Changelog

macOS 5.1

October 2026

• Safari History and Safari Bookmarks are one Safari card, with tabs for Kinds, Sites, Bookmarks, Reading List and Tabs. Your files stay in the same folders.
• Each Voice Memos note carries its transcript under its audio: the one Voice Memos made, or on macOS 27 one heard on your Mac with Apple’s speech model in the language you pick in Options…. Each note says which it is, in which language, and how sure the model was.
• Either Safari purchase you made unlocks all of Safari.
• Your Safari bookmark files take the names Safari shows: Favorites and Bookmarks Menu. The old files are replaced.
• Each Safari visit and bookmark carries Safari’s own few lines of the page under its line, on macOS 27. Untick Page Snippets to leave them out.
• Safari’s own topics for the pages you read go into each day’s topics and beside each visit, and topics.md lists every topic with its Wikidata link and its pages.
• Each site’s icon, the largest Safari keeps, is copied once into safari-icons and shown before its Safari visits and bookmarks.
• Safari’s Reading List is a kind of its own: every page you saved is a file in safari-reading-list, saying when you saved it, whether you read it and when, with Safari’s preview of the page. It leaves your bookmark files, and its own tab lists the pages to untick.
• With Safari’s data folder connected and Safari unlocked, your open tabs are files in safari-tabs and safari-tab-groups: this Mac with its windows and pinned tabs, each iPhone, iPad or Mac on your account, each Tab Group. Private windows are never written.
• With Safari unlocked, more of what Safari keeps is written too: Recently Closed with Safari’s own summary of each page, your downloads a file a month (kept after Safari forgets them), Top Sites, each site’s settings, the Privacy Report a file a month, and the pages you asked Safari to watch.
• Tick Page Pictures to put Safari’s own picture of each page under its visit or tab. It is off until you tick it, as the pictures take room.
• Tick Page Text to fetch the text of each bookmark and Reading List page into safari-pages, linked from its line. It is fetched once, on your Mac, without your cookies; a page behind a sign-in says so instead. Your history is never fetched.
• Tick CSV to also have your Safari history a month at a time, your bookmarks, Reading List and downloads as CSV tables in safari-csv, a row per visit, bookmark, page and download, for Numbers or a spreadsheet. It is off until you tick it.
• With Markdown chosen in Settings › Markdown, the pictures in your Reminders lists and a reply in Messages use standard Markdown. They stayed wikilinks.
• After you unlock a source, its setup sheet says how many are already on your Mac. It counted every item as there.
• Link previews in Apple Notes come out as the page’s title linking to it. They were left out of the file.
• Settings › Markdown says that links to web pages are always standard Markdown. The Links choice is for links between your notes and files.
• Each source’s card shows where its files go with Options… beside Change…. The format, Organize and a source’s own settings, like Safari’s Includes and Voice Memos’ Transcribe In, are in Options…, the same sheet as at setup.
• Before Safari’s data folder is connected, the Tabs list says where your tabs are and offers Connect. It said no tabs were found.
• Safari’s topics leave out a page you come back to day after day, like a feed: its one topic described a moment of it.
• While Safari is locked, its Tabs list says your tabs and Tab Groups sync with Unlock Safari.
• A Voice Memos recording carries the date Voice Memos shows for it. A recording synced from your iPhone carried the day it reached your Mac.

macOS 5.0

October 2026

• Alto Index runs on the same engine as Exporter now: a new window, a setup sheet that walks you through connecting each app, and changes written the moment you make them instead of every 15 minutes.
• Everything you had carries over: each app’s folder, what you unticked, what you bought, and the files already in your export folder.
• Phone Calls, Safari History and Screenshots now have a list: choose the people, sites and months that sync.
• Closing the window no longer stops syncing: Alto Index keeps your files current until you quit it.
• alto.index is now called Alto Index.
• Settings, the export log, Help and About are redrawn to match, and every screen speaks the app’s 19 languages.
• Granola is no longer a source. The files it exported stay in your folder.
• Alto Index now sends anonymous usage stats, so the steps that lose people can be fixed: which welcome step was on screen, which source was connected, when an unlock button was shown and what came of pressing it, and once a day that the app is still in use. Never a note, a title, a file name or anything else from your data, and one switch in Settings turns it off.

macOS 4.1

September 2026

• If you bought a bundle, alto.index no longer asks you to buy anything until it has heard back from Apple about what you own. It used to show every source’s free limit and price for the first moment after launch, and kept showing them if that check was slow, so people who had already paid for all connections were told a source cost extra. A sync that starts in that moment now waits for the answer too, so it never runs with the free limits.
• The Claude Desktop extension is in the app: Integrations, claude desktop extension, and the download opens straight away. Finding it meant hunting the website before.
• The mcp docs button opens a page that exists. It pointed at an address that was never there.

macOS 4.0

September 2026

• Choose what syncs: tick the folders and notes from Apple Notes, the mailboxes from Mail, the lists from Reminders, the calendars from Calendar, and the same for Messages, Bear, Contacts, Voice Memos, bookmarks, Books, Podcasts, Kindle and Screen Time. Anything new exports on its own unless you untick it.
• Organize Apple Notes by folder, by tag or by smart folder, and Contacts in one folder, by group or by company. Notes and Bear export as Markdown or HTML.
• Full resync removes only the files alto.index wrote, and every source card works the same way, with a sync bar that never moves the layout.
• Contacts and Calendar now read straight from their folder on your Mac, the way every other source already did. Contact notes come across for the first time, and repeating events still export every time they happen. Each asks you to pick its folder once, and everything you already exported stays where it is.
• Notes and Messages export in a richer format, the same one as our notes exporter app. A note is named by its title, carries whether it is pinned or shared, and links to the notes it mentions. A conversation shows replies, every earlier version of an edited message, and links each person to their contact file, which in turn lists their conversations. Every file is rewritten once, on the first sync.
• Setting up a source takes you through it one step at a time, and a folder that does not hold that source’s data is turned away on the spot, with the name of what it was looking for.
• alto.index now speaks seventeen languages: Arabic, Czech, German, Spanish, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese and Simplified Chinese, alongside English.
• Apple Books and Screen Time open their folder in the right place, and Apple Mail and Phone Calls reconnect on their own when the app starts.
• Every screen is translated, and so are the macOS permission prompts.

macOS 3.2

September 8, 2026

• Your exports go back where they belong. Since May, alto.index wrote each source straight into the folder you picked, so anyone who picked Documents got nineteen folders loose in it. Files land in alto-index inside that folder again, and the folders left loose are moved back in for you, once. Nothing is deleted or overwritten.
• alto.index speaks German, Spanish, French, Japanese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Every screen, and the macOS permission prompts too.
• A first run that tells you where you are: pick a folder, connect a source, sync. One button at a time, and it says which step you are on.
• An About page of its own, on the heart in the toolbar and in the alto.index menu. What is new, who made it, how to send an issue or an idea, and the newsletter.
• The heart in the bottom bar carries a dot when there is something new to read, and the card behind it now has the release notes it was always meant to show.
• Help opens with the way to reach us instead of burying it under the explainers, and the alto.index Help menu goes there rather than nowhere.

macOS 3.1

September 1, 2026

• Menu bar mode: keep syncing with the window closed. Status for every source lives in the menu bar, and you turn it on in settings.
• Fair local prices in 57 countries, and the app now shows prices straight from the App Store in your own currency.
• Send feedback without leaving the app: report an issue, request a feature or ask a question right from the Help tab.
• Connected sources now sort to the top of the list.
• A new icon, cleaner typography, hover-only scrollbars, and Screen Time finally wears its real icon.