Release notes

Kinetic Notes 1.8 adds line numbers and a word count to the editor. Both are off until you turn them on, in Settings → Editing.

Line numbers

Turn on Show line numbers to number the lines of a note in a gutter beside the text. The numbers are muted, and the line holding the cursor — every line a selection touches — is drawn brighter on a faint band.

The numbers are drawn beside the text, not added to it, so they are never copied, printed or exported. A line that wraps is numbered once.

A word count, or whatever you would rather count

Turn on Show word count for a bar along the bottom of the window counting the note you are looking at. Click the count, or its ^ caret, to count something else instead:

• Characters (with spaces) — every character except line breaks
• Characters (no spaces) — leaving out spaces and line breaks as well
• Words
• Lines — counted exactly as the line-number gutter numbers them, so the two always agree
• Paragraphs

Your choice is remembered. An emoji or an accented letter counts as one character, and words are found correctly in languages written without spaces between them.

What’s New, after an automatic update

With Auto-Update on, updates install themselves when Kinetic Notes quits, so the notes describing them were never seen. From now on, the first launch after such an update opens a window with that version’s release notes, once. Updates installed from the update window already show their notes there, so nothing more appears.

This begins with the update after 1.8, since 1.8 is the first version that knows how to do it.

A tidier window

• The divider between the notes and the note is now the same thin line in both layouts, and either layout’s divider is dragged by grabbing that line.
• Show the search field beside the window title moves to the top of the checkboxes in Settings → General.

Fixes

• Each layout remembers where you left its divider. Switching between the stacked and side-by-side layouts used to reset the other layout’s divider to an even split.
• In the side-by-side layout, the lines between notes no longer run through the notes. They were drawn a little too high, across the end of each preview and its tags.

Changes in #38 and #39.

On some Macs, a freshly downloaded 1.7 was refused at launch with “Apple could not verify ‘Kinetic Notes.app’ is free of malware.” The application was signed and notarized correctly — the zip around it could damage that signature while being unpacked, before macOS ever looked at it.

Two faults in the archive, not the app

Stray filesystem metadata had been stored inside the application bundle, and unpacking with Finder left some of it behind, where no unsigned file is allowed. Separately, four Spanish resource files were sealed under one spelling of their accented names while Finder wrote back another, so they no longer matched the signature. Either one is enough for Gatekeeper to reject the copy on disk.

Nothing in the application itself changed. 1.7.1 is 1.7, packaged so that it survives every way of unpacking it, and the release script now refuses to publish an archive carrying either fault.

Reported in #34.

Kinetic Notes 1.7 tidies up Preferences: the update controls gain a pane of their own, the application can be pinned to a light or dark appearance, and the two spots where Dark Mode used to hide text are fixed.

An Updates pane joins Preferences

The update controls, previously reachable only from the application menu, now live together in Settings → Updates: a Check Now button, a Check for Updates Automatically toggle, and beneath it an Auto-Update toggle that downloads and installs updates on its own. Both toggles drive the existing Sparkle updater and persist in its settings. Auto-Update is available only while automatic checking is on, since the updater will not auto-install otherwise.

The Preferences toolbar was refreshed at the same time. All five panes now use SF Symbols for one consistent, Dark-Mode-aware look in place of the older bitmap icons, and the window is sized so every tab stays visible rather than collapsing into a ”»” overflow menu.

Dark Mode text, and a Color Scheme control

Two controls had kept colours that only worked against a light background: the Fonts & Colors Body Font field drew its name in a hard-coded black, invisible on the dark pane, and the Notes → Storage file-attribute tables kept a white background that left their text unreadable. Both now use the semantic colours that follow the system appearance.

A Color Scheme control joins Fonts & Colors. Follow System — the default — leaves the app to track macOS; Force Dark and Force Light pin the whole application to one appearance regardless of the system setting. The choice takes effect immediately and is remembered across launches.

Also in this release

• Deleting the note you searched for no longer blanks the whole list. After narrowing the list by typing in the search field and deleting the matching note, the now-stale search matched nothing, so the list filtered down to empty with no hint a filter was still active. A deletion that would empty the list now clears the search, and the surviving notes reappear.

Kinetic Notes 1.6 is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so it opens normally on first launch. The right-click → Open workaround earlier versions needed is gone.

The application updates itself

On its second launch it asks whether you would like it to check for updates. Decline and nothing contacts the network.

A scheduled check does not interrupt you: when a new version turns up, an Update Available button appears in the toolbar and waits until you are ready. Choosing Check for Updates… yourself still answers straight away.

Every download is verified against a signing key built into the application before it is unpacked, and a download that fails that check is discarded rather than installed.

Nothing is measured. No profile of your system is sent, and no record is kept of who was offered what. The update feed is the only network request the application makes.

The title bar is stacked again

The window’s title sits on its own row, with the search field on a full-width row beneath it — the way Notational Velocity had it. That was never removed on purpose: macOS 11 redefined how toolbars are drawn and folded the two rows into one. 1.6 asks for the older arrangement explicitly.

The side-by-side layout is still available, under Settings → General → Show the search field beside the window title.

Also in this release

• Hiding and re-showing the toolbar no longer renames the window “Notation”.
• Check for Updates… is translated into every language the application ships. It had been left in English in the Spanish interface.
• A Help → Support Development item invites donations.
• The Help menu’s Kinetic Notes Web Site item now points at kineticnotes.org rather than the source repository.

This release rewrites how Kinetic Notes talks to the disk. The storage formats are unchanged and verified compatible in both directions, but the code underneath them was new, so it shipped as a beta first. That testing is done and 1.5 is now the stable release.

Carbon File Manager removal

The deprecated Carbon API that handled note storage has been replaced. Two Carbon calls remain, for resolving Alias Manager records and reading volume creation dates.

Files and storage

• Notes are addressed by path instead of opaque FSRef handles.
• Atomic saving through scratch files eliminates incomplete writes.
• Directory scanning uses getattrlistbulk(2) for efficient folder reading.
• The notes folder location is stored as an NSURL bookmark, with backward compatibility.
• Trash and Finder operations use current APIs.

Data and security

• Archiving moved to NSSecureCoding, with byte-identical output.
• Keychain access now uses SecItem. Existing passphrases remain functional.

Interface

• All alerts rebuilt on NSAlert, across 38 call sites.
• Typographic quotes restored in 14 alerts and undo names.
• Welcome notes rebranded across all seven localizations.
• Column headers display opaque backgrounds; grid lines follow the system appearance.

Housekeeping

• Removed obsolete Leopard and Snow Leopard runtime checks.
• Application icon reserved outside the GPL licence.
• Changelog separated from the README.

Localization

Spanish was added as a seventh locale with complete translations, and the rebrand from Notational Velocity to Kinetic Notes was applied across every language.

The first release of Kinetic Notes, forked from Notational Velocity 2.0 β7.

Universal binary

Native Apple Silicon support: arm64 and x86_64, both native in one binary. Rosetta 2 is neither required nor used.

Dependencies removed

• OpenSSL replaced with Apple’s CommonCrypto. Encryption remains compatible — databases encrypted by Notational Velocity still open.
• AutoHyperlinks replaced with NSDataDetector.
• The Sparkle update framework was removed. Updates are a manual download.

Identity

Renamed to Kinetic Notes, with its own notes directory, Keychain service, and bundle identifier, kept separate from Notational Velocity so that both can be installed at once and neither can affect the other’s data.

New

• A first-run import assistant for migrating from Notational Velocity. It copies, never moves, and includes encrypted databases.
• Dark Mode support.

Removed

• Simplenote sync. The service’s integration was part of Notational Velocity and is no longer present.