Changelog
What’s changed
Every released version, newest first. FreeFlow is a one-time purchase and updates are included, so there is no version of this list you have to pay to reach.
The same notes appear inside the app under Help → What’s New. Builds that never shipped to anyone are not listed here.
1.7.2 · current
The indicator shows up on every Space, the microphone opens with AirPods on, and back-to-back takes both land.
- The recording indicator follows you to every SpaceAfter FreeFlow had been running a while on a Mac with several Spaces, holding ⌥ recorded and pasted while the pill never appeared. It was there — on a Space you were not looking at: leaving a fullscreen app had quietly taken the indicator’s window off every other Space, and macOS never put it back. 1.7.1 blamed App Nap for the same symptom; that wake stays, but this was the cause. The indicator and the Claude card now move to whichever Space is active each time they appear, and follow you if you switch Spaces while they are up. The “random text” after a short ⌥Space was the same bug from the other side: with no indicator, a toggle session gave no sign it was still running, and the next ⌥Space pasted everything heard since.
- A take started right after the last one no longer dies when that one pastesSince 1.5.2 you can hold ⌥ again while the previous take is still being written down. FreeFlow’s own ⌘V, pasting that previous take, counted as “a key typed while holding ⌥” and silently cancelled the new one. Its keystrokes now announce themselves and the hotkey ignores them.
- The microphone opens even when AirPods are the defaultWith AirPods (or any Bluetooth headset) set as the Mac’s input and output, a freshly launched FreeFlow recorded nothing: every take ended in “No audio from MacBook Pro Microphone”. macOS’s audio engine kept pulling the capture back onto the headset’s microphone a few milliseconds after each start, which flipped the headset into its call profile and killed the recording before a single sample. FreeFlow now opens the microphone it chose directly, so it stays on the built-in mic (or the one you picked in Settings), and picking a Bluetooth mic on purpose works too.
1.7.1
The indicator is back, Parakeet stays in your language, and the menu bar opens Settings again.
- The recording indicator shows up againSince 1.7.0 an idle FreeFlow could doze off (macOS App Nap), and a take begun from that doze recorded and pasted while the indicator never reached the screen. Every take now wakes the app for as long as it runs, so the pill, panel or notch bubble appears as ⌥ goes down.
- Parakeet V3 keeps to your languageParakeet V3 guesses the language from the audio, and a short take with little to go on sometimes guessed wrong — a one-word English take came back in Cyrillic. Each mode’s language now tells it which alphabet to stay in. Modes → Language is open for Parakeet V3 (28 languages); if you dictate in something other than English, pick it there once. Auto-detect still lets it guess.
- Settings… from the menu bar, every timeAfter a login launch, Open FreeFlow, Settings… and Help in the menu bar did nothing: the window they open had never been created, and nothing could create it. FreeFlow now builds its window on demand, so the menu bar — and reopening from Finder or Spotlight — works from the first click.
- Smaller fixesA stray mode named “Renamed” that a developer build once left in the Modes list is removed on launch. Links inside the app (Settings → Models, Help → a section) land on the right pane every time.
1.7.0
Formatting on your Mac, and updates that install themselves.
- Formatting on Apple IntelligenceAny mode can now hand its take to Apple’s on-device model with a prompt you write: filler and false starts gone, self-corrections applied, punctuation fixed — on your Mac, with nothing sent anywhere. Turn it on under Modes → Formatting (macOS 26 or later, with Apple Intelligence on); Clean Up has it on for new installs. If the model is slow, refuses, or the take is too long, the raw transcript pastes instead — a take is never lost to formatting.
- Updates install themselvesWhen a new version is offered, Install and Relaunch downloads it from freeflow.audio, checks that it is signed by FreeFlow, notarized by Apple and the announced build, swaps it into place and relaunches. Later now means later: a version you send away stays out of the daily check, and Check for Updates still shows it.
- A license stays on its MacYour license file now belongs to the Mac that activated it. Copying it to another Mac no longer carries the activation along — activate there instead, and the seat count means what it says. Nothing new is sent to anyone: the check is a fingerprint kept only in the file. The License window also shows how many of your seats are in use, as the licence server reports it, rather than repeating the number on the box.
- Two knobs for a stubborn microphoneSettings → While dictating gains Hold-⌥ delay (how long ⌥ is held alone before recording starts) and Silence threshold (how quiet a take can be before it counts as silence). They existed as hidden defaults; if your first syllable is clipped or quiet speech comes back as “Didn’t catch that”, they are yours now.
- Smaller fixesCopy diagnostics and the feedback window no longer hitch while the report is gathered. A screenshot attached to feedback keeps a small thumbnail instead of the whole grab. Two takes finishing in the same second can no longer overwrite each other. Read-aloud waits longer for a slow app to hand over the selection. The Accessibility watcher no longer keeps an idle FreeFlow awake. Four entries in this history (1.3.3 to 1.3.6) never reached anyone — their fixes shipped in 1.4.0 — and are marked so in the app.
- Also since 1.6.01.6.1 was built but never published, so its fixes ride here: plans and questions from Claude Code have separate switches that apply at once, a moved FreeFlow.app reads Not connected instead of silently yielding every card, and the auto-answer developer setting is compiled out of release builds. Errors clear themselves after two and a half seconds with or without the recording view. A microphone change mid-take no longer bleeds into the next take. The compute setting applies from the next dictation, and a license key is checked against FreeFlow’s own store before it activates.
1.6.0
Answer Claude Code without leaving what you’re doing.
- Claude’s questions come to youConnect FreeFlow to Claude Code in Settings and a small card appears whenever a session needs you — a question to answer, a plan to approve, a command to allow, or a turn that has finished. Click an option, or hold ⌥ and say it. The answer goes straight back into that session, and you never leave the window you were working in: the card is built so it cannot take keyboard focus, so your cursor does not move. It shows which project and branch is asking, and steps through them when more than one is waiting.
- Reply out loud when Claude finishesA finished turn shows what Claude said, and holding ⌥ over the card sends your reply back as the next instruction instead of pasting it into whatever is behind. On a question, saying an option’s name picks it — “use CPU and GPU” finds the option called “CPU & GPU” — and anything else goes through as a free-form answer. Permission cards are the exception and are click-only on purpose: a mis-heard word must never be able to allow a command.
- The window can no longer open where you cannot see itIf FreeFlow’s window was last used on a monitor that is no longer attached, macOS could restore it far outside every display — the app was running, the menu-bar mark was lit, and there was nothing on screen to click. A window that lands on no display at all is now brought back to the middle of your main one. A window you deliberately dragged half off an edge is left exactly where you put it.
- It can never get in your wayA card you ignore for 45 seconds hands the prompt back to Claude’s own window, exactly as it behaves today, and Esc does the same immediately. If FreeFlow is closed — or quits while a card is open — the session carries on within a second rather than waiting. Nothing here talks to the network: FreeFlow and Claude Code pass small files inside your own Library folder, and each of the four card types has its own switch in Settings.
1.5.2
The first take after a break is quick again — and ⌥ always records.
- The first take after a long break is no longer slowLeave FreeFlow alone for a night or a weekend and the first take could sit on “Writing it down…” for fifteen seconds. macOS had quietly pushed the speech model’s weights out of memory to make room for other apps, and the transcriber pulled them back from disk one page at a time. FreeFlow now re-reads the model’s files in one pass while you are still speaking, so the weights are back before you let go of ⌥ — about a third of a second for Cohere’s 2 GB, and nothing at all when the model was used in the last ten minutes.
- Press ⌥ during “Writing it down…” and it records right away1.5.1 remembered a ⌥ pressed while the previous take was still being transcribed and started recording once that take had pasted — as long as you were still holding. Let go first, as anyone does when the wait stretches past a couple of seconds, and what you said was gone. The next take now starts the moment you press: the microphone opens, the indicator shows recording, and the previous take finishes in the background and pastes first, in order. Esc still cancels what you are recording, never text already on its way.
1.5.1
⌥ shortcuts leave the microphone alone.
- A ⌥ press during “Writing it down…” is no longer lostPress ⌥ again while the previous take was still being transcribed and nothing happened: no recording, no indicator, and whatever you said went nowhere. Cohere takes a second or two to write a take down, so this was easy to hit. The hold is now remembered and the next take starts the moment the previous one is pasted — keep holding, and watch for the indicator.
- Silence no longer comes out as “Thank you.”Hold ⌥ without speaking and the model was handed a second of room noise, which it confidently transcribed as “Thank you.” The silence check now looks for a moment of actual speech-level sound instead of averaging the whole take, so an empty hold shows “Didn’t catch that” and pastes nothing.
- ⌥ chords no longer start a takePressing ⌥ as part of a shortcut — ⌘⌥← to switch tabs, ⌥⌫, ⌥e for an accent — opened the microphone, ducked your audio and flashed the indicator for a few milliseconds before the chord cancelled it. On AirPods every one of those flipped the headset into its mono call profile: sound in one ear, crackle, and a volume that sometimes never came back. Holding ⌥ now waits 150 ms before it touches anything, so a shortcut never reaches the microphone at all.
- Your volume always comes backDucking put the volume back only if it was still exactly where FreeFlow had left it — a Bluetooth headset renegotiating its level was enough to strand it at 25%, and the next take ducked from there. It now comes back unless you turned it up yourself mid-take, and, outside Incognito, every duck and restore is written to the log.
- The language menu knows your modelCohere Transcribe speaks 14 languages and nothing else. Picking Hebrew for it quietly typed English, with one grey caption as the only warning. A mode’s language menu now lists only what its model can transcribe, and a mode already set to something its model can’t do says so in red. Hebrew, and every language outside those 14, needs a Whisper model.
- Speed and accuracy on every modelThe meters only fit beside a trash icon, so installed models showed them and the ones you could still download didn’t — and “Accuracy” wrapped onto two lines. They now sit on the same line as each model’s description, on every row, at any window size. Hover a description for the model’s story, and click the ⓘ next to Voice models for what “avg WER” and the meters actually measure.
- Modes give the settings the roomThe list of modes opened wide and the settings squeezed in beside it. The list now starts narrow and the settings take the rest — drag the divider if you want it otherwise.
1.5.0
Now it reads to you — and leaves your AirPods alone.
- Bluetooth headsets keep their stereoRecording from a Bluetooth headset's microphone makes macOS drop the headset into its mono call profile for the whole take — sound in one ear, everything muffled — and a stray ⌥ chord could trigger it too. Auto-detect now prefers the built-in microphone whenever the system input is a Bluetooth headset. Want the headset mic anyway? Pick it under Settings → Microphone.
- Read aloudSelect text in any app and press ⌃⌥S — FreeFlow reads it back in Kokoro's voice, entirely on your Mac. Nothing selected? It reads your clipboard. Press again, or Esc, to stop. The voice is a 117 MB one-click download under Models; reading speed lives in Settings.
- Cohere Transcribe, for 14 languagesA 2B-parameter model with the best multilingual accuracy on offer, now in the model list. It needs macOS 15 and a 2.2 GB download, takes a moment to prepare the first time, and transcribes the language your mode names — it has no auto-detect, so anything outside its 14 languages comes out as English. Parakeet stays the recommended default for speed.
- History shows what you actually saidA dictation's transcript could show up blank in History for the rest of the session — the placeholder written before transcription was being remembered instead of the finished text. Word counts and daily stats were undercounting for the same reason.
- Prices and domains keep their spellingAutocapitalize treated every full stop as the end of a sentence, so “4.99 for” and “gmail.com” came back capitalized mid-word. Dictionary entries built around punctuation — C++, .NET — could never match at all; now they do.
- Downloads can be cancelledA model download had no stop button, so one misclick on a 3 GB model meant quitting the app. There is an × beside the progress bar now, in Models and in onboarding, and a failed download says why it failed instead of just offering Retry.
- Nothing spoken into a password field is left behindWhen a password field has focus macOS blocks pasting, so FreeFlow put the text on the clipboard instead — and in the most common case never took it back off. It is now always cleared after 30 seconds, whether or not Incognito is on.
- Quieter when idleSettings kept probing permissions every 1.5 seconds after you closed the window, and the always-visible recording indicator kept redrawing an animation too small to see. Both now stop when nothing is watching.
- Easier to read, easier to hearCaptions across the app were below the contrast standard in both light and dark mode; they are darker now. Every switch also announces its name to VoiceOver instead of reading as an unnamed button.
1.4.0
Deleted modes stay deleted — and you can talk back.
- Deleting a mode actually deletes itA deleted mode vanished from the list and then came back, at the bottom, the next time anything redrew. The editor writes its copy of the mode to disk as it closes — and deleting a mode is exactly what closes the editor, so every delete quietly undid itself. It no longer writes back a mode that is already gone.
- Send feedback, without leaving the appA bug, an idea, or anything else — in the sidebar and under Help. Drop or paste a screenshot; leave an email if you want to hear back when it is fixed. Diagnostics ride along only while the toggle is on, and the toggle names what is in them before you send.
- Incognito keeps its promise on every pathIncognito clears the clipboard after a dictation, but only did so when the paste actually landed. If Accessibility was off, if FreeFlow couldn’t send the keystroke, or if you were typing into a password field, the text was copied and left there. All three now clear it — after 30 seconds, so you can still paste it yourself first.
- Picking Neural Engine can no longer brick the appOn macOS 27, preparing a model on the Neural Engine crashes — and the crash happens at launch, before Settings is reachable, so choosing it left FreeFlow unable to start at all. If a launch dies that way, FreeFlow now notices on the next one and puts the setting back to Automatic.
- A little air around the roomThe content now sits as a rounded pane on the sidebar’s ground instead of butting straight up against it.
1.3.2
Belt and suspenders.
- Deeper crash-proofingThe fault fixed in 1.3.1 had one more way in — through machinery FreeFlow didn’t even own. Every known path in the app is now closed, and it survived a thousand-cycle hotkey stress test.
- Unplugging the mic mid-takeTaking your AirPods off no longer wedges a recording. FreeFlow finishes with what it heard and is ready for the next take on whatever mic is left.
- The Dock icon works againClicking it brings the main window back even while the recording indicator is on screen.
1.3.1
Steadier on its feet.
- The crash is goneA bug in how FreeFlow watched the keyboard could take it down at any keystroke, anywhere. Fixed at the root — the same fault was behind every crash report.
- Closing keeps your placeThe red button now tucks the window into the menu bar instead of throwing it away. Reopen it and you’re back on the same screen, scrolled where you left off.
- Fussier microphonesVirtual and aggregate inputs that report themselves oddly for a moment no longer bring down a take.
1.3.0
Yours to shape.
- Light modeLight, dark, or follow the system — in Settings → General.
- IncognitoNothing written to disk, nothing left on your clipboard. Off by default — flip it in Settings.
- Hotkeys that actually recordSetting an ⌥ shortcut no longer fires a dictation mid-keystroke — and conflicts get flagged.
- A smaller, faster notchThe notch indicator is about a third of its old size and appears and clears without the hitch.
- Languages by nameSearch for “Portuguese” instead of typing “pt”. Modes are easier to delete, and new ones pick their own icon.
1.2.0
A warmer look, a quieter HUD.
- Redesigned dashboardWarm paper tones, serif headlines, a calmer sidebar — easier on the eyes everywhere.
- Notch indicatorA minimal waveform bubble tucked under the notch — third style in Settings, or keep it visible always.
- Pick your microphoneChoose an input device, or let Auto-detect follow the system default.
- Updates find youFreeFlow checks quietly once a day and only speaks up when something new exists. Off switch in Settings.
- Faster, cleaner takesInstant paste, per-mode filler-word and profanity cleanup, and honest model ratings with real WER numbers.