Changelog
What changed in each release, written for the people using it. Every version's complete notes and downloads live on GitHub.
0.4.2
Release notes →A patch that opens the front door: book files open straight from your file manager, drag-and-drop imports, and every illustration gets a full-screen viewer.
New
- Open with ReadAware. Make ReadAware the default app for your book files and double-clicking one lands directly in the reader, with the book added to your shelf on the way. If the app is already running, the existing window takes over — no second copy.
- Drop books to import. Drag book files anywhere onto the window and they import on the spot.
- A closer look at illustrations. Tap an image in any book to view it full screen. Zoom around the cursor with the wheel or a pinch, drag to pan, double-click to toggle fit, and a small toolbar covers zoom, rotation, copying to the clipboard, and closing.
0.4.1
Release notes →A patch for the statistics page and the sentence reader: charts you can tap, and a plugin that finally keeps its settings — plus a progress readout and a session timer — under its own roof.
New
- Tap the charts. The reading-stats bars now hand the ink highlight to whichever bar you tap — daily, weekday, and time-of-day charts alike — and it stays where you put it.
- The sentence reader keeps its own settings. Step unit, tap to advance, and swipe to step moved into the plugin's own settings page, joined by two new options: a chapter position readout (12 / 87) and a session timer that restarts on every entry and is never saved. Both live on a small floating chip you can drag anywhere.
Improved
- Chart tooltips traded their floating card for a quiet ink label pinned above the bars.
- The About page shows the series codename beside the version.
Fixed
- The Total time headline no longer overflows on phones, and tapping a chart no longer draws a focus ring.
- Turning the readouts off in settings applies without restarting the app.
- iOS no longer shows two selection menus at once in the reader.
0.4.0El Alto
Release notes →The first release of the El Alto series, and a release about distance: the actions you need while reading moved onto the sentence itself, the panels worth opening moved one tap away, and the assistant stopped taking detours before answering.
New
- Tap the sentence. In sentence or paragraph reading, tapping the highlighted sentence opens its actions right there — copy, highlight, underline, note, ask AI, dictionary — instead of a reach for the bottom bar.
- Doors instead of a toolbar. The floating navigator strip opens the table of contents, your notes, reading appearance, or chat in one tap, and pages itself on phones so it always fits one row.
- Updates introduce themselves. After the app updates, a quiet link opens this changelog in your language. Dismiss it, or let it fade on its own after two days.
Improved
- The reading assistant answers in the language you write in, reports reading time in hours and minutes rather than raw counters, and no longer inventories your stats before answering a question about the book.
- Spoiler protection now also fences what the assistant may already know about a famous novel — nothing beyond your reading position, unless you explicitly ask to be spoiled.
Fixed
- External links — the About panel, the what's-new door — actually open your browser now.
- A pasted API key is refused without being echoed back into the conversation.
- Book cards can no longer be presented twice in one reply.
0.3.1
Release notes →A release about PDFs, and about the reader chrome knowing when to get out of the way. A PDF page is a picture, so the page color never reached it and every fixed-layout book stayed on white paper inside a dark app — that is fixed, along with the controls those books were offering but could not honor.
New
- PDFs follow the page color. A light palette tints the paper as the page is drawn, leaving every ink and photograph exactly as printed. A dark palette redraws the page in two tones, so the text stays readable instead of sitting as black ink on a dark sheet.
- Page Rendering. Keep a book on its original colors while everything else follows your palette. Remembered per book, for the art and photography where the color is the point.
Improved
- Fixed-layout books no longer offer typography they cannot honor. A PDF or comic is a sequence of pages someone else already typeset, so font, size, weight, spacing, alignment and margins are gone for those books. Page color and reading mode stay, because both still do visible work.
Fixed
- The reader toolbar no longer flashes up and vanishes a moment after you tap the page. Anything that re-flows the text — the soft keyboard, rotating the device, changing the font size — was being mistaken for a page turn.
- The chat composer takes the caret when you open the panel, not every time the toolbar reappears. On a phone that had been throwing the keyboard over a page you only meant to glance at.
0.3.0
Release notes →The release where the app stops being a fixed set of features and becomes something you extend. Plugins run in real sandboxes, contribute to almost every surface, and ship through a marketplace. The agent grows tools and traces, the reader grows an ending, and both the book and the conversation are now yours to typeset.
New
- Plugins. A full plugin system: sandboxed workers with permission-gated capabilities, a TypeScript-first authoring path, and a marketplace with install-time consent. Plugins contribute reader menus, headers, command-palette entries, whole pages, AI tools, dictionary lookups, themes and bundled fonts, voice engines, scheduled tasks, and even virtual books that live on your shelf like any other title. Five ship built in — Dictionary, RSS Reader, Sentence Reader, TTS Voices, and Editorial Themes.
- Read-aloud. The reader speaks, following the same sentence and paragraph navigator you read by. Any TTS engine can plug in, with per-provider voices and custom endpoints.
- An ending. Finishing a book now lands on an end-of-book screen instead of a dead stop, with an optional look back written by the agent.
- Agent as a destination. The agent gets its own primary page with multiple threads, grounding in where you actually are in the book, expandable execution traces, and tools that can safely read and change your settings.
- More formats. CBZ, CBR, TXT, and HTML join EPUB, MOBI, AZW3, FB2, and PDF. Covers and metadata fill in at import.
- Make it yours. Primary navigation and every menu surface are drag-arrangeable. The command palette works while reading, and Mod+1..9 jumps between destinations.
- Typography for the app, not just the book. Chat replies, notes, and plugin views get their own font, size, and line spacing — following your reading settings by default, or detached if you'd rather. Text alignment becomes a reading setting too, defaulting to whatever the publisher chose.
Improved
- The progress bar in the reader header is a scrubber you can drag.
- Fixed-layout books (PDF, comics) take annotations and swipe page turns.
- AI provider setup is simpler, remembers a model per provider, and supports per-tier thinking effort for smart and fast models.
- Your API key is encrypted at rest, and AI requests route through native HTTP instead of the webview.
- All state changes are event-sourced: projections rebuild from an append-only log and can be verified against it.
- The shelf grid fills wide windows, and book titles from file names come out clean.
- The desktop app inherits your macOS system proxy.
- Dev builds get their own identity and data directory, so they no longer share the release app's library.
- Docs and blog on readaware.app are now available in English, Simplified Chinese, and Japanese.
Fixed
- Books whose stylesheets pin a near-black text color are no longer invisible on the dark page color — a whole class of calibre-converted EPUBs was unreadable in dark mode.
- EPUB 3 inline footnote bodies stay hidden and open in a popover, instead of dumping a chapter's worth of notes into the prose.
- The line-spacing setting now works on books that declare their own line height on paragraphs, where it previously did nothing at all.
- Chapter headings in real-world .txt files are recognized.
- Android ships with its built-in plugins, and serves plugin assets over the scheme it actually uses.
- The marketplace remembers the last mirror that worked.
- Stray taps on the reader's progress bar no longer seek on touch devices.
- Plugin pages scroll as pages, virtual rows re-measure when content above them changes, and open settings forms adopt external writes instead of shadowing them.
- Marketplace file paths are allowlist-validated, closing a Windows drive-relative path bypass.