Changelog

v1.2.0

Storyboard

  • Turn your manuscript into a visual storyboard. A new Storyboard workspace lets you plan your book or script shot by shot. Build a library of your characters, locations, and props; anchor each shot to the exact passage it illustrates; and lay the whole thing out as a grid you can play through with your narration.
  • Generate consistent scene art. Create artwork for each shot that actually looks like the characters, places, and props you've defined — bind them to a shot and their look carries into every new image. Star a favorite version of any asset and the rest of your storyboard follows it. Lock an image's settings to keep the same look while you change the pose or angle, or reroll for fresh variations. Guided prompt forms assemble a clean description for you, with a live preview before you generate. Image generation uses the same plan allowance as your other AI features.
  • Export your storyboard as a video. Turn a finished storyboard into a shareable video. Each shot's image is held for the length of its narration and stitched together in playback order, with your generated voiceover as the soundtrack. Preview it, choose a resolution, pick where to save, and Studio renders the finished file.

Improvements

  • Faster startup. Studio now loads significantly less code before the first screen appears, split into pieces that update and cache independently — launching the app and installing updates both feel snappier.
  • Fully self-contained launch. Interface fonts now ship inside the app instead of loading from the internet, so the app looks right immediately even offline — and makes zero third-party requests at launch.
  • No more dark flash at launch. If your Mac is in light appearance, the window no longer flashes black while the app starts.
  • Smoother AI chat. Long conversations no longer stutter or lag while the assistant is streaming a reply.
  • Keyboard-friendly dialogs. Tab now stays inside open dialogs and cycles through their controls, and closing a dialog returns focus to where you were — no more focus escaping into the background.
  • Snappier typing in long documents. The editor's per-keystroke bookkeeping now skips text that didn't change.

Fixes

  • Screenplays now display in their proper typeface. The screenplay editor's Courier Prime font was silently missing from the shipped app, so scripts rendered in a generic monospace font. It now loads correctly.
  • An error in one screen no longer takes down the whole app. If something goes wrong, you'll see a recovery card with "Try again" and "Reload app" options instead of a blank window — and your work elsewhere stays intact.
  • Last-second edits are no longer lost when switching files. Changes made in the moments before clicking to another file (or closing it) are now saved instead of silently dropped.
  • Project settings no longer reset each other. Saving project settings — or simply changing the editor page width — could erase your saved image-generation defaults and re-enable audio enhancement after you'd turned it off. Every settings save now preserves everything you've configured.
  • A damaged document no longer crashes the app. If a document's primary data is ever corrupted, Studio now opens it from its Markdown copy instead of failing every time you open that file.
  • Voice model downloads now report failures honestly. A failed model download or delete previously showed "ready" anyway, leaving voice features broken with no explanation. Failures now show a clear error state.
  • Undo can no longer erase a freshly opened document. Pressing Undo immediately after opening a file could revert it to an empty page — and auto-save that. Opening a file no longer counts as an undoable step.
  • Chat replies stay in their conversation. Switching conversations while the assistant was mid-reply could deliver the rest of the response into the wrong chat. Replies now stay bound to the conversation that asked.
  • Audio players no longer fight each other. Starting playback in the audiobook export preview while Play-All was running could make both skip ahead and interleave; pausing a preview also restarted it from the beginning. One player now owns playback — starting a new one cleanly stops the other, and pause picks up exactly where you left off.
  • Screenplay imports keep everything you wrote. Importing a .fountain script used to silently drop notes, page breaks, lyrics, centered text, dual dialogue, and several title-page fields. All of it now survives import and export, exactly as written.
  • Nested checklists no longer corrupt saved files. A checklist inside a list item (or a list inside a checklist item) could be written incorrectly to the saved document. Saving now preserves the structure exactly.
  • Quitting right after typing no longer loses your last edits. Changes made moments before closing the window are now written to disk as part of shutdown.
  • Login errors now tell you what's wrong. Wrong password, no connection, and server trouble each show their own message instead of everything claiming "invalid credentials."
  • Sidebar drag-and-drop is disabled for now. Dragging files appeared to reorganize them, but the change was never saved — it silently reverted on reload. The drag affordance is off until real file-move support lands.

v1.1.1

Fixes

  • Voice Settings panel now scrolls. The right-side Voice Settings panel could clip the speaker form and error messages off the bottom of the screen with no way to reach them. The panel now scrolls within its bounds, with the heading staying pinned at the top.

v1.1.0

  • Arqenne MCP. Your AI assistant can now generate speech with your Studio voices — locally, no API keys, no per-call charges. Works with Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, and opencode. Available on every plan; Free includes one voice, paid tiers unlock all 29.

v1.0.0 — First public release

The first public release of Arqenne Studio for Apple Silicon Macs.

Writing

  • Rich-text editor with slash commands, and a floating formatting toolbar (bold, italic, underline, links, color, highlight, "✦ Suggest").
  • Screenplay mode. Write scripts in standard Fountain format (.fountain) with proper scene headings, character cues, and dialogue formatting — set per file at creation, alongside regular Markdown manuscripts in the same project.
  • Resizable inline images with alignment controls.
  • Dual-format persistence. Every document is saved as both structured JSON (perfect fidelity) and clean Markdown (portable, diffable). Auto-saves on a 2-second debounce.
  • Local AI Assistant. Runs entirely on your Mac's Apple Silicon to power suggestions in the editor's selection toolbar. The app auto-selects a smaller or larger model based on your available RAM.
  • Project knowledge base. Ask questions about your own manuscript — Studio indexes your project locally so the assistant can pull from your worldbuilding, character notes, and prior chapters. Your text never leaves the device.
  • Arq design system. Warm parchment in light mode, deep umber in dark — auto-switches with your system theme.

Voice

  • Two on-device voice engines. Your audio never leaves your Mac.
    • Standard Text-to-Speech — fast, lightweight, instant in-app preview.
    • Enhanced Text-to-Speech — studio-quality narration. Runs end-to-end on Apple's MLX framework, written in Rust for native performance.
  • Voice cloning. Clone any voice from a short reference clip with the Enhanced engine — no upload, no third-party account.
  • Paragraph-level audio editor. Generate, replace, and play back narration paragraph by paragraph. Stale-audio detection flags clips that have drifted from the edited text.
  • A growing voice library. 28 voices on Standard TTS, plus voice cloning on Enhanced TTS — more on the way.

Export

  • PDF export on every plan. Ship your manuscript anywhere.
  • Audiobook export on paid plans. Turn your narration into a finished file:
    • Starter — MP3
    • Creator — MP3 + WAV
    • Studio — MP3 + WAV + full M4B audiobooks with chapter markers

Offline-first

  • First-run model downloads with a progress UI; cached locally and skipped on relaunch.
  • Works offline after first launch. Writing AI, voice synthesis, and projects all work with the network off. Cloud chat features need a connection.

Plans

  • Free, Starter, Creator, Studio. A single shared budget per user across writing and voice.
  • No surprise bills. 80% usage alert, hard stop at 100%.
  • Gift codes. Single-use codes unlock an upgraded tier for a set number of days.

Security

  • Encrypted at rest. Authentication tokens are encrypted with AES-256-GCM using a per-install random key.
  • Atomic writes. A crash mid-write can't corrupt your session.
  • Signed auto-updates. Every update is cryptographically verified before it installs.
  • Privacy-first crash reporting. We log a user ID only — never your email or document content.