iXnote 26.007

In the last release notes I said I'd stop shipping big features for a while. I lasted about six weeks. iXnote 26.007 is live on the App Store, and most of it is about the five minutes before a meeting and the hour after it.

What this means for you

Your next meeting, one tap away. FollowAlong's feed now shows your next calendar meeting at the top, right next to what's being said. Tap it and iXnote makes a card for the meeting, connects a card for every attendee, and takes you straight there. You walk in with the card already open. No setup, no digging through the import sheet while everyone else says hello.

Meetings sit in the feed at their real time. Upcoming ones stay above, then they slide down the timeline once they're over. Once a meeting has a card, its row disappears, so you're never offered the same one twice. Recurring meetings work too; each occurrence gets its own card.

Suggestions your graph has been hinting at. Select a card and FollowAlong suggests cards two steps out that several of its connections lead to. If three of your contacts all connect to the same project, that project probably matters to the person you're looking at. You don't need a microphone or a meeting for this. Just select a card. Long-press a suggestion to connect it, and it leaves the list.

Transcripts that carry their context (Pro). An exported FollowAlong transcript now records which meeting you were in, who was there, and which cards you had open, at the moment it happened. Hand it to ChatGPT, Claude or any other AI tool and it already knows what the conversation was about. You don't have to explain anything, and you don't have to do anything; it's captured while FollowAlong listens.

Cleaner FollowAlong cards. Fewer junk cards, and the ones you get stick to what was actually said. No more padding with textbook facts nobody in the room mentioned. At most five per pass, so the feed doesn't flood.

FollowAlong gets its own column (iPad and Mac). FollowAlong is now a fourth column beside your graph, the same width as the others, so you can watch suggestions arrive while you keep working. Nothing covers your cards. The microphone button sits in the toolbar next to it.

Your iPhone, sideways. Layout now follows how much room iXnote has, whatever the device. Turn a big iPhone sideways and you get the full multi-column graph. Turn it back and you get tabs.

The decisions behind it

I built a judge before I touched the prompt. Changing the instructions FollowAlong uses to draft cards is easy. Knowing the new ones are better is the hard part, because a single meeting that looks better proves nothing. So I recorded real sessions, replayed them through the old instructions and the new, and had the results judged blind. The new version won 7 of 8 comparisons and lost none, which is the only reason it shipped. It isn't free. On one session it kept slightly fewer of the cards I'd accepted before, 8 of 11 against 10 of 11. I'll take that trade for a feed that stops inventing things.

It suggests. It never connects. The shared-connections feature could have drawn the connections itself. The arithmetic is right there. It deliberately doesn't. The graph is yours, and a connection you didn't make is one you won't trust or remember. So iXnote proposes, and you decide every connection. Same rule as FollowAlong, same rule as Shortcuts.

Who reads a transcript now? Mostly an AI tool. And raw speech never says which meeting it was. "Can you send that over to her by Friday" means nothing without knowing who was in the room. So the transcript now stamps the meeting and the open card at the source, at the moment they happen, where nobody has to reconstruct them afterwards.

The folding phone broke a rule. The old rule was simple: iPhone means tabs, iPad means columns. A folding phone is both, sometimes within the same minute. So the rule became "how wide is the window?" Landscape iPhones got the iPad layout for free on the way.

Everything in 26.007

• Next meeting in FollowAlong. Shows at the top of the feed. One tap creates the meeting card with connected attendee cards and selects it. Rows sit at their real time and disappear once the meeting has a card. Each occurrence of a recurring meeting is separate.
• Calendar access. Asked for when FollowAlong first needs it. Say no and meetings are simply left out; everything else works.
• Shared-connection suggestions. Select a card to see cards two steps out that several of its connections lead to. Long-press to connect. No microphone needed.
• Transcript context (Pro). Exported transcripts include meeting title, attendees and open cards, timestamped. Transcripts still stay on your devices and in your iCloud, and are cleared after 7 days.
• New card drafting. Better adherence to what was said, fewer junk cards, a cap of five per pass.
• FollowAlong column (iPad and Mac). A fourth column at full width, with a microphone button in the toolbar. On small windows the columns keep a minimum width and scroll sideways rather than hiding.
• Live ticker. A one-line strip of the conversation crawling right to left. It speeds up for a fast talker, settles when they pause, and tucks away when FollowAlong isn't listening.
• Width-based layout. Columns or tabs depending on available width. Every iPhone gets columns in landscape.
• Better matches to existing cards. While you listen, matches favor cards near the one you've selected but still reach across your whole graph, so a brand-new card with few connections still gets relevant matches.
• Fixes. The live transcript no longer pauses or bunches up when you select a different card mid-meeting. Edits to a card show everywhere the moment you save. A fresh install no longer silently fails to show meetings.

What's next

This time I mean it. Bug fixes, and finding the people who'll tell me what to build next. If iXnote helps you think, a rating or a line of review in the App Store makes a real difference to who finds it (there's a button in Settings). And if a transcript with its context does something clever in your AI tool of choice, send it to me. I want to see it.

iXnote keeps your cards on your devices and in your private iCloud, end-to-end encrypted. I never see your data, because it never touches my servers.

Update from the App Store, and become a better thinker, not a better note taker.