Release Notes

Every release of Spleen, newest first, with the date it shipped. For the story behind the latest changes, read What's New.

v1.0.0-alpha.37

5 October 2026

Libron is a quiet book face with softened serifs, made by Nico Verbruggen. Choose it under Preferences, Editor settings, Editor font family, next to Literata, Atkinson Hyperlegible and Inter.
In the guide, What’s New now tells the story of the latest changes in a few paragraphs. The full list of releases moved to a page of its own, Release Notes, with the date each version shipped.
The About page now names every typeface Spleen is set in, who made it, and the open licence it is shared under.
In light mode, Ukiyo’s parchment page looked yellow rather than off-white on phones with a wide-colour screen. It is now a paler, more neutral paper. This had been the case since the theme arrived in 1.0.0-alpha.36 on 4 October.

v1.0.0-alpha.36

4 October 2026

A fifth theme, taken from the colours of a Japanese woodblock print: parchment paper, ink charcoal, indigo, celadon green, chestnut brown and a deep red. In dark mode the page becomes a charcoal night sky with celadon accents. Choose it under Preferences, Appearance, or from the palette button on the public pages.
The Help Center and the page a reader sees when you share a document now use Ukiyo instead of Zen. Your own Light, Dark or System choice still carries over, and visiting them never changes the theme you picked.
The changelog now opens on the ten newest releases, with a button to show them all. A link to an older release opens the full list.
A document inside a section now offers its actions in the same order as a document at the top level, with Rename before Move.
The notes and annotations drawer leaves a wider margin on small screens, and the Save note button now sits directly under the text field.
Screen readers now say which language, mode and theme card is selected in Preferences, Appearance.

v1.0.0-alpha.35

1 October 2026

The login and signup pages now show how you signed in last time on this browser: with Google, Facebook, or email and password. It is there to save you from creating a second account by picking the wrong one. The reminder is kept in a cookie for 30 days and holds nothing but the method.
When a newer version of Spleen is out, the Help Center header now shows the same update button as the rest of the site.
The cookie policy lists the new last sign-in method cookie, and every cookie name is now set in a monospaced font so it is easy to find in your browser settings.

v1.0.0-alpha.34

1 October 2026

You can now sign up and log in with your Facebook account, next to Google and your email address. Spleen receives only your name, email address and profile picture.
The GitHub button is gone from the login and signup forms. No account used it, so nobody loses access.
Without a profile picture, the upload button now sits centred at the bottom of the circle. Once you have a picture, it moves to the corner beside the remove button.

v1.0.0-alpha.33

30 September 2026

Account, Personal info has a new Author information card for a contact email, a phone number and a postal address. Word manuscripts print them in the contact block under your name, where an agent looks to reply. All three are optional, and the contact email falls back to the one you sign in with.
The Backups section now says Up to date as of rather than Last backup. On a night when nothing changed, no new copy is made, so the newest file in your Dropbox can be older than that date. Back up now shows a spinner while it runs.
When something fails before a page can load, the error page now has the Spleen header, a plain explanation and a Try again button, instead of a bare Internal Error.
Download data left out the country and bio you set on your profile. It has done so since the first alpha. Both are now included, along with the new author information.
The feature cards on the homepage now share one height, so a row no longer ends in cards of different lengths.

v1.0.0-alpha.32

27 September 2026

The projects overview now starts in the grid, where each project shows as a card with its cover. If you had already chosen the table, you keep it.
On a larger screen, every page of the grid opens with a New project card while your plan allows another project. With only a few projects, faint empty frames fill out the rest of the shelf, never suggesting more room than your plan has.
The title filter and the sort button appear once a list holds ten or more projects. With fewer, you can see everything at a glance, so they stay out of the way.

v1.0.0-alpha.31

27 September 2026

Notes, Annotations and Snapshots no longer open with a paragraph explaining themselves. A short hint appears only while a tab is empty, and goes once there is something in it.
Each note and annotation shows when it was last edited, and Edit and Delete have moved into a menu at its bottom right. Clicking an annotation takes you to its passage. Notes are now a plain list rather than cards, and long ones show more before Show more appears.
The homepage screenshots now open on the Notes tab, and the phone screenshot shows the start of a book.

v1.0.0-alpha.30

27 September 2026

Signed in, the Manage in the app and Switch to buttons on the pricing page took you to your projects instead of your plan, so changing plans from there meant finding Account, Billing yourself. They now open the billing page. This had been wrong since the first alpha.
On a larger screen, the homepage now steps through three views of the editor: annotations beside the text, a document’s snapshots, and the radio. Small dots underneath move between them.
The list of releases on this page fades out at its edges as it scrolls, so it no longer stops at a hard line.

v1.0.0-alpha.29

26 September 2026

Library can now back up your projects to your own Dropbox. Connect it once under Account, Backups, and every night Spleen copies each project that changed as a Spleen Archive you can import again. Spleen only sees its own folder, keeps the last 10 copies of each project, and can make a copy right away with Back up now. If a backup cannot finish, because your Dropbox is full or access was removed, the Backups section says so and what to do.
A Spleen Archive is now read from one consistent moment. Before, a save or a move made while the download was being prepared could, rarely, give a file whose sections and documents did not quite match.

v1.0.0-alpha.28

26 September 2026

Library can now export a project as the interior of a paperback, ready for KDP, IngramSpark or a local printer. Choose a trim size of 5 × 8, 5.5 × 8.5 or 6 × 9 inches, and optionally a copyright page with your ISBN and a dedication. The book opens with a title page and contents, numbers its pages from the first chapter, starts every chapter on a right-hand page, and sets your name and the title at the top of the pages. The fonts are embedded and the margins mirror across each spread, as print services require. Choose Print PDF from the Export menu; your settings are remembered for each project.

v1.0.0-alpha.27

26 September 2026

Library can now export a project as a Word document in standard manuscript format, the kind agents, editors and publishers ask for: a title page with your name, email and an approximate word count, 12pt Times New Roman, double spacing, each chapter on a new page, and a header with your surname, the title and the page number. Choose A4 or Letter from the Export menu.
Quill now includes 3 projects and Folio 10; Library stays unlimited. Creating share links now needs Folio or Library. Nothing you already have is taken away: every project stays, and share links you made keep working and can still be stopped. If you are over the new limit, you cannot create another project until you are below it.
Each plan now lists what it actually adds, including Zen mode on Quill and share links on Folio. The line promising early access to new features is gone, because nothing delivered it yet.
Since alpha.20, the Resources menu in the site header could open past the right edge of a laptop-width screen, cutting off part of it. It now opens towards the left.
On shorter screens, the side panel on the guide, legal, about, contact, blog and changelog pages could run below the window, leaving the card under the contents list out of reach. It now scrolls on its own.
Every public page now starts its title at the same height, so it no longer jumps when you move between them, and the feature cards on the homepage line up their icons and titles.

v1.0.0-alpha.26

25 September 2026

On a computer, bold, italic, alignment and the other formatting tools now sit in the bar at the top of the page, between the panel buttons, instead of floating over the text you select. They format what you select, or what you type next. If you prefer the floating toolbar, open Preferences and turn off Fixed at the top of the page under Formatting toolbar. Zen mode keeps the floating one, and the editor tour now points the toolbar out.
Reporting a problem no longer asks for a message of at least ten characters. Sending the page and your app version is enough for us to start looking, and a few words about what you were doing still help. We read every report, and we will email you if we need more or once it is fixed.
A project without a subtitle now reads "click here to add a subtitle" on its overview page, so it is clear the line can be filled in.
The site and the help centre headers were a little taller than the one in the editor. They now match.
The note under the radio streams now takes two short lines, and the popup is narrower on a computer.
The What's New article in the guide showed a note meant only for us above the releases, starting "The releases themselves are not written here". Notes like it are now kept out of every page, and out of search. This had been the case since 1.0.0-alpha.19 on 13 September.

v1.0.0-alpha.25

24 September 2026

The first time you open a project on a computer, a few small notes point out the parts worth knowing: the project tree and its menu, sections, research, the panel beside the page, and the tools at the top. Each one waits for Got it, and Skip tour ends it at any point. It runs once. To see it again, open Preferences and choose Show tour again under Editor settings.
Your projects, your account and the report page now carry Home, Projects, Account and Resources across the top on a wider screen, as the rest of the site does. The help centre moved into Resources, so the separate button for it is gone.
A document outside any section showed only its own title at the top of the editor. It now shows the project name before it, the way a document in a section shows its section.
When Spleen fails on our side, the page now says so in plain words instead of "Internal Error", and offers Try again next to the way back. It also offers Report a problem, which sends the reference shown on the page along with your report, so we can find exactly what happened.
The footer now reads the copyright first and the version after it.
Reporting a problem from outside a project opened a page with no header or footer, so there was no way back except the browser. It now looks like the rest of the app, and on a computer the cursor is already in the message field. This had been the case since reporting arrived in 1.0.0-alpha.10 on 8 September.

v1.0.0-alpha.24

24 September 2026

Every public page asked search engines to stay away, a setting left over from before launch. The site, the blog and the guide are now open to them, and every guide page is listed so it is found sooner. Your projects, documents and share links stay out of search results, as they always have.
Each guide page told search engines that its real address was on spleen.page, which only sends visitors back to the guide. Search engines tend to drop pages like that. Each page now gives its own address. This had been wrong since the site went live on 5 September, but it cost nothing, because search engines were kept out until this release.

v1.0.0-alpha.23

23 September 2026

Pages name their icon, but some programs skip the page and ask for a file called favicon.ico by convention: feed readers, bookmarking tools, and a browser tab showing something that is not a web page. Spleen had no such file, so they showed a blank square. It now has one, drawn from the same mark as the rest. It had been missing since the site went live on 5 September.
The day and month headings in the Snapshots tab were as tall as the cards around them, so a few days of history filled a phone screen before you reached a single snapshot. They are now slimmer, and more of the list fits in view.
The list of versions beside the changelog grew with every release and pushed the page down with it. It now sits in a box of its own height that scrolls, so the newest releases stay at hand.
The email address, the town and the opening hours now carry the weight, with their labels quieter beside them, and the two cards sit the same distance apart as everything else on the page.

v1.0.0-alpha.22

22 September 2026

On an Android phone the on-screen keyboard slid over the page instead of making room for itself, so a panel that filled the screen kept its full height underneath it. The field you had just tapped could end up behind the keys, along with the buttons for saving what you wrote. The page now shrinks to the space the keyboard leaves. It has been this way for as long as Spleen has had an editor, and it affected anyone writing on an Android phone. An iPhone behaves as it did before.
In a dark theme, choosing Edit on a note or annotation drew a filled panel behind the text that did not match the card around it, and the text sat tight against its edge. The field is now invisible until you type in it, as it always was in a light theme. It arrived with the contrast work on 29 July and showed only in the dark themes.
The panel holding Notes, Annotations and Snapshots opened at the width it uses beside the editor on a desktop, which left a narrow column to read and write in. On a phone it now takes nearly the whole screen, keeping a strip of the page beside it to tap on to close.
Choosing Edit now places the cursor after what you have already written and brings the whole card into view, instead of leaving you to tap into the field yourself. Save and Delete read as they do everywhere else in Spleen.
A post with no image of its own shows the frame that stood in for one, now with a small icon in the middle chosen to suit the post. It is a quieter way to tell the posts apart at a glance than a stock photograph would be.

v1.0.0-alpha.21

20 September 2026

Subscribing to Folio or Library can now be paid with iDEAL/Wero, alongside cards, Apple Pay, Google Pay and Link. The first payment goes through your own bank the way any iDEAL/Wero payment does, and the renewals that follow are collected from the same account by direct debit, which your bank tells you about beforehand. The pricing page names the accepted methods so you can see them before you start.
If you opened the payment page and then changed your mind, say to pick yearly instead of monthly, starting again was refused with a message telling you to close the checkout first. Closing it released nothing, so the only thing that helped was waiting five minutes. The hold is now released the moment you come back without paying, and the message no longer suggests something that never worked. It has been this way since the guard against paying twice arrived on 5 September, and it could catch anyone who left the payment page without finishing.
The page now reads as a list of questions, with the first answer open and the rest a click away, so you can see everything that is answered without scrolling past it. The list beside it marks the question you have open, and a link to a question opens it when you arrive.
While places are left, a single line above the site header says so and links to the form, instead of the offer living only in the home page heading. It is not shown once the places are gone, or to someone already signed in.

v1.0.0-alpha.20

19 September 2026

There is somewhere to read about what is being built and why, at the Blog in the Resources menu. Posts are listed newest first, each saying who wrote it, when, and roughly how long it takes to read. The first one is an account of the fortnight since Spleen went public on 5 September, including the parts that broke and what it took to put them right.
A new page collects the short answers: whether your writing is private, what happens to your work if you stop paying, how to get it out of Spleen, what deleting something actually does, and how to cancel. Each one points into the guide for the longer version, so nothing is answered twice in two places that could drift apart.
Blog, FAQ, Changelog and the help centre are together under Resources in the site header, instead of Help center sitting on its own at the end of the row. On a phone the same four appear as one group in the menu, where the help centre used to be pinned by itself above Close, and whichever page you are on is marked.
On a phone, a project card spells out the month, and in the narrow column beside the cover a long one such as September pushed the date onto a second line. It is shortened there now, and stays spelled out on a wider screen. It has looked that way since the projects list was translated on 13 July, and only on a narrow screen.

v1.0.0-alpha.19

13 September 2026

If you signed up but never confirmed your email address, then forgot your password and chose a new one through the reset link, Spleen still refused to sign you in because the address was unconfirmed. The reset link had just proved the address was yours, since it only ever reaches that inbox. It now counts as confirming it, so choosing a new password lets you straight in. It has worked the old way since sign-in first asked for a confirmed address, on 16 May, and it only caught someone who had never confirmed.

v1.0.0-alpha.18

12 September 2026

The sign-up form said places were limited, then took you to the same page as everyone else, with nothing to say whether you had asked in time. The form no longer claims anything about places. Once you have signed up, the page that asks you to confirm your address tells you the application landed and that an email will follow, and it says so only when a place was actually still open, so a full cohort no longer implies a promise it cannot keep. Applying has worked this way since self-service applications arrived on 11 July.
An invitation that had been sent but not yet accepted did not count against the six founding places, so the application form could have given away a place that already belonged to someone, and the invited person would have arrived to find the cohort full. Nobody was caught by this: it needed the places to run out between an invitation being sent and accepted, and that never happened. It has been possible since applications arrived on 11 July.
Visitors without an account now see a short note under the main button: the first project is free, with no end date. The founding tester link beside it is underlined, so it reads as a link on a touch screen, where the underline only appeared on hover and so never appeared at all.

v1.0.0-alpha.17

11 September 2026

If you joined through a founding beta invite, deleting your account removed everything the page named except one thing: the invite itself, which still held the address the invitation was sent to. Your seat was released properly, so nobody was kept out by it, but that address should have gone with the account and did not. It does now. Invites that were never accepted are untouched, so an invitation still waiting to be claimed outlives the person who sent it. Invites have worked this way since they arrived on 26 June, and any left over from an account already deleted are being cleared separately.

v1.0.0-alpha.16

11 September 2026

Spleen keeps the public site and the writing app on separate addresses, and only the writing side is meant to know who you are. The page that turns a founding beta invite into an account sat on the public side, so that is where the account was made, and the public site was left holding a sign-in it should never have had. You would see your own initials in the header on spleen.page, and the log out in that menu took you to your projects rather than signing you out. Nothing you wrote was ever involved and nobody else could see anything of yours. Invites now open on the writing side, where every other sign-up already happened, and links already sent still work and simply move you across. Everyone who has joined the beta so far came in this way, and the stray sign-in on the public site stops counting for them from this release.

v1.0.0-alpha.15

11 September 2026

That checkbox works by setting your browser a small puzzle to solve, which is how Spleen keeps bots off the sign-up form without asking you to read wobbly letters. The puzzle was set far harder than intended, so the box sat there spinning: around seven seconds on a fast desktop, and close to a minute on an ordinary laptop. It has been that way since bot protection arrived on 17 May, on every sign-in, sign-up, password reset and message through the contact form, which means everyone in the beta has sat through it at least once. It now takes about a second.
If you asked for a founding beta seat and it was granted, nothing was sent to you. The seat was yours and waiting, and the only way to find out was to try signing in again. Approval now sends you an email.

v1.0.0-alpha.14

10 September 2026

The header still showed your name and a Projects link, as though nothing had happened. You were signed out, and the app itself knew it; only the public site's display was stale, and it could stay that way for days. It clears the moment you sign out now. Deleting an account had the same fault, which is where it was noticed.
It now matches the sign-in and sign-up pages it sits alongside.

v1.0.0-alpha.13

10 September 2026

The link in a founding beta invite named an internal address instead of spleen.page. It worked, because it sent you on to the right page, but the mail looked wrong and should never have named that address at all. It now reads spleen.page, and the line under the button names the same address the button opens. Both invites sent since the alpha went live on 5 September carried the wrong one.
No copying it across from the email. You can still change it, though the beta is tied to the address that was invited.
It sat a short way past its footer for no reason.

v1.0.0-alpha.12

9 September 2026

It sits at the end of the header, the same button the project header has always had, and opens the form over the page you are on instead of taking you somewhere else to fill it in. Reporting has left the public pages and the account menu in a project sidebar, where it sat among links to other places. Inside a project on a phone there is no bug button, so reporting from a phone means stepping out to your projects list or Account first.
Report a problem now sits below the places you can go rather than among them, and Help center has moved up into the list under Account.
The menu behind your avatar checks the page you already have open, as the phone menu has always done.

v1.0.0-alpha.11

8 September 2026

The icon opened the public homepage instead. You are only signed in on the writing side of Spleen, so arriving on the marketing side looked exactly like being logged out, which is what several people reported. Nobody was ever signed out. An icon already on a phone may keep the old start for a while; removing it and adding it again fixes it immediately.

v1.0.0-alpha.10

8 September 2026

A bug button sits at the end of the project header, with the same thing in the account menu and a page at /report for everywhere else. It asks one question: what happened.
The report carries the page you were on, your app version and your browser, so a problem can be found without a conversation first. Nothing you have written is sent, and the form says so before you send it.

v1.0.0-alpha.9

8 September 2026

If a payment did not go through, your account said your paid plan was free and had no end date, at the moment you most needed to fix your card. It now says the plan is on hold until the payment clears, and points you at the billing portal.
An account whose subscription named a plan Spleen no longer recognises showed the free plan with a billing cycle and a renewal date beside it. The free plan never claims either now.
The Manage billing button sat on top of the sentence below the end date.
Custom templates saved on Library used to disappear from your account when you moved to a smaller plan. They were never deleted, only hidden, which is the worst way round. They stay visible now, with a line saying they need Library to start a project from, and you can still delete any you no longer want.

v1.0.0-alpha.8

8 September 2026

On the project overview and the research page, closing the sidebar left no way to open it again unless you knew the keyboard shortcut. Every page inside a project now carries the same button the editor has. The Project structure card on the overview has gone with it, since it opened the same panel a few rows below that button.
The upgrade item in the account menu no longer names a single plan or fills itself with green. It reads Upgrade plan and opens your billing page, where every paid plan is one step away. The project limit notice and the snapshot prompts stop naming a plan for the same reason.
On the projects, account and research pages they were set a size smaller and spaced wider than the same paragraph elsewhere on the site. They now match.
The paragraph describing a free plan was set larger than every card beside it. It and six others now share one line spacing.

v1.0.0-alpha.7

7 September 2026

A download of everything you have written now sits in its own section. It existed before, but only inside the delete-account dialog, so the only way to reach it was to begin deleting your account.
It arrives as a zip holding one Spleen Archive per project, which Spleen can import again. Before, it was a single file you could only read. Your templates and account details travel with it as a record.
The warning listed less than it should. It now names templates, shared links and uploaded images too, and says plainly that Stripe keeps payment records for as long as tax law requires.
They sit side by side rather than down one long column, and two-step verification says what it will actually ask you for, and that you get backup codes.
On the projects screen a title like Life of Bogdan had the tails of its letters cut off. It had been that way since the grid view arrived.
It ran off the left of a phone screen. The last release fixed it opening off the top; this one fixes where it sits.

v1.0.0-alpha.6

6 September 2026

The title and the line beneath it sat in a narrow column with space either side. They now use the width of the screen, and the button below them is larger.
On an iPhone it opened off the top of the screen, so Later and Reload now could not be reached. It had been that way since the first alpha. It now opens below the button that summons it.
An open tab checks every five minutes rather than every fifteen, so it spends less time on a version that has been replaced.
Cancelling changed one word on the account page. It now says that your paid access runs to the date, and that the account returns to the free plan afterwards.
It used to leave you on the homepage with nothing to say the change had worked.

v1.0.0-alpha.5

6 September 2026

Picking Folio or Library ended in an error rather than opening the checkout page. It had been that way since the first alpha went live, so no one could start a subscription at all. It now works.
On a wide screen the pages scroll beneath the header, so the scrollbar starts under it instead of running the full height of the window.

v1.0.0-alpha.4

6 September 2026

Menu items, text areas, the sign-up verification widget, and the pricing cards were each rounded to their own radius. They now share one.
The projects icon is the one the desktop uses, and the update button sits first among the buttons beside it.
On a small screen the credit line is centred and keeps the version on one line rather than breaking it in half.
The screenshots on the homepage were reshot, so they show the app as it looks now.

v1.0.0-alpha.3

6 September 2026

Headings now step down in one ladder across the site, the guide, and your own documents, instead of the lightest weight the typeface has.
Eight panels, delete account and two-step verification among them, showed a centred title where every other one is left aligned. The new project panel also ran its description into the first field.
Page introductions read better on a phone, where their line spacing had been tuned for a larger screen.
The home and folder icons at the top of a project now respond to a tap, and line up with the button below them.
The free plan comes first on every screen size, each plan says what support it gets, and the VAT note sits beside the billing choice.
The shared links page now says what a link is for before you have made one: someone can read your work without an account.
The contact buttons on the terms and cookie pages opened an address we never used, and now go to the contact page.

v1.0.0-alpha.2

5 September 2026

Spleen sets headings, body text, and the editor in different typefaces, and every page used to fetch all of them. Each page now asks only for the ones it puts on screen, which shows most on a slow connection.

v1.0.0-alpha.1

5 September 2026

Projects hold a book of writing and research, split into sections and documents, with a resizable split, folding, project search, and a switcher for moving between projects.
Bold, italic, highlight, inline code, and alignment, on desktop and touch, with a floating toolbar, autosave, focus mode, and Zen mode for writing against a blank page.
Start from a built-in template or one you saved yourself, or import from Markdown or a Spleen Archive.
Table and grid layouts, title filtering, First, Previous, Next, and Last page controls, bulk project actions, and archived projects.
A dedicated reorder workspace with dragging and keyboard controls, for both writing and research.
Archive and Trash inside each project, with restorable section and document trees under Out of the project.
Clearer Projects, Account, and Help Center navigation across screen sizes.
Project types, subtitles, author or pen names, synopses, statuses, per-project paragraph indentation, and book covers.
A dedicated reorder workspace with dragging and a keyboard path, plus Archive and Trash inside every project, where sections and documents stay editable and restorable.
Keep research beside the draft in the context panel, annotate a selection, and take snapshots of a document as it changes.
PDF, EPUB, HTML, Markdown, and Spleen Archive, with an optional table of contents for PDF and HTML.
Share one document or all the writing in a project with a reader, and manage every link you have handed out from your account.
Zen, Retro, Nature, and Cobalt, each in light, dark, or system, with Atmosphere controls in the project header, editor settings, and optional browser spellcheck.
Quill is free, Folio and Library add more room and more tools, monthly or yearly, with VAT included in the price and your invoices and plan changes in your account.
A full guide with search, troubleshooting, and reference material.