35 releases · v1.1.35 current
Roadmap
What is being worked on, what is next, what is being thought about, and what has been decided against. Nothing here has a date on it: a one-person roadmap with dates is a promise broken in public.
Now
The work actually in hand. Two of the three came from one reader with a 5,550 note vault, which is the argument for telling me when something is slow.
Very large vaults
A reader opened Skein on 5,550 notes and waited minutes. The sidebar draws immediately from the file names alone, the vault is read across four lanes behind that, and three releases since have taken out the rest: the click tax in 1.1.14, the canvas re-reading every file each time you moved a card in 1.1.18, and in 1.1.19 the six operations that made you wait - making a folder is twenty times quicker now, opening the journal seventeen. 1.1.20 took the last of it: a launch was re-filing every note into a search index it had already built, four and a half seconds of it on a 5,500-note vault, and it is a third of a second now because a launch looks only at what changed while you were away. Nothing on this path is outstanding but the only measurement that counts, which is not ours: his vault, his machine, his answer.
Notes kept in iCloud Drive
iCloud touches files after Skein saves them, and every touch was being read as an outside edit, which cost you typing lag and could produce a conflict copy of a note nobody else had opened. 1.1.13 makes a touch that changed nothing cost nothing. Offloaded files are the remaining half: opening a vault macOS has evicted should download it with a progress bar rather than blocking on each file in turn.
Guarding the file, not just fixing it
A picture in a note is held in the file as Markdown and shown to you as a picture, and for two days a bug threw that Markdown away as you typed. It is fixed, and the honest problem is that three separate pieces of code touch that one piece of information. A check that fails the build when a fourth one forgets is what stops the same class of fault returning.
Next
Each of these is the missing half of something that already ships. Finishing what exists beats starting what does not, and it makes this list checkable against the app rather than aspirational.
Opening a very large vault quickly
Measured on 27 August rather than guessed at: the cost of opening a big vault rose faster than the number of megabytes in it, and the part that bent was the search index. 1.1.33 makes building the index and reading links grow in proportion to the vault. What is left is the only measurement that counts: one reader confirming the result on the vault that started this.
Later
Wanted. No order implied within the list, and no promise that all three arrive. One of them is now started, which is a statement about work rather than a date.
Mathematics
LaTeX in notes. It is worth saying plainly that this is parity rather than an advantage: everyone else has it, and it waits behind the things nobody else has. What changed on 27 August is the price rather than the priority - the suite already carries a native maths renderer for Verso, so this is no longer a research problem, and block equations are considerably cheaper than inline ones.
Not planned
Things people reasonably ask for and will not get. This is the section that earns the other three, and it matters more here than on the other two sites: an app with no plugins owes you a list of what it has decided against, because you cannot add any of it yourself.
Plugins
Permanent, and the most important line on this page. Every feature is in the app when you download it, which is what makes it possible to say the app does not talk to a network and to mean it. A plugin system would hand that promise to somebody else.
A sync service, or a publish service
Put your vault in iCloud Drive or Dropbox and it syncs like any other folder. There is no Skein account to make, no server holding your notes, and no subscription to sell you, which is also why the launcher is a launcher rather than a sign-in screen.
A theme gallery, or custom CSS
Skein has curated themes, and now a theme editor: seven named things - window, page, text, quiet text, dividers, and two accents - with the contrast measured and shown as you change them, because a theme you cannot read is the actual risk. What is still refused is the two things this entry was always about. No community gallery to browse, and no stylesheet to drop in. You can change the colours Skein has; you cannot restyle the app. Curated is not the same promise as configurable, and that is the half worth keeping.
The bolted-on extras
A web browser inside the notes app, a slide deck maker, an audio recorder, a random-note button, tab groups and saved workspace layouts. Each is somebody's favourite and none is what a knowledge manager is for.
Anything with AI in it
Nothing in Skein sends your notes anywhere, because nothing in Skein talks to a network at all. That is a stronger claim than a privacy policy and it only stays true by refusing this.
Recently shipped
The last three. This list is generated from the release notes, so it cannot fall behind the app.
1.1.35
Calmer writing, a caret of your own, Duo, and diagrams drawn in reading mode.
1.1.33
Large vaults open much faster, and your PDFs and Office files show up in the sidebar.
1.1.32
Tables keep their shape, large notes open faster, and changes show immediately.
All 35 releases, in full, on What’s new.
This order is not fixed. Something a reader actually needs beats something on the list, and several of the entries above arrived that way: tell me what is missing.