Highlight — Smarter focus, faster context
Welcome to one of our biggest releases yet. Highlight 1.41 doubles down on the two things people tell us they love most: getting answers about whatever you're working on, and doing that work right inside the assistant. We rebuilt the overlay, taught the magic dot to read the room better, and shipped a long list of integrations and quality-of-life improvements suggested directly by the community.
<video src="https://cdn.highlightai.com/changelogs/1.41/hero.mp4" loop playsinline></video>
TL;DR
- A redesigned overlay with multi-pane focus mode, faster keyboard navigation, and a refreshed look.
- Audio notes now transcribe in real time and summarize when you stop the recording.
- Linear, Notion, and Slack can now be used as both sources and targets — ask questions, then file the answer.
- MCP agents are out of beta. Install once, use everywhere.
- Hundreds of smaller fixes across macOS and Windows.
If you only have 30 seconds: try
⌘ + .(orAlt + .on Windows) to open the new overlay, drop in a question, and pressTabto pivot to a follow-up without losing your place.
✨ What's new
Multi-pane overlay
The overlay is no longer "one box you type into." It's a workspace.
- Pane snapping — drag any answer to the side to keep it in view while you ask the next question.
- Linked context — answers in side panes stay aware of each other. Ask a follow-up in the main pane and Highlight will pull from the pinned panes automatically.
- Pin & forget — pinned panes survive across sessions until you dismiss them with
⌘ + W.
<video src="https://cdn.highlightai.com/changelogs/1.41/overlay-panes.mp4" loop playsinline></video>
Keyboard shortcuts you'll actually use
| Action | macOS | Windows |
|---|---|---|
| Open overlay | ⌘ + . | Alt + . |
| Pin current answer | ⌘ + Shift + P | Ctrl + Shift + P |
| Cycle pinned panes | ⌘ + ⇥ | Ctrl + Tab |
| Send to selected app | ⌘ + Enter | Ctrl + Enter |
| Dismiss everything | Esc (twice) | Esc (twice) |
Real-time audio notes
Recording a quick voice note? Highlight now transcribes as you talk and, when you stop, generates a structured summary tailored to what you said — meeting recap, todo list, brain dump, or freeform notes.
<video src="https://cdn.highlightai.com/changelogs/1.41/audio-notes.mp4" loop playsinline></video>
- Local-first transcription on Apple Silicon and modern Windows machines (no audio leaves your device).
- One-click handoff to your favorite notes app — currently Notion, Apple Notes, and Obsidian.
- Long recordings (>1 hour) are chunked automatically. No more frozen progress bars.
Magic dot, smarter
The magic dot used to be a launcher. Now it's an ambient assistant. It glances at what's on screen (with your permission) and surfaces:
- The best action for what you're doing right now.
- A live count of unread messages in connected apps.
- Quick context handoff into chat with a single click.
Privacy note: nothing is sent off-device unless you click. The dot's signals come from on-device accessibility APIs you've explicitly opted into. You can disable any of these at any time in
Settings → Privacy → Magic Dot.
🧩 Integrations
Linear, Notion, Slack — now bidirectional
Ask a question that touches one of these apps, and Highlight will offer to send the answer back to the right place.
- "Summarize this thread" → Slack reply or canvas
- "Draft a spec for X" → Notion page in the workspace you picked
- "Open issues blocking the 1.41 release" → Linear filter + the option to comment
<video src="https://cdn.highlightai.com/changelogs/1.41/integrations.mp4" loop playsinline></video>
MCP agents are out of beta
The Model Context Protocol integration is now stable. Install an MCP server once from the new directory and it's available across every conversation — including ones triggered by the magic dot or audio notes.
highlight mcp install https://example.com/your-mcp-server
A few of the agents we've been testing with internally:
- GitHub Reviewer — open a PR URL, get a structured review.
- Postgres Inspector — describe a query and have it run safely in read-only mode.
- CalDAV — calendar awareness without giving Highlight full access to your account.
Want to ship your own? See the MCP authoring guide.
App SDK 2.0
If you build apps on Highlight, the SDK got a major refresh:
- New
useContext()hook with strongly-typed permissions. - A streaming variant of
inference()that returns anAsyncIterable. - Vector store queries are now ~3× faster on average.
- The
permissions.jsonschema has its first breaking change since launch — see migration notes.
🛠 Improvements
- The chat input now supports multi-file drag and drop. Drop a folder and we'll do the right thing.
- Sidebar collapses on narrow displays automatically (and remembers your last setting per monitor).
- Streaming responses now render code blocks incrementally instead of waiting for the full response.
- Conversations can be renamed inline (
F2) and starred for quick access. - Search across history is now fuzzy and ~10× faster on large libraries.
- The settings UI was reorganized into clearer sections; nothing was removed, just easier to find.
- New onboarding tour for first-run users that takes about 90 seconds and highlights the things people commonly miss.
Accessibility
- Full keyboard navigation across the overlay, sidebar, and settings.
- ARIA labels added to every actionable element in chat.
- A new high-contrast theme (toggle in
Settings → Appearance). prefers-reduced-motionis now respected throughout the app.
Performance
| Metric | 1.40 | 1.41 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cold start (M-series Mac) | 1.8s | 1.1s | −39% |
| Cold start (Windows, NVMe) | 2.6s | 1.6s | −38% |
| Memory at idle | 420 MB | 290 MB | −31% |
| First-token latency (cloud) | 480 ms | 320 ms | −33% |
| Battery impact (1h idle, M2) | 4.1% | 2.4% | −41% |
🐞 Bug fixes
We closed 214 issues this cycle. The highlights:
- Fixed a long-standing crash when pasting very large images into chat.
- Fixed
the disappearing chat input on dual-monitor setups— it stays put now. - Hotkeys no longer fire when typing into other apps' password fields.
- The audio recorder no longer keeps the mic indicator on after stopping.
- "Open at login" actually opens at login on macOS Sonoma+.
- Resolved a memory leak when streaming long responses with many code blocks.
- PDF previews render correctly when the file path contains non-ASCII characters.
- Fixed an issue where Slack reactions weren't surfaced in summaries.
- Fixed Linear filters not applying when the workspace had >50 projects.
- The magic dot no longer gets stuck behind full-screen apps after returning from sleep.
⚠️ Breaking changes
We try hard to avoid these, but a few were necessary.
- App SDK
permissions.json— see the migration guide above. Existing apps will continue to work on 1.41 with a deprecation warning until 1.43. - Legacy hotkeys removed:
⌘ + Shift + H(replaced by⌘ + .) and⌘ + Option + N(replaced by audio notes). - Windows 10 < 21H2 is no longer supported. The app will still launch but new audio features will be disabled.
✅ Settings worth revisiting
Take 30 seconds to look at these — they were either added or significantly improved:
-
Settings → Privacy → Magic Dot— pick what the dot can see. -
Settings → Audio → Local transcription— opt in to fully on-device transcription. -
Settings → Integrations— the new bidirectional toggles are off by default. -
Settings → Appearance → High contrast— try it, especially in bright environments. -
Settings → Shortcuts— every shortcut is now rebindable.
🧪 Beta tracks
Want to live on the edge? You can now switch tracks without reinstalling:
Settings → About → Release channel
- Stable — what you're on now.
- Beta — about a week ahead, generally safe.
- Alpha — daily-ish builds from
main. Expect rough edges.
If you find something broken on an early track, please send feedback via the in-app button — it now attaches the relevant logs automatically (with your consent, every time).
🙏 Thanks
This release wouldn't exist without our community. Special thanks to the folks who filed the issues, recorded the screen captures, and put up with our "can you try one more thing?" replies. A few standouts:
- @avery — caught the dual-monitor input bug.
- @kenji_dev — proposed the multi-pane overlay design that we ended up shipping.
- @samantha-ops — relentless about the magic dot privacy controls. You were right.
- Every single person who left a 👍 or 👎 on a response — those signals trained the new ranker that decides what the magic dot suggests.
📦 Build notes
- Channels: stable, beta, alpha
- Platforms: macOS 12+ (Intel & Apple Silicon), Windows 10 21H2+, Windows 11
- Auto-update: rolls out over 48 hours starting at noon PT.
- Installer size: ~140 MB (mac), ~120 MB (win).
You can always grab a fresh installer from
highlight.ing/download, or update from the
app via Settings → About → Check for updates.
highlight-1.41.0-arm64.dmg sha256: 6f3a9b…c81e
highlight-1.41.0-x64.dmg sha256: 1ad24c…be17
highlight-1.41.0-x64.exe sha256: 9c47fe…0832
One more thing
There's a small, friendly easter egg hidden in the overlay. We won't spoil it. If you find it, post a screenshot — we'll send you a sticker pack. 💌
— The Highlight team
