Introducing the Edgebar

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the Future of Alter.

Introducing the EdgeBar, a completely new way to interact with Alter. Invoke it directly from the edge of your screen, whenever you need it.

🎶 Todd Terje - Ragysh 🎶

What is the EdgeBar?

The Edge Bar is a slim, elegant toolbar that sits on the edge of your screen, ready to give you instant access to Alter's most powerful features. Once invoked, you can slide it up or down to reposition the activation hotspot exactly where it feels most natural.

Paired with QuickHub, this will deprecate the notch and the old interface, including the control block taking too much estate in your menubar. The notch will stay until the EdgeBar becomes stable.

Click the blue arrow to reveal all available functions:

• Quick Hub — Launch it with a single click by pressing the plus button. Better yet, the icon below auto-attaches Quick Hub to your current active window. Switch windows and the Quick Hub follows seamlessly.

• Recording — Start recording any meeting (in-person or remote) with one tap on the mic icon. Perfect for capturing ideas, meetings, and conversations without switching context.

• Live Features (Parakeet) — Launch the live notepad or live caption directly from the Edge Bar for real-time transcription during meetings.

• Right-Click Controls — Stop recording, cancel, or switch your input device with a simple right-click.

Fully Customizable

Head to Settings to configure your Edge Bar experience:

• Choose to display it on the right, the left, or both sides simultaneously

• Position it vertically to match your workflow

Going further

• Drag and drop a file on the Edgebar to add it to a Quickhub window

• Browse a Youtube video, add the transcript in one click to an Alter window

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Cheers,
Olivier & Sam

Full Changelog

New Features & Enhancements

• Audio capture pipeline: Rebuilt capture for cleaner, more reliable meeting recordings.

• Cloud transcription: Switched to the new Soniox V5 engine for improved cloud transcription quality.

Bug Fixes & Stability

• Meeting history: Fix history saving of meeting recordings.

• Live transcription: Fixed a Whisper live callback deadlock that could stall transcription.

• Dictation cleanup: Ignored dictation cleanup failures so they no longer interrupt workflows.

• Startup reliability: Captured AppKit launch exceptions, removed the placeholder window, and gated hub rendering until explicitly opened.

• Preferences: Sanitized persisted layout values and resolved a runtime concurrency warning.

• Chat rendering: User raw tags now render literally in messages.

• Workspace tools: Fixed Xcode Python shim handling in bash tool execution.

• Notch input: Fixed plain Return key submission from notch input.

• Pasteboard: Fixed a crash when copying to the pasteboard.

• QuickHub shortcuts: Reduced modifier attach sensitivity when opening QuickHub.

• Hub app sense: Refresh app context when focusing the hub.