Finder & Bloom Smart Attach

TL;DR: QuickHub treats Apple Finder (and Bloom) as a first-class workspace: dock the hub to a Finder or Bloom window and Alter automatically uses your current folder and files for context—summaries, organization, and natural-language file work without the copy-paste dance. This beta also brings customizable keyboard shortcuts, richer QuickHub tool/context previews, chat search with #, multiple API key endpoints, expanded locales (Italian, Portuguese, Japanese), and a long list of hub, workspace, and marketplace stability fixes.

New Features & Enhancements

• Finder & Bloom smart attach: Automatically attach the active Finder folder or Bloom panel to chat when using QuickHub—your file manager becomes part of the AI workspace
• Default workspace: default workspace provided for Ask Anything and Plan with Word, Excel, and PowerPoint skills enabled.
• QuickHub: Tools and context details previews.
• Hub & chat: Search your chat history with #; ⌘R retries the last message; usage view updates for add-on requests.
• Keyboard shortcuts: User-customizable shortcuts in Settings.
• API keys: Support for multiple custom endpoints.
• Mouse widget: New “add selection to Alter” item.
• *Actions: Handle failing action parsing (prompt to fix).
• Localization: Italian, Portuguese, and Japanese locales added.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Text Selection: Hardened text selection capture.
• QuickHub & Chats: Smoother conversation window dragging and “Return” key sends message more reliably.
• Dictation & audio: Local+ Parakeet model availability fix; improve microphone state UI.
• Windows & shell: Prevent stale hub reopen; don’t pop the hub open when closing Settings; Dock icon surfaces existing Alter windows instead of the Hub.
• Marketplace: Comments polish and less aggressive polling; install/tool-description link fixes.
• Actions: Preserve default action parameter values.

Hotfix Weekend

TL;DR: Several bug fixes around transcription and better support for exotic latin keyboard layouts. This beta fixes custom vocabulary loading issues that could block dictation, prevents stale transcription context, and smooths out a marketplace install issue.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Keyboard layout support: Added support for exotic Latin keyboard layouts.
• Transcription reliability: Fixed custom vocabulary loading issues that could block dictation and prevented stale audio transcription context from leaking into later transcription flows.
• Marketplace install flow: Fixed Try now failing to find the local action after importing from the marketplace.

Alter Action Marketplace

TL;DR: The Alter Action Marketplace is here. Discover great Actions, install them in a click, make them your own, and publish what you build. This beta also improves the install flow, reorganizes tool management, refines hub input behavior, and includes a round of stability fixes across microphone monitoring, diarization and settings.

New Features & Enhancements

• Alter Action Marketplace: Added the new marketplace to easily distribute and install Alter Actions, including the Skills, Tools and MCP servers they need to work.
• Tool management: Reorganized the tools manager sidebar to make installed tools and marketplace content easier to browse.
• Hub input UI: Merged the mode, action, and send controls into a more streamlined input button.
• Context improvements: Sped up active app context retrieval.
• Meeting prompts: Added a minimum meeting duration for mic monitor stop notifications.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Conversation recovery: Added a retry action for assistant errors in the conversation view.
• Microphone and diarization stability: Prevented stale meeting session control, reduced repeated auto-start prompts after canceling, improved camera attribution handling, and blocked concurrent diarization runs.
• App and settings behavior: Reopened settings correctly from the app menu, stopped polling when the application detail view disappears, kept automation permissions neutral on inconclusive checks, and fixed the tools window navigation sidebar.

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 AttributedString warning related to LiveTranslationView, and removed an excess await warning.

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_id in 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 .docx files 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 Name for 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.