a link — blue, underlined and tappable.
build 1097
Cropping a picture: draw the frame, then crop
Cropping works the way it does in Preview. In a picture's markup tools, choose Rectangular Selection (the dashed rectangle) and drag across the picture: a frame with handles appears, and nothing is cut yet. Drag a handle to adjust it, or drag inside the frame to move it, then choose Crop Selection at the end of the bar. On the Mac, Return or ⌘K crops too, and Escape takes the frame away.
Save with the frame still up, and the picture is cropped first.
A cropped picture stays cropped. A crop used to vanish: after another note and back, the whole picture was there again. Not any more — on the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad.
A picture that lost its crop that way opens as the note shows it, ready to be cropped again.
build 607
A User Guide, in the app and on the web
NotaBene has a User Guide. Choose Help ▸ NotaBene Help (⌘?) on the Mac, or Settings ▸ Help ▸ User Guide on any device: eleven chapters, about sixty pages, every feature explained step by step for the Mac, the iPad and the iPhone. It is part of the app, so it works offline, and its search finds a word typed with or without accents.
The same guide is on this site, at User Guide — handy for reading on one device while you try things on another.
Every section of Settings has a ? that opens the page about what it sets — at the bottom right on the Mac, in the bar at the top on the iPhone and iPad.
The guide and the app speak Czech, too, and the Czech is tidier: the coloured boxes have one Czech name everywhere instead of sharing a word with blocks, the app addresses you the same way on every screen, and the Apple Watch uses the app's own words. A PDF's annotation summary page is now written in the app's language.
build 478
The list of callout types draws clean
Every row in the opened list of callout types is its own name and nothing else. Some of them kept a second line reading Callout — a word the heading above the list had already said — and those rows were the ones the arrow keys appeared to walk straight past. They were the same rows drawn twice from two different lists; each list now has rows of its own, so nothing is left over from the other one. ↑ and ↓ reach all thirteen, and the list scrolls to keep the highlighted one in view.
build 477
A callout's title is its own colour, and / offers which kind you want
A callout's title is the colour of its own type again. Reopening a note painted every callout title in the colour set for Heading 4 — which is each machine's own setting, so the same block came out red on a Mac and blue on an iPhone while its box, its bar and its icon stayed right. That is why it looked like a fault in syncing; it never was one, and what is written into the note was correct all along. Notes that are wrong now put themselves right the next time you open them.
Typing / and choosing Callout offers the type. It used to insert a Note, and the other twelve kinds could only be reached by knowing to type their names. It now opens all thirteen — the same list the ⊕ button shows, in the same order — and typing narrows it. /warning still goes straight to the warning block in one step, and the types you have made yourself in Settings ▸ Callouts are in the list too, for the first time.
build 476
An attachment can be dropped between any two paragraphs
The blue line stops jumping over whole paragraphs. Where a dragged file would land was worked out from the other attachments alone, so all the writing between two of them belonged to the card below it: a page of text had one target at the top of it and the line skipped the lot. Every block of the note is now a target of its own — the top half of it means above, the bottom half below — so a file goes between any two paragraphs, above a callout or under one.
A callout and a block of code stay one block each. They are one drawn box, so a file lands above or below it and never inside it.
Dragging to the very top or the very end still works as it did. Above the first block is the start of the note, below the last one its end.
build 430
One chooser for everything, PDF through the system print panel, and Info that opens where you are going
Choosing a notebook, a tag or a note is one list with a filter. Type and the list narrows, so a hundred notebooks are as quick as five. It is the same chooser everywhere — moving a note by swipe, by its menu or over a whole selection; linking a note from the editor or from a calendar event; picking the note a task from a message goes in. On iPhone and iPad it is a full-height sheet with ✕ and ＋ in the bar and the filter field at the bottom, where iOS puts search; on the Mac it is a window with the search field under the title and ＋ New Notebook… beside Cancel. ↑ and ↓ walk the list and Return takes what is highlighted, without leaving the field. A note's row carries its notebook and its date, so two notes of the same name are told apart.
Move a note into a notebook that does not exist yet. Every list of notebooks now ends with New Notebook…: name it and the note goes straight into it. Before, filing a note somewhere new meant leaving what you were doing, making the notebook in the sidebar and starting the move again.
PDF export is the one your Mac already has.Export ▸ PDF opens the print panel, with PDF ▾ ▸ Save as PDF at the bottom — the page count, the range and the preview are the note's own. On iPhone and iPad the command is called Share, because that is what it does: the share sheet, with Print inside it. And pictures come out, which they did not before: a note exported to PDF was losing every one of them. Other attachments — a PDF, a Word file, a spreadsheet — appear as their name and size on a line, the way Evernote exports them.
Info opens on the thing you asked about. The foot of a note says 3 backlinks; press it and Info opens on that list, not six sections above it. The line under a note's title on the iPhone — its notebook, its tags, its pin — opens Info on Filing the same way, and comes up full height rather than half. Info opened plainly with ⓘ still starts where it always did.
The calendar's arrows are buttons again. ‹ and › are the system's own controls, with the platform's material and its pressed state, and there is room between them and Today — on a phone a thumb aimed at Today was landing on ‹.
build 412
Attachments you can arrange, and a task description that writes like a note
Attachments move where you want them. Drag a picture, a PDF, a Word file or a zip to another place in the note — on the Mac, the iPhone and the iPad. A blue line shows where it will land, the way the sidebar shows one when you reorder a shortcut. It is a move, not a copy: one attachment before, one after.
Every attachment can show itself, or just its name. Right-click one (or press and hold on a touch screen): Display As ▸ Title turns it into a one-line card with a coloured badge, and Display As ▸ Preview puts it back. Pictures, PDFs, Word and Excel files all offer the choice, and the note remembers which you made and carries it to your other devices. The same menu renames a file — and the way you chose to show it stays. PNG and JPEG have badges of their own now, and every one-line card is the same height whatever is in it.
And that menu is the same on every device. On iPhone and iPad, holding an attachment used to bring up the ordinary text menu, and everything you can do with a file lived only in the small bar above the selected one. Now a press — or a right-click with a mouse — gives you what the Mac gives you: show it, annotate it, open it, download it, rename it, choose how it is shown and how wide it sits in the note, set it as the note's preview, delete it.
A task's description writes like a note. On the Mac, **bold** turns bold the moment you finish the second pair of asterisks, # makes a heading, - a bullet and 1. a numbered list. Return after a heading starts an ordinary paragraph, Tab nests a list item and ⇧Tab brings it back out. Select a few words and a small bar offers bold and italic; ⌘B and ⌘I do the same. The field has an outline, so you can see where it starts and ends, and it grows as you write. And ⇧Return adds a line without filing the comment.
Mail says which mailbox it came from. The address stands on the message and on the task it became, so you know which profile to open.
A picture stays a picture. On iPhone and iPad, once a picture was shown as its name, saving the note wrote that one-line card over the photograph itself, under the photograph's name — and the next time you opened the note there was a blank white sheet where the picture had been. No longer: a picture keeps its own bytes, and the real picture goes back into the note before every save. On the Mac the card stretched across the page when a picture was switched back to its preview; that is fixed too.
And a run of fixes. A file dropped onto a note lands once instead of three times. A moved attachment lands on a line of its own rather than pressed against its neighbour. Clicking a picture on the Mac no longer freezes the note. A large picture on the iPhone draws, instead of leaving a blank sheet. A picture keeps its own name on the iPhone and the iPad — those nameless rows reading File not here yet were a picture that could not say what it was called, not a file that had gone missing. And a heading typed at the very end of a note no longer closes the app.
build 349
Coloured code blocks, and a history that says which device
A code block finally looks like a block. A rounded box the full width of the column, air above and below it, and in its top-right corner the language it is written in and a button that copies it — the characters alone, no font and no indent, so it pastes into Xcode or a terminal as code. Choose the language, or let the block recognise itself and say its guess in brackets. And it is coloured, the way Xcode colours it: keywords, strings, numbers, comments and names. The colours are only ever drawn — they never enter the note, so they reach neither a copy, nor an export, nor your other devices. Until now only the Mac coloured anything; on iPhone and iPad a block stayed grey.
A note's history says which device made the change. Every version carries when it was, how long the note was, and whether it was written on the Mac, the iPhone or the iPad — so a change that arrived from somewhere else is recognisable as one. Restoring shows up at once, with no leaving the note and coming back. And on the Mac the history is a window of its own: drag any edge to resize it, push it aside to look at the note underneath, and it opens where you left it.
A task made on the Watch arrives with the date you changed it to. Adding a task on your wrist and immediately giving it another date left the new date on the watch: two changes about one task were applied in whatever order the disk happened to list them, and the second then found nothing to apply to. Both arrive now, in the order you made them.
The app speaks the language you chose in it. The widgets, the Control Centre and Lock Screen buttons and the slash menu all followed the language of the phone: NotaBene set to English on a Czech phone drew Czech widgets and offered a Czech menu under a heading saying STYLE. They obey the setting now.
build 336
Mail: a flagged e-mail becomes a note or a task
A new Mail section in the sidebar. Flag a message — in Outlook, in Mail, in the browser, on your phone, anywhere — and it turns up here. Nothing is installed anywhere; the flag is the whole gesture. Connect a Microsoft mailbox by signing in, and any other with an address and a password: iCloud, Gmail, Seznam, a company server. As many as you like, in the order you drag them into. NotaBene only ever reads — flags and unread marks are never changed, and for password mailboxes that is enforced by the server itself, not promised by us.
A message becomes a note or a task.Make a note asks what to call it (offering the subject) and gives you a note with the message inside it and its attachments — a PDF stays a PDF. Add as a task… asks which note the task belongs in. A message can also be dragged straight onto a notebook. A note made from mail is marked as one: a blue envelope beside its name in the list and the tag mail. Both can be switched off in Settings, and the tag can be one of your own.
The way back to the e-mail. Tasks and notes made from a message carry an envelope that opens it. For mailboxes connected with an address and password the message opens in Mail itself — on the Mac, iPhone and iPad — so you can reply from there. For Outlook it opens Outlook on iPhone and iPad, and the browser on the Mac. The link survives you archiving the mail later.
Messages you have dealt with leave the list and stay dealt with on all your devices. Making a note or a task from a message deals with it there and then, and a mistake can be put back. The filter switches between outstanding and dealt-with mail and names both lists out loud — no more guessing that something is meant to be clicked.
Back and forward return to what you were doing, not just to the previous note. Read a message, open a note from it, press back — and you are at the message again. It works across Notes, Tasks, Calendar and Mail alike. Mac and iPad, or ⌘[ and ⌘].
build 302
A stack opens, and notes can be picked out from the keyboard
Tapping a stack lists everything in it. The notes from every notebook filed under it, in one list — pinned ones first, then by date. Until now a stack could only be unfolded and its name did nothing at all. On the Mac the name opens the stack and the glyph beside it still folds it; on the iPhone, under Notebooks, the row opens it and the chevron at its right-hand edge folds it — the way a group of lists behaves in Reminders.
⇧ and the arrows pick notes out on the Mac, and on an iPad with a keyboard attached. Each ⇧↓ takes the next card along — measured from the card you last picked out, or from the note you already have open, so a run can start without a ⌘-click first — and ⇧↑ hands it back. The note in the editor does not change, exactly as with a ⇧-click. A plain arrow puts the selection down and goes back to one note at a time. While you are typing in a note or in the search field, the arrows stay the caret's.
A smaller thing: a stack no longer shows a number anywhere. Beside every other row a number means notes; beside a stack it counted notebooks, with nothing on the row to say which of the two it was. Where a stack's contents are still counted is the Notebooks table, under a column with a heading.
build 298
The calendar links a note, deleted stays deleted, and the Dock finally takes files
A note and a calendar event belong together. Tapping an event opens its card beside it, with the arrow on the event itself — until now it hung somewhere above the grid pointing at nothing. The card gained Link a Note…, which searches the whole library, operators and all; the note you pick then stays listed on the card, opens at a tap, and ⊖ unlinks it. And a note made for the event — by Create Note, by recording, or by dragging the event onto a notebook — is linked to it from the start, where before it was merely named after the meeting and attached to nothing. The link also holds across your devices: what you link on the Mac is linked on the iPad.
What you delete stays deleted. Selecting every note and sending it to the Trash was refused by sync as “that must be a mistake” — the deletions were dropped and never retried, so the notes stayed in iCloud and the next device wrote them back to disk. Notes deleted weeks earlier came back among the living. Deletions now go out as soon as two passes in a row agree, however many there are. Anything stuck from before clears itself.
A file dropped on NotaBene's Dock icon makes a note — named after the file, with the file inside it. It had never once worked: the system handed the file over correctly and the app dropped it on the floor. Dropping onto the icon of a closed app works too, where the file used to be lost entirely.
Shortcuts can be reordered. Tapping a notebook shortcut used to light up two rows — the shortcut and that same notebook further down the sidebar — and dragging then dragged both at once, so nothing moved. One row lights up now. And the order can be changed without dragging at all: Move Up / Down / to Top / to Bottom in the right-click menu.
Smaller things: a group of notebooks is called a svazek in Czech, as in Evernote, and its menu offers New Notebook in… straight inside it. Tasks are set larger on the Mac. The Light / Dark choice finally reaches every colour — anyone running the app dark on a system set to light was seeing the light-mode blue on dark screens. And Notebooks and Tags no longer leave a grey plate behind them when tapped.
build 290
Links get a target and a name, a PDF stays a PDF, and the Mac survives the summary
Insert ▸ Link is now Notes' own Add Link: two fields, Link To and an optional Name. A link inserted with nothing selected used to go nowhere at all — it now writes itself out as its address, so it is never invisible. Selected words arrive already filled into Name, and changing it replaces them. An address with no scheme gets https://; mailto: keeps its own.
An attached PDF stays a whole PDF. For nine days every document attached on the Mac was quietly turned into a picture of its first page — under its own name, still ending in .pdf, so nothing looked wrong until you opened it. Word and Excel files went the same way. Both are fixed.
The annotation summary no longer takes the Mac down. Insert a summary, remove it, insert it again and save, and the app simply vanished without a word. It was silent because the system was the one closing it; it no longer happens.
Merging notes makes a new note instead of writing into the first one. The merged notes' titles go in as Heading 1 rather than a bold line, so the outline can see them. Deleting several notes at once now always asks. On the iPad, ⌘ and ⇧ with a click select as they do on the Mac, and Esc puts the selection down.
Smaller things: Settings is fully in Czech — Blocks, Keyboard Shortcuts and Welcome alike. The Notebooks, Tags, Shortcuts and Saved Searches headers fold at a tap, Scan has joined the iPhone's quick actions, and every empty field now says what it wants in grey inside the field — on the Mac those words used to sit outside it, pushing your typing to the right.
build 272
Several notes can be merged into one
Pick two or more notes — ⌘ or ⇧ with a click on the Mac, Select in a card's own menu on iPhone and iPad — then choose Merge Notes from the bar along the bottom or from a note's right-click menu.
Before anything is joined it asks what matters: what the resulting note should be called, and what order the notes go in. Drag a row by the handle on its right to reorder it, and drop anything that turns out not to belong. Each note shows how much room it takes up.
Advanced options decide whether to keep a copy of the original notes (off — they go to the Trash, where they can be fetched back), whether to separate the merged content with a horizontal rule, and whether to carry each note's title in as a heading above its own words. The last two are on.
Tags and pins survive: whatever any of the merged notes carried, the note left behind carries too.
build 262
An ordinary paragraph can be indented, and a code block has a command
Increase and Decrease Indent in the Aa menu only ever worked on list items — anywhere else they were greyed out. They now indent an ordinary paragraph too, and a selection spanning both a list and a sentence does the right thing to each.
Tab stays with lists, where it nests an item — so a tab character can still be typed into prose. The buttons are for what the key cannot do.
Code Block finally has a command of its own: /code. The monospaced, boxed paragraph that until now only appeared if you typed or pasted ```. Choose it again and the text goes back to ordinary.
build 255
Undo walks the whole way back, inserted things included
Undo (⌘Z) now takes back what the app put in for you — a picture, a table, a divider, a link to another note — and carries on into the text you wrote before it. Until now it stopped at whatever had been inserted, and after a table the undo arrow greyed out altogether.
What the / menu does can be taken back too, and so can formatting as you type — # for a heading, - for a bullet, --- for a divider, **bold** — and a list renumbering itself. One step back, not a change you can't undo.
A picture whose file name had a line break in it — a screenshot, usually — disappeared from its note after a while. It now goes in under a name that survives.
build 221
A slash opens everything, an at-sign offers your notes
Type / at the head of a line (or after a space) and a menu of everything that can go in a note opens — headings, lists, a table, a block, a picture, a recording, a task. Keep typing to narrow it: /tab is a table, /task a task, /today today's date.
Type @ and it offers the note you want to link to, searched across the library as you type — and the dates as well.
Quote finally has a command of its own. Until now the only way to make one was knowing about > at the head of a line.
The note outline now lists blocks alongside the headings, so a warning or a summary is somewhere you can jump to. In a note built entirely of blocks you can leave them out again in Settings ▸ Editor.
The menu stays out of the way of web addresses, fractions, dates and e-mail: https://, 1/2 cup and [email protected] open nothing. And the whole thing turns off in Settings ▸ Editor ▸ Commands, each of the two on its own.
build 215
Czech in the welcome tour, and a visible version number
The welcome tour is finally all in Czech. Until now half its text stayed in English even with the app set to Czech.
Settings ▸ Welcome now shows the version and build number under the icon. It is selectable, so a bug report has something to start from.
The app is ready for TestFlight — from this version it can go out to testers.
build 212
Blocks hold together, and the list takes arrow keys
Typing at the end of a block sometimes split it in two. Not any more.
The note list walks with the up and down arrow keys, without reaching for the mouse.
build 209
Blocks, three capture buttons and Shortcuts
Blocks — a tinted frame with an icon and a heading, in the middle of the text. Thirteen kinds: Tip, Warning, Todo, Quote, Question and more. What Obsidian calls a callout.
Three capture buttons at the top of the sidebar: new note, new task, new recording. On iPhone they are the blue circle at the bottom, the other two behind a long press.
A welcome tour at the first launch — seven screens on what the app does. Open it again from Settings ▸ Welcome.
Shortcuts at the top of the sidebar: a hand-ordered list of what you use daily — notes, notebooks, tags and saved searches together.
build 204
Stacks fold, and the iPhone looks like the iPad
A stack of notebooks folds like every other section in the sidebar.
A stack counts its notebooks, not its notes. The old number made no sense.
Tag, notebook and stack rows look the same on iPhone as they do on iPad.
Everything a swipe can do is now in the long press too — for anyone who doesn't get on with swipes.
build 198
Dragging into Shortcuts
Drag a note, a notebook or a tag into Shortcuts with a finger or a mouse — and an empty list can be hit too.
On the Mac a note can finally be picked up and dragged.
Something off?
Beta feedback is the only thing that decides what goes on this list next.
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