Today we are releasing the Desktop app, a big milestone towards Capacities becoming an all-encompassing thinking environment. You can download the app for Mac and Windows now.
With the desktop app, we drastically improved the performance of the app, added partial offline support, and made linking better and faster. Let’s dive in!
Better performance and loading speed
We completely rewrote the app infrastructure of Capacities for the desktop app. It makes Capacities much faster and more performant. You should especially notice the following:
- Better general performance when working with Capacities
- Better startup time (after loading for the first time)
- Much faster loading of tags, databases, and collections (after loading for the first time)
Better search for linking
When linking to content, you now have access to the powerful search engine of Capacities. All relevant content will show up immediately. On top, search is now decoupled from your inputs, so it’s faster and does not impact the typing experience.
Partial offline support
This new architecture now allows working with Capacities while being offline. It’s not full offline support but will allow using it while on the train, for example. The following is possible now:
- All content that is already loaded will be accessible. You can edit it and you can create new content.
- Search is supported when offline. You can search all loaded content.
What does not work yet:
- It would help if you did not work across devices when offline. The first write wins, content can be lost. This is also true for all integrations: You should not work on your daily note when offline while sending messages from Telegram or WhatsApp.
- File uploads and caching are not supported yet. When offline, you cannot upload files and images. They will fail and be broken.
We will of course work on both issues, but you can use Capacities offline if you have these constraints in mind.
Additional new features
Reworked drag-and-drop operations for blocks You can now indent blocks by dropping them below others slightly to the right.
On top, you can now drop blocks on objects and they will be appended to that object.
Small improvements and fixes
- Toggle blocks properties, if multiple blocks-properties are present
- Added: Exit button for settings.
- Design improvements
- Updated and improved gray color palette in light mode
- Better design of tabs.
- Better design of highlighted search text in inline command dropdowns.
- Design of Tweet rendering (especially in preview)
- Simpler MediaWebResource card design
- Added: Close button to settings.
- Better design of preview on small cards.
- Standard page view design.
- Toggle both section in encyclopedia view
- Better responsive design of index card.
- More descriptive, less distracting placeholder text in empty blocks.
- Fixed some bugs to make editing experience in the preview modal better and more stable.
- Improved Editor stability and bug fixes (multi-context editing).
- Better Math-token shortcut (
Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + M) - Fixed: When pasting an inline link, the focus is now being set of the link token.