Changelog
Stay up to date with the latest features, improvements, and bug fixes in Alter. We've shipped 82 releases and counting!
MCP Authentication and QuickHub Stability
TL;DR: This beta is mostly a bug-fix release focused on MCP authentication, with a handful of QuickHub behavior fixes so attaching context, showing detached windows, and closing QuickHub feel more predictable.
New Features & Enhancements
- QuickHub behavior: Improved detached window anchoring when shown, made attaching context behave more predictably without closing the QuickHub window, and refined
cmd+w,escape, and close-button behavior.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- MCP authentication: Fixed MCP servers authentification failures.
Stability and Computer-Use Polish
TL;DR: This beta fixes the broken Quick Actions shortcuts in both Hub and QuickHub, smooths out permission onboarding and overlays, and adds polished mouse feedback for computer use so every click, scroll, and context grab feels crisp, alive, and a little bit magical.
New Features & Enhancements
- Computer use: Added animated mouse feedback for get-context, scroll, and click actions.
- Permissions & onboarding: Improved permission prompting flow, upgraded permission overlays, and added localizations for the permission experience.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- QuickHub & shortcuts: Fixed shortcuts so they work in both Hub and QuickHub; improved focus behavior in the context strip to avoid stuck items; restored drag-by-title-bar behavior.
- Permissions: Fixed the Alter logo shown in permission flows and stopped incorrectly reporting hangs while checking AppleScript permissions.
- Onboarding & quitting: Stopped incorrectly reporting hangs when closing the onboarding window and quitting Alter.
- Conversation view: Serialized console bridge payloads more safely.
- Input & pasteboard: Fixed an
NSPasteboard-related concurrency warning. - Warnings & cleanup: Removed the deprecated menu highlight color warning for microphone UI, fixed the
AttributedStringwarning related toLiveTranslationView, and removed an excessawaitwarning.
Snap QuickHub for AI Context
TL;DR: We shipped QuickHub early; your feedback turned into a real feature—automatic screen context. Snap QuickHub to any window and it loads what’s on your screen (screenshot and accessibility data) with no prompts and no copy-paste. This build also brings notification surfaces instead of the notch, stronger meeting experience with a low-level detector, and a long list of QuickHub, audio, and windowing fixes.
New Features & Enhancements
- Automatic screen context: Snap QuickHub to a window to load screenshot and accessibility context automatically—no manual capture flow.
- Notifications: Redirected notch notifications to floating notification surfaces, including a glass background on Tahoe; removed legacy notch notifications in favor of surfaces.
- Meeting & recording: In-meeting audio settings; ProcessTap as the default capture path; improved sleep and wake handling using IOPMAssertion instead of caffeinate.
- QuickHub: Better keyboard shortcuts for attach and detach.
- New Models: Minimax 2.7, GLM 5.1, Qwen 3.6 Plus
Bug Fixes & Stability
- QuickHub: Fixed typing lag after the shortcut; reworked attached focus and window layering; resolved cmd-drag delay and kept drag tied to active focus; fixed top content clipped by the title bar, window frame resets after computer-use cleanup, full-screen and close behavior, appearance settings respect, streaming from QuickHub into the Hub, pending context on new chat with AppSense sync and other windows incorrectly resurfacing on close.
- “Add to Alter” / Finder: Restored adding content to QuickHub as well as the main app.
- Audio & microphone: Fixed empty meeting recordings; clearer error surfacing; preserved failed meeting audio for recovery; cleared stale transcription failure indicators.
- Menubar & notch: Quit handling across custom windows; menubar quit button; meeting recording state synced with the meeting controls aligned to the menubar.
- MCP & auth: Ephemeral loopback for OAuth and token refresh; deferred remote MCP startup for login-item launches; simpler remote MCP success page; authentication checks on schedule jobs and across views.
- Settings & usage: Clamped max tokens to 8192 in manage settings; duplicate Settings menu entry removed; delete confirmations aligned between Hub and Quick Hub; window-relative delete alerts where possible.
- Startup: Removed legacy caffeinate cleanup that caused an internal error dialog on launch in GUI builds.
The Notch is Gone
TL;DR: Alter has a new floating QuickHub window that brings your chats, switcher, quick actions, and notifications into one place. This is the first big step away from the notch, with auto-attach behavior, better window controls, clearer usage visibility. Now in preview, enable in the Settings!
New Features & Enhancements
- QuickHub Preview: Added the new floating QuickHub window as a preview of where Alter is going, bringing chats, transcripts, and quick actions into one movable interface.
- Switcher & Command Palette: Added a faster switcher with
cmd+k, prefix support, sections for quick actions, and better ways to jump between conversations, transcripts, and commands. - Smarter Window Attachment: QuickHub can now attach to the left or right side of a target window, match window height, auto-attach during computer use, and support text selection workflows.
- Hub, Menus & Notifications: Added a new menu for recent chats and transcripts, better notifications outside the notch, and progress feedback on notification action buttons.
- Settings & Usage Visibility: Added a modern Settings UI, shortcuts settings, and a cost estimate indicator so it is easier to understand how much context you are sending.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Notch Transition & Windowing: Improved reopen behavior, reduced notch layout issues across screen changes.
- Chat, Hub & Conversation Fixes: Fixed deadlocks, overlay presentation, focus issues, transcript handling, and reduced unnecessary editor refreshes.
- Audio, Recording & Session Stability: Improved microphone state handling, recording reliability, speaker diarization loading, session recovery, missed schedule handling, and clearer “no session” alerts.
- Workspace, Flow & Skills Fixes: Improved workspace ID handling for ephemeral and flow tool use, reduced skill loading issues, and made generated files surface correctly in ephemeral workspaces.
- Copy, Diff & Rendering Fixes: Restored the diff switch button, fixed diff copy behavior and source persistence, and improved markdown copy output for rich text.
Create Images Directly in Alter
TL;DR: Alter can now generate and manipulate images directly in your workspace with the new Creative Studio flow. This release also improves how tool-produced files and images show up in chat, adds support for fal.ai, and includes a broad set of fixes for MCP, chat rendering, actions, and app stability.
New Features & Enhancements
- Creative Workflow: Alter can generate images directly, work with uploaded files, and support richer media workflows from one place.
- Creative Agent: Added the new creative agent action using multiple tools and our open-source creative studio Agent skill.
- Better Tool Outputs in Chat: Tool-produced resources and images now flow through conversations more cleanly, and the tool inspector can show files produced by tools.
- Conversation Rendering Upgrades: Added Mermaid support in conversations and improved how images are handled as resources to reduce token usage.
- Remote MCP Servers: Added Craft, Exa, Fal.ai as new official servers
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Image, Chat & Tool Reliability: Fixed image encoding and display issues from MCP tools, improved tool error surfacing, corrected tool parameter truncation, and fixed snake_case tool name presentation.
- Remote MCP Servers: Fixed authentication issues.
- Action, Hub & Editor Fixes: Fixed the action editor model selector getting out of sync, restored correct new-chat behavior when invoking an action from the Hub, fixed glitchy switching between actions.
- Stability & Performance Improvements: Reduced hangs across AX activation, launch-at-login, menu interactions, modal flows, and choice dialogs; improved notch action list performance; and fixed test build issues.
- Workspace & Flow Fixes: Fixed workspace-bound chats opened from the Hub losing workspace tooling, made replace follow-up behavior consistent with the replace tool, and ensured Flow details return the full schema payload.
Build PowerPoints Directly in Alter
We have embedded PowerPoint capabilities directly into Alter. You can now build professional presentations, complete with custom layouts, grids, and visual assets, without ever opening Microsoft PowerPoint.
New Features & Enhancements
- Embedded PowerPoint Creation: Added a new PPTX skill so Alter can generate PowerPoint presentations directly, including support for richer visual presentation workflows.
- Media Creation: Images created by tools are now displayed in the conversation, with options to preview, open, download, and copy them.
- Custom Endpoint Management: Custom endpoints can now be sorted by visibility, and a new option lets you decide if newly discovered models should automatically be made visible.
- Tools & Workflow Upgrades: Added alarms to reminders, Apple Mail contexts now list attachments without downloading them, chat messages can be copied as plain text or markdown from the context menu.
- Broader App Compatibility: Added support for the Helium browser.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Custom Endpoints Reliability: Improved compatibility with custom endpoint setups.
- Hub & Transcript Stability: Fixed transcript opening in Hub, prevented crashes when updating transcripts in the sidebar, resolved transcript renaming sync issues, and reduced tab reload loops when many tabs open at once.
- Chat & Conversation Resilience: Improved retry behavior, surfaced connection errors more clearly, and fixed image results not appearing in conversations.
- Workspace, Tools & Sandbox Fixes: Fixed missing
workspace_idin tool calls, prevented ghost tools after deleting quick actions. - Audio, Remote & Build Fixes: Improved server error handling, fixed WhisperPro trial availability, resolved audio recording stop/write timing issues.
- Model & UI Polish: Custom models in the floating window are now sorted by name.
Review Word Docs Without Opening Word
TL;DR: Add comments, highlights, and edits directly inside .docx files from Alter, so you can review and revise Word documents without opening Microsoft Word. This release also improves meeting capture reliability, quick actions, and add GPT-5.4-mini and nano to our roster.
New Features & Enhancements
- DOCX Skill: Alter can now generate and review Word documents directly by adding comments, highlights, and edits inside
.docxfiles without opening Word. - Meeting & Recording Controls: Meetings can now remain active for up to 30 minutes before low-level auto-stop, new experimental method to capture system audio: choose ProcessTap to record FaceTime and WhatsApp calls.
- Workspace & Usage Improvements: Added
Copy Namefor workspace files and folders and fast mode cycling is less likely to switch you into the workspace unintentionally. - New Models: Added GPT-5.4-mini and GPT-5.4-nano
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Floating Window & Memory: Removed crash-prone floating window constraints, reduced floating window crashes, and more aggressively discard conversation webviews to lower memory usage.
- Meetings, Audio & Microphone Handling: Fixed auto-meeting detection across Teams and other apps, microphone input selection shows only physical devices, and the stuck microphone “processing” indicator is resolved.
- Code Runner: Fixed various file not found errors when using skills.
- Quick Actions, Hub & Notch Reliability: Restored quick action shortcuts, prevented duplicate notch submissions, only auto-execute the first quick action response, fixed canceled retry and escape-to-stop behavior in Hub, and resolved lingering notch windows after external display disconnects.
Introducing the Excel Skill
TL;DR: Create Excel without opening Excel. Drop in PDFs, CSVs, bank statements, and other source files, then ask Alter for dashboards, analysis, and polished spreadsheets without ever touching Microsoft Excel.
New Features & Enhancements
- Excel Skill: Alter can now turn source documents and raw data into Excel files, dashboards, and analysis through a simple chat workflow.
- Voice Processing: Updated Argmax to latest version.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Transcript Recovery: Reworked transcripts to be recoverable and reindexable.
- Recording Reliability: Fixed first-recording startup issues, improved recovery from screen recording interruption, and fail fast when Whisper models cannot load.
- Audio & Dictation: Fixed voice processor selection issues, better error handling when loading transcription mdoels, enabled cloud dictation on the trial plan, and resolved dictation stop/copy-paste race conditions.
- Chat & Editor UX: Fixed long tool-call URL overflow in chat, preserved new lines when copying code blocks, and restored the missing YouTube transcript icon in the context strip.
- Navigation & Search: Improved sidebar display when not searching.
Native Web Search: The Better Way
TL;DR: Native Web Search is now built into Alter’s router models. Pick best, fair, fast, or light, and Alter automatically retrieves current information from the internet when needed with no tool setup or extra steps. Plus welcome GPT 5.4 to our model roster.
New Features & Enhancements
- Native Web Search: Added automatic backend-powered web retrieval to Alter’s router models so current information is fetched from the internet when needed.
- Workspaces: Now code runner and full-access are exclusive to avoid confusion, full rework of the sandbox system for both bash sandbox and code container, and added previews for all workspace root files.
- Meetings: Automatically copy transcripts in Markdown format with sync support.
- New Default Skills: Embedded Anthropic skill for DOCX, PPTX, and XLSX files.
- New Model: OpenAI GPT-5.4 is available to everyone.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Message Editing Reliability: Fixed floating panel editing, newline handling, deletion at the start of lines, and Escape-to-cancel behavior.
- Speech-to-prompt: Fixed continuous speech-to-prompt when an active chat is open in the hub.
- Custom Model Providers: Fixed model identifier parsing.
- Tool Use: Improved bash tool and reduced malformed tool calls
Hotfixes & Stability Improvements
TL;DR: This hotfix release focuses on reliability and polish across actions, recording, floating panel behavior, flow execution, and workspace bash support.
New Features & Enhancements
- Workspace Bash Safety: Added an allow list path to support more CLIs like Obsidian-cli
- Recording: Ignored “no capture source” errors when removing screens to avoid unnecessary failures messages.
- Floating Panel UX: Removed the large overlay in favor of a cursor-based feedback.
- Flow Execution: Optimized flow step behavior for smoother and more predictable runs.
Bug Fixes & Stability
- Built-in Actions Respect Settings: Fixed built-in actions so they correctly honor user-disabled tools.
- Recording Reliability: Fixed multimonitor timeout behavior during recording.
