Ampersand
0.4.5

What changed

• Ampersand no longer freezes at launch or shows “Application Not Responding” when your vault is in iCloud Drive. With Optimize Mac Storage turned on, macOS removes the local copies of notes it thinks you aren’t using, and reading one waits while it downloads again. That waiting now happens in the background: the window appears right away and stays responsive while the sidebar, backlinks, and tags fill in.
• Deleting, moving, and renaming notes and folders in the sidebar no longer stalls the app. Opening the document panel also no longer re-reads your entire vault each time.
• Published notes on ampersand.page now turn away AI crawlers: bots that collect training data or build AI search indexes, and AI assistants asked to open a shared link. Link previews in messaging apps keep working. Notes published or republished with this version also carry their no-index and no-AI instructions inside the page, so the instructions stay with a copy saved without the server’s headers.
• Fixed meeting transcription crashing on Linux the first time it ran on many computers. The 0.4.4 speech engine used processor instructions that only some server CPUs support (AVX-512 on Intel and AMD, SVE on ARM). It now targets a common baseline: AVX2 on Intel and AMD, and plain ARMv8 on 64-bit ARM, including the Raspberry Pi 4.

Ampersand updates itself in place, so you are probably already on a newer build than this one. If you are installing fresh, the download page always has the current release for macOS, Windows and Linux.