What’s New

Your Story Bible now earns its facts: newly detected characters, places, and things wait on a review shelf until you keep, merge, or ignore them — and the AI chat talks with you about your story before reaching for tools.

✨ New Features

• Detected shelf — review newly detected characters, places, and things; keep, ignore, or merge duplicates with "Same as…" before they join your Story Bible

  

• Earned canonicity — extracted entities start as candidates and graduate to canon as evidence accumulates

• Outline support — mark a document as an outline; planned vs. written material is tracked separately

• Talk-first AI chat — conversational answers grounded in your story, with live Story Bible and document lookups

• Chat edit tools — ask the chat to update Story Bible entries directly

• Proofread view — new desktop workspace view for focused review passes

• Smarter web research — Wikipedia candidates re-ranked semantically for relevance

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Re-syncs are ~4× faster — editing a paragraph re-extracts only the affected section
• Merged or deleted entities no longer resurrect after a sync
• No more false "out of sync" warnings on documents with no prose edits
• Bring-your-own-key cloud chat: fixed crashes, key encryption, and refreshed the model list
• Moving the chat panel no longer cuts off an in-flight AI response

🔧 Improvements

• In-app release notes banner after updates; tidier Story Bible panel

This release teaches your AI companion to read your actual manuscript — not just its notes about it — and gives you a workspace you can reshape on the fly: switch layouts for the kind of work you're doing, and drag your tools wherever you want them.

✨ Your Companion Can Now Read Your Prose

Ask what actually happens on the page and your AI companion reads the manuscript itself to answer — quoting and reasoning over your real writing, not just the Story Bible's summary of it. Chapter by chapter, it understands the book the way you wrote it.

✨ A Workspace That Switches With Your Work

Jump between Writing, Focus, and Brainstorm layouts with a single switch — each one arranges the editor and your tools for that kind of work.

🔧 Put Your Panels Where You Want Them

Drag any right-side panel into place with generous, forgiving drop zones — rearrange chat, Story Bible, and previews to match how you work.

✨ More Features

• Story Bible syncs across your devices. The characters, relationships, and canon your Story Bible discovers now follow you from machine to machine.
• Richer entity sheets. A tabbed overview-and-detail view for every character, place, and concept, with at-a-glance rollup status.
• A chat that greets you with ideas. Open a fresh chat and it suggests starter prompts drawn from your own story.
• Faster first answer. The on-device AI warms up ahead of time, so your first message doesn't wait on a cold start.
• Panels remember their size. Stacked panels keep their height when you close and reopen them.
• ⌘⇧W toggles the Page Editor with a tri-state switch that restores your cursor right where it was.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• No more phantom "Entity not found" toasts looping after Story Bible edits.
• Sidebar sync icons update for nested documents, not just top-level ones.
• The sync "success" banner stays dismissed when you reopen the Story Bible panel.
• The chat stop button now sits right where send was, instead of jumping.
• Press Enter to create a collection straight from the type selector.
• Smoother Page Editor close animation.

This release is all about polish: a live, honest view of your Story Bible syncing, a workspace you can reshape around your work, and a long list of fixes — including bringing back UI that recent changes had quietly disabled.

✨ Watch Your Story Bible Build Itself

Syncing now shows an honest, determinate progress bar and a live feed of every entity it discovers — characters, locations, objects, and groups — as they're found. No more wondering whether anything's happening behind the scenes.

🔧 A Roomier, Reflowing Workspace

Dismiss the editor to hand the full right region over to tools like Page Preview — the layout reflows gracefully to fill the space. Shape the workspace around whatever you're doing right now.

✨ More Features

• Quick-create with ⌘N. Press ⌘N to create a collection on the home view, or a new book inside a collection.
• Self-serve alpha trial. Join the WordSpark alpha right from Settings — no waiting.
• Check for Updates. A new desktop menu item lets you check for updates on demand, with a persistent reminder when one's ready.

🔧 Improvements

• Instant Story Bible load. Loads immediately from local storage — no more three-second startup delay.
• Smarter AI under memory pressure. On lower-VRAM machines, the local AI degrades its context gracefully, explains what happened, and offers a one-click Reload AI.
• Popovers stay on screen. Floating menus and popovers keep themselves within the viewport, even on smaller windows.
• Coverage at a glance. Ask your AI companion how well your Story Bible covers your manuscript — a new coverage tool answers in chat.

🐛 Bug Fixes & Restored UI

• Focus Mode is back to normal for returning writers. Retired an outdated onboarding ceremony that kept reappearing every session for established users.
• Clearer sidebar text in dark and lunar themes. Raised sidebar text contrast above the WCAG AA readability floor.
• More resilient sync. Interrupted local syncs now heal themselves, and cancelling a sync then retrying recovers cleanly.
• Documents missing from the cloud are restored automatically from your local copy.
• Repaired desktop AI diagnostics so on-device behavior is properly traced again.

WordSpark can now research the web for you — and ground what it finds in your own Story Bible, turning raw facts into insights that fit the world you're building. This release also makes Story Bible sync noticeably faster, adds a clearer way to confirm character aliases, brings print settings to Page Preview, and folds in a round of fixes from testing.

✨ Web Research in Chat

Ask your AI companion to look something up, and it researches the web — then grounds the results against your Story Bible canon so suggestions match the world you've built. Curate which sources it reads before it writes anything into your notes.

✨ Author Alias Confirmation

When the Story Bible suspects that two names refer to the same character — "Marcus" and "Marcus Reed" — it now asks you to confirm before merging, and explains its reasoning. You stay in control of who is who.

✨ Page Preview Print Settings

See your manuscript as a finished printed page, now with print settings and real page folios and running heads. The preview flows across multiple pages and updates live as you write.

✨ More Features

• Local AI engine, clearer than ever. WordSpark now shows exactly which engine is active — on-device or cloud — with a redesigned setup experience.
• Find help without leaving WordSpark. WordSearch now surfaces help and documentation: type ? to search articles with live previews.
• Faster in-app search. A new local search index makes finding entities and documents quicker.
• Concepts and objects are back in the Story Bible. A more precise extraction layer recognizes concepts and objects again.

🔧 Improvements

• Story Bible sync is about 50% faster on the desktop app.
• More accurate character alias matching, so the same person isn't split into duplicates.
• Notifications now support clear-all, timestamps, and tidier spacing.
• The right sidebar is more flexible — drag-and-drop, resize, and graceful overflow.
• Smaller, leaner documents from trimming redundant formatting behind the scenes.
• Honest email verification — clearer copy, a resend cooldown, and an account-recovery path.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• A batch of fixes from testing across document move, the settings overlay, import cleanup, chat, and themes.
• The Story Bible summary panel no longer crashes for anthology collections.
• Page Preview no longer overwrites the wrong document.
• Oversized documents are now handled gracefully during sync.
• The editor keeps focus after you close the alignment dropdown.

A round of post-launch fixes smoothing out rough edges reported since the desktop launch — across onboarding, billing, in-app banners, and local AI model setup.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Onboarding: re-entering onboarding no longer creates a duplicate account, and a blank display name can no longer overwrite your existing profile.
• Billing: the upgrade modal now shows the correct annual-license proration, and license activation is reliable even when a payment is retried.
• Banners: a dismissed update banner stays dismissed, and the trial banner no longer overlaps the top navigation.
• Local AI setup: interrupted model downloads recover gracefully, with a clearer message when the model folder isn't writable.

A small billing correction: WordSpark is now a $50/year license with optional renewal.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed: billing now uses the correct $50/year license model. Renewal is optional — if your license lapses after paying, you keep full editing access and only miss new app updates.

A quiet patch release fixing first-launch model loading on the desktop app.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed: local LLM model failing to load on first launch.

WordSpark v0.2.0 is a major release. AI now runs entirely on your own machine — no internet required, no per-message cost, no waiting on cloud servers. Your chat companion is sharper and remembers what you've talked about. Your Story Bible understands your manuscript more accurately than before. And there are four brand-new surfaces for writers: a Scratch Pad for non-canon writing, WordSearch for finding anything in your project, full image support, and a live manuscript page preview.

✨ AI That Runs on Your Mac

• No more cloud, no more waiting. Chat responses, Story Bible extraction, and citations all happen on your computer. No internet connection needed for AI features once your model is downloaded.
• Pick your model. Download, swap, and remove AI models from inside WordSpark. WordSpark recommends a model that fits your machine's memory.
• Smarter about resources. WordSpark loads the AI when you need it, frees up memory when you don't, and recovers gracefully if your machine runs short on RAM.
• Cloud AI is opt-in. If you'd rather use cloud models, you can plug in your own API key. The default is private, on-device, and free to run.

✨ A Smarter Chat Companion

• Your AI remembers the conversation. Threads now keep their context across turns and across sessions, on both web and desktop. Pick up a chat from yesterday and it knows what you were working on.
• The AI knows what kind of help you're asking for. Brainstorm, check, summarize, find — WordSpark routes your question to the right tool instead of guessing.
• Slash commands inside chat. Type / to see what your AI companion can do. Includes /no for politely declining a suggestion without re-explaining yourself.
• Reliable citations. When the AI cites a passage from your manuscript, the citation actually points where it says it does — every time.
• Rich text input with queuing. Format chat messages with bold, italics, and lists. Keep typing while the AI thinks; your next message will be sent when it's ready.
• A clearer writing-coach voice. The AI now follows a writing-coach personality that respects your authorial intent. You can customize personas if you want a different tone.

✨ A More Accurate Story Bible

• Better automatic extraction. WordSpark now recognizes characters, places, and concepts in your prose more accurately — including new ones you didn't declare upfront. It also figures out when "Sarah," "Dr. Reed," and "she" all refer to the same person across scenes.
• One-click sync. "Canonization" is now called Sync. One click refreshes your Story Bible from your prose. An ambient indicator tells you when your Bible is out of date.
• Every fact links back to the prose. When WordSpark says a character has green eyes, you can see exactly which paragraph it learned that from.
• Smart Prose Correction. Fix a character's name or detail in the Story Bible, and WordSpark surfaces every place in your prose that needs to be updated — with you in control of which edits to accept. (We never silently change your writing.)
• Author-edit protection. If you've manually edited an entity's description, WordSpark protects your changes during the next sync instead of overwriting them.
• Automatic cleanup. Delete a paragraph, and the Story Bible facts that came from it clean up automatically.
• Much faster on desktop. Story Bible sync on the desktop app is dramatically faster on large manuscripts.

✨ Scratch Pad Mode

A gold-themed, non-canon writing surface for warm-ups, deleted scenes, character explorations, and anything that isn't your manuscript. Multi-pad with colors, tags, pinning, manual reorder, and full-text search across every pad. Syncs across your devices.

✨ WordSearch — Find Anything, Fast

Press ⌘K to open WordSearch from anywhere. Find a document, a character, a place, an action — type a prefix like # for entities or > for actions to narrow your search. A live preview pane shows what you're about to open. WordSearch is also how you discover keyboard shortcuts and quick actions.

✨ Image Support

• Insert images via toolbar, drag-and-drop, or paste from your clipboard. HEIC images from your phone are converted automatically.

• Word documents import with their images intact. No more losing illustrations when you bring in a .docx.

• Edit images inline. Resize, replace, add alt text and captions — all without leaving the editor.

  

✨ Manuscript Page Preview

See what your novel will look like as a finished printed page while you write. Configurable trim size, margins, and running heads (the chapter title and page number at the top of each page). The preview updates live as you write.

✨ A Calmer First-Run Experience

• A new onboarding ceremony — "The Dissolve." A quieter, more confident first-write experience that fades away as you find your stride. No more "are you done yet?" prompts.
• Story Bible and chat reveal themselves naturally as you build momentum, instead of all at once.
• A congratulatory card appears the first time you discover focus mode.

✨ Writing Goals & Progress

• Daily and session word count goals with a filling vessel ring that turns gold on completion.
• The same progress ring appears in your header, your focus mode toolbar, and your progress popover.
• Panel Focus System. Keyboard shortcuts like ⌘F now act on whichever panel is focused, so you can find in your editor or your Story Bible without switching contexts.
• Global Story Bible search with a dedicated hotkey.

✨ Editor Polish

• Inline font controls. Choose font family and size right in the editor toolbar.
• Author-controlled paragraph indent. First-line indent with per-paragraph override.
• Cleaner heading styles. Tighter spacing, H3 enabled, sensible defaults out of the box.
• Native spell-check restored on right-click.
• Big typing-speed fix. Documents over 1,500 words no longer feel sluggish.

✨ Desktop Improvements

• System-browser sign-in. OAuth opens in your default browser instead of an in-app window — safer, and your saved logins work.
• Custom DMG installer artwork.

🐛 Notable Fixes

• Citation rendering restored after the chat rewrite.
• Onboarding ceremony no longer repeats every time you sign in.
• Theme respects your system preference on first load.
• Chat history dropdown stays inside the visible window.
• Entity detail modal scrolls when descriptions get long.
• Story Bible context properly isolated between collections (series at the collection level, anthology at the book level).
• Find-and-replace highlights work again; global ⌘F works from anywhere.
• Email verification now required when signing up with email and password.
• Stripe trial banner shows days remaining without pushing content off-screen.
• Modals now dismiss in the right order when you press Escape.
• Sidebar and header now respect spacing and sizing across themes.
• Sync buttons no longer falsely disable while the AI is generating.
• Onboarding hints no longer "leak" into the app after graduation.
• A wide-reaching hover-state fix restored hover feedback throughout the app.

🎨 Look & Feel

• Sidebar redesign with inline naming, smooth creation transitions, and trial enforcement woven in.
• Full-width sticky header with unified navigation.
• New logo.
• Theme palette icon with color swatches for quick theme switching.

Queue your entire manuscript for Story Bible extraction and watch it process in real time. Plus, deleted documents now go to a recycle bin where you can preview, restore, or bulk delete.

New Features

• Batch canonization queue with progress tracking

  

• Citation hover previews in AI chat

• Recycle bin with bulk delete and command palette integration

  

Bug Fixes

• Improved error messages and retry for canonization failures