Changelog
What’s new.
Changes in each Platypus release, newest first. In the app, Settings → General → What’s new opens the notes for an available update.
0.1.1
Side-by-side PDF views, simpler chat, and clearer setup and recovery.
Before updating
- Copy any questions you want to keep from the waiting queue before updating. Version 0.1.1 removes that queue; questions that were still waiting will not be sent or kept. Saved conversation messages remain.
Reading and notes
- Open a second view of the same PDF beside the first to follow cross-references. Navigation, search and chat citations follow the view you used last. Split view is also available from the Focus mode controls.
- Drag the divider to resize the views without changing their zoom. It snaps near the midpoint; double-click or press Enter to reset. Each new split starts at equal widths.
- Free-form note controls appear only in the active view. Switching views saves the current edit and keeps the other copy readable. Empty notes have a shorter command hint, and PDF change notices explain when a file changed outside Platypus.
Document chat
- Chat runs one question at a time while keeping your next draft editable. Stopped, failed and interrupted answers stay visible beneath their questions. Asking again after an early failure works, and Rewind also removes later answers from the AI conversation.
- On devices that cannot run AI resources, including 4 GB computers, short readable PDFs can use chat immediately without resource downloads. These chats have no citations and omit image-only content. Long and scanned PDFs still need supported hardware and AI resources.
- On supported devices, every PDF chat requires AI resources and Prepare for chat so answers can cite the document. Setup has clearer progress, recovery actions and device guidance. PDFs over 150 MB show the chat size limit before offering resource setup.
- When no AI provider is available, chat offers Set up AI providers. Model selectors show only the selected model name, and unused empty chats disappear when you switch chats.
Settings and notifications
- Privacy settings separate the website policy from optional usage reporting, with a concise collection summary and clearer deletion feedback.
- Notifications and errors use plainer language. Toasts show an icon, stay longer for long messages or actions, and pause while hovered. Missing or unmovable PDFs are identified by file name.
0.1.0
Refined reading and chat controls, flexible notes, and one place to manage saved document data.
Notes and reading
- Place free-form notes directly on the PDF with a transparent background. New notes remember your last background and text scale choices across documents and restarts.
- Adjust a note’s text scale with live preview, and open its controls with either a left-click or right-click. Double-click to edit, or drag to move it.
- Highlights & Notes has softer cards and a quieter editor. Home cover actions are clearer in dark mode, with a compact label for unavailable PDFs.
Saved data
- Settings → Saved data lists documents with saved highlights, notes and chats, including when the original PDF is missing. Search the list, reveal a PDF in its folder, or export one document or all saved data as JSON or Markdown.
- Delete a document’s saved data after confirmation. This closes its open tabs and removes its annotations, reading state, chats and prepared chat data. Your original PDF, other documents and shared model resources are kept.
Chat and settings
- Copy a question from the action row beside Rewind. Clearer tooltips explain rewinding and saving an answer as a note.
- Chat, Settings and privacy controls use quieter surfaces and clearer feedback. Model and export-format menus follow the app’s theme, with selection checkmarks and grouped chat models.
- Routine AI connection checks stay quiet and preserve established connections and model choices through temporary failures. Successful checks are shared across windows for three hours; failed checks can retry on the next window focus after one minute. Refresh still checks immediately.
Security
- Updated the app runtime to block compromised intermediate certificates when connecting over HTTPS.
0.1.0-beta.3
Whole-document chat for shorter PDFs, planned searches for long PDFs, per-chat models, and conversation rewind.
Updating on Ubuntu
- Updating from beta 2 still closes Platypus once. Reopen it to restore your open documents, highlights and notes. Updates from beta 3 onward reopen the app automatically.
Document chat
- Documents up to about 50,000 tokens are now read in full. Longer PDFs use AI planning to choose searches and sections for each question. Planning uses your selected model’s allowance and can add waiting time; failed plans fall back to ordinary document search.
- Short PDFs finish Prepare for chat after their text is parsed and saved, skipping the embedding step.
- Each chat keeps its own provider and model. You can change models within that provider for later questions, while Settings supplies the default for new chats.
- Rewind a conversation from the icon below a question. After confirmation, Platypus stops an active answer and discards that question and the later conversation. The question and its selections return to an empty composer; an existing draft is preserved, and nothing sends automatically.
- Each chat continues one session in your Codex or Claude Code CLI. If that session is missing or incompatible, saved messages remain readable and Platypus asks you to start a new chat.
- Answers now request more precise source citations, especially for specific facts, numbers and explanations that draw on several passages.
- Suggested and manually renamed chat titles can now be up to 80 characters long.
Provider privacy
- Codex web search is now disabled through the CLI’s own setting as well as the answer instructions.
- Claude Code no longer treats file or image names prefixed with @ in document text as attachments from your computer. Earlier builds, including beta 2, passed that text to Claude Code unchanged.
0.1.0-beta.2
Lower memory use with many PDFs open, automatic refresh of edited files, larger documents, and clearer limits for chat preparation.
Reader
- Platypus now manages memory across open documents. Inactive tabs release offscreen pages first and are suspended only under memory pressure, then resume at the same position and zoom.
- When a PDF changes on disk, Platypus opens the new version and copies over highlights and notes that still match. If some could not be restored, it tells you.
- PDFs up to 500 MB can be opened, up from 256 MiB. Sizes in messages now use decimal MB, as file managers do.
- Refined the focus-mode controls, highlight appearance and scrollbars.
Document chat
- New chats are named from your first question while the answer is still being written.
- If Codex or Claude Code no longer offers your saved chat model, Platypus switches to that tool’s default and tells you. The AI providers settings are simpler.
- Polished chat actions and scrollbars.
Preparing documents for chat
- PDFs that already contain a text layer are prepared faster, because text recognition now runs only on image-heavy pages that have no text.
- Long documents have up to two hours to prepare, up from 15 minutes. You can still cancel at any time.
- A scanned document with more than 700 image pages (1,000 on computers with 16 GB of RAM or more) is declined within seconds to protect your computer’s memory. You can still read it.
0.1.0-beta.1
The first public beta, for Apple Silicon macOS, Windows x64 and Ubuntu 22.04 and 24.04 x64.
Reading and notes
- A local-first PDF reader with navigation, search, highlights, and rich notes with equations.
- Export your highlights, notes and chats as Markdown or JSON.
Document chat
- Ask questions about a PDF and get answers with citations that open the source passage in the document.
- Parsing and indexing run on your device. Answers use your own Codex or Claude Code sign-in.
- Guided setup in Settings downloads the local resources chat needs.
Updates and privacy
- Platypus checks for updates and installs one only when you choose Update and restart.
- Usage reporting is off unless you opt in.
Looking for an installer?
Download Platypus