DESIGN.md

TierNote Desktop Design System

Product Context

• What this is: A local-first, general-purpose note workspace where an editable T1-T5 list makes priorities visible and an AI note agent helps organize local material.
• Who it is for: People who want one calm place to collect, rank, read, and refine notes without giving up local ownership.
• Project type: Cross-platform desktop productivity application. The public website/ is a separate branded product surface and does not inherit these desktop rules.

Aesthetic Direction

• Direction: Calm native workspace, informed by Codex rather than copied from it.
• Decoration: Minimal. Hierarchy comes from type, whitespace, alignment, and state, not colorful cards or ornamental chrome.
• Borderless modal headers: Use a text-only title block with the explicit close action on the right. Do not place decorative or category icons to the left of modal titles; typography and whitespace provide the hierarchy.
• Hover tooltips: Prohibited inside the desktop app — including native title attributes, which must never appear in the app DOM (we are not a website). Information belongs inline or behind an explicit click; aria-label stays for assistive technology. This rule does not apply to the public website/. Non-interactive readouts (like the AI composer model ID) are plain text: no cursor change, no hover highlight, no tooltip.
• Cursor: The desktop app uses the system default arrow cursor for ordinary controls and drag-and-drop content. Text fields keep the browser-native I-beam. The two pane resizers are the only resize-cursor exception: use col-resize both while hovering over a divider and throughout an active pane resize.
• Mood: Serious, quiet, capable, and spacious. TierNote should feel like a professional work surface, not a personalized dashboard template.
• Memorable quality: A Codex-like note tool whose primary object is the user's tiered knowledge, not chat.

Product Structure

• Keep the homepage tier list as the core first screen.
• The Home greeting may include one compact animated weather mark on its right. Home shows only the condition image: no city, temperature, forecast text, provider name, enclosing card, or dashboard treatment. An explicit click opens a read-only lightweight detail panel containing only current conditions and several forecast days. Its title and city share the action row, where a gear opens Settings > General directly. City search, recent cities, one-time device location and source attribution live only there. Once configured, weather stays enabled as part of Home; users switch cities rather than removing the feature. Never request location on launch. The desktop prohibition on hover tooltips still applies to this mark. Treat the mark as an absolutely positioned background element: it never consumes layout width or compresses the greeting, and may sit behind the greeting when the center workspace becomes narrow. Keep a small inset from the top-right edge and allow the weather canvas to overflow so halos and clouds are never clipped. Settings keeps up to ten deduplicated recent cities locally as direct text actions. Multi-word names remain intact and the row wraps only between cities; do not spend space on generic location-privacy helper copy.
• Use one outer shell for the top bar and persistent left navigation rail.
• Let the shared title bar span the full window width. Place the TierNote wordmark at its left edge, followed by back/forward navigation and the File, Edit, and Help menus. On macOS, reserve clearance for native traffic-light controls.
• Start the left rail below the title bar with Home as its first row. Do not repeat the product icon or wordmark there. Library switching remains in the File menu and is also exposed as a discoverable global-action icon at the right edge of the Home row, matching the placement of global actions such as search in Codex.
• Leave a modest top inset above the Home row so the left rail breathes under the title bar rather than feeling pinned to it.
• Place the center workspace and right contextual rail inside one continuous inner panel. Its top-left border and radius are the primary visual boundary; the right rail is not a second sidebar.
• Keep the left navigation pane within its 210-380px range. The right contextual rail has no product-level maximum; its only upper bound is the remaining window width after preserving the main workspace's 560px minimum.
• Treat AI chat as one workspace mode, not the visual identity of the whole product.
• Treat Plugins as one Plugin market workspace. Categories filter package types; installation and enabled state appear directly on package rows and detail pages. Do not add a parallel Installed tab. A plugin row represents one installable package and opens an uncapped list of independently switchable skills. Keep publisher and runtime identifiers internal instead of adding metadata rows to the package UI. Do not add per-plugin access controls or capability-access metadata; built-in capabilities use normal application access. Plugin and skill switches still control capability availability: remove disabled Agent tools from model requests and reject direct execution attempts in the backend.
• Presentation generation uses the application-managed native runtime. Skills define narrative and slide intent; they do not install their own renderer. Generated decks are editable 16:9 .pptx files with restrained typography, one message per slide, deliberate layouts, and density limits that prevent obviously overflowing content.
• Document generation uses one application-managed native runtime shared by the Generate DOCX and Generate PDF skills. Both accept the same semantic block model. DOCX output is an editable Open XML package; PDF is laid out locally with a system TrueType font and does not require Word or LibreOffice. Generated PPTX, DOCX, PDF, and MP4 files reserve unique names in the generated-files directory instead of overwriting existing exports. Settings > General exposes that directory and defaults it directly to the current selected workspace root. A fixed custom directory is an explicit opt-out for users who want a note-only workspace. Successful generation tool results always show the full path with Copy path and Show in folder actions.
• A concrete note page keeps four creation shortcuts beneath its title: Generate DOCX, Generate PDF, Generate PPT, and Generate video. Each shortcut selects the matching enabled built-in skill and focuses the composer while preserving the current note as context. It never sends a request automatically. Do not restore the unrelated disabled Mobile long image placeholder in this row.
• Settings exposes Multimodal models as a separate destination next to Audio to text. Its Image recognition, Image generation, Speech generation, Video generation, Music generation, and Sound effects generation tabs mirror the compact Audio to text switcher and keep independent provider, model, endpoint, and locally saved API-key records. Recognition is a fallback when the active model cannot accept images; image, speech, video, music, and sound effects generation keep independent provider configurations for media-generation skills. Video configuration does not replace TierNote Video's dependable native fallback. Video model presets are protocol-aware. Runway exposes its current supported video IDs, while BytePlus/Volcano Engine, Kling, Vertex AI Veo, MiniMax/Hailuo, Luma, Vidu, Pika, Alibaba Cloud Wan, Tencent Cloud Hunyuan/Youtu and PixVerse, LTX, Adobe Firefly, and OpenAI Sora each keep a distinct direct-service record. Adobe exposes both required credentials; Vertex keeps project and location in the editable endpoint. Sora is visibly marked with its announced 2026-09-24 shutdown. Music presets likewise keep Google Lyria, ElevenLabs Music, and MiniMax Music protocols separate, while sound effects use an independent ElevenLabs protocol. Configuration checks use non-generating metadata/account endpoints where providers offer them and otherwise stop at local completeness validation; do not expose Agent music or sound tools until generated audio is saved through a guarded local-file contract. STT/ASR stays in Audio to text instead of being duplicated here; only models compatible with its recorded-file workflow belong there, while realtime streaming models require a separate future interaction design. Expose each Agent tool only when its configuration is complete, save generated images to a unique workspace path, and allow presentation skills to reuse that relative path. Do not add a local OCR tab before that runtime exists.
• Treat Settings as another global workspace mode, opened from the Settings text action immediately to the right of Help in the title-bar menu. Do not duplicate this action beside the window controls. Below the shared title bar, replace the normal left rail with a settings navigation rail and merge the center workspace plus contextual right rail into one continuous, scrollable settings surface. Settings is not a modal and uses no backdrop or floating dialog boundary. Keep General, Appearance, and Models as distinct pages. Library switching already belongs to the Home row and File menu and is not duplicated here. All settings scroll surfaces use the same narrow, transparent-track, low-contrast scrollbar treatment as the main workspace; avoid native heavy scrollbar chrome. Keep the settings navigation rail compact at 220px on the ordinary desktop layout. Name its model destination Models to match common AI app settings language, and keep the version and Feedback actions together on one unwrapped footer row. Appearance is one continuous grouped surface for theme and color scheme. General contains language and generated-file location, followed by a structured Weather forecast section with the current-city readout at the header's right, recent cities below, and the current-location action beside city search. Provider attribution belongs in the section's introductory sentence rather than consuming its own row. Weather has no removal action; selecting another city replaces the current one.
• Message settings support only Tencent Weixin and Telegram. Present both as restrained connection rows in the continuous settings surface, with status, pairing, and recovery information shown inline after an explicit action. A paired private phone chat is another entry point into the same AI note agent used by the desktop composer: ordinary text remains conversation, while a message consisting primarily of one public link implicitly asks AI to fetch, organize, and save it as a local note. Phone turns persist in the shared local conversation history and appear in the desktop right rail. This is not a remote terminal or group-chat bot. Keep credentials in the current user's app-data directory and never expose them back to the webview.
• Model settings use a directory/detail split inside the model page: searchable providers on the left and one provider's URL, local key, protocol note, and selectable models on the right. Provider marks are compact monochrome identifiers, not decorative cards. Show only the catalog's canonical provider display name; never repeat its lowercase/internal provider ID beneath it, including in the composer model menu. Keep OpenAI-compatible as the ordinary path; only the official Anthropic provider uses its native Messages API, indicated by a short inline note rather than a control. Model rows may show technical metadata at the 12px floor (model ID, context size, and input/output price), while actions and names remain 13px or larger. Keep the default provider first in the directory, followed by every provider with selected models, then the untouched catalog entries. A compact Add custom action in the provider directory asks for a custom name and creates an OpenAI-compatible local provider whose model IDs are entered manually. Custom providers stay grouped at the top and use a neutral cube mark. Their details replace the catalog documentation action with a trash action; the explicit trash action deletes immediately and removes only that provider's local configuration. Manually entered model IDs are local records and show the ID once, with no guessed name, icon, or price. Adding one enables it immediately; it uses the same checkbox interaction as catalog models, while a dedicated trash action removes its saved local record. Unchecking only removes it from the composer. A catalog refresh must never remove or hide a locally saved model, including one newly marked deprecated upstream. The AI composer exposes only models selected here. Every reasoning-capable model gets TierNote's fixed five effort levels (low, medium, high, xhigh, max); models.dev reasoning-option metadata must not filter or clamp them. A provider's model list always expands in full inside the outer settings scroller; do not cap its result count or add a nested model-list scrollbar. Non-default providers show a count only when at least one model is selected; never render a zero badge. The composer model readout must come only from the provider's explicitly selected model list; never fall back to a seeded or example model ID.
• On My Contexts (我的设定), use five direct-entry content cards with independent retrieval switches, all enabled by default. Cards have no selected state: their light surface remains #f1f1f1 during hover and navigation, with a neutral dark-mode counterpart. Enabled/context states use iOS blue (#007aff) in light mode and egg-yolk yellow (#e7be15) in dark mode. Reuse that state color for the active library multi-select control, selected-file checkmarks, and the removable file context pill in the AI composer. Add Material is an action and has no retrieval switch.
• Keep the composer in a stable bottom row when chat is active.
• Present the composer metrics as one compact runtime summary rather than equal dashboard columns. Separate metric groups with a low-contrast |, join closely related values such as input and output with ·, and keep each group intact in the deliberate narrow-layout rows. Show only values the runtime actually measures; future latency, speed, turn, or step metrics join this same grammar once the backend reports them.
• Render AI thinking and tool activity as compact, unframed disclosure rows rather than full-width cards. Tool rows use static status marks and become a checkmark on completion or a clear failure mark. Keep summaries aligned to 26px; clicking the chevron reveals arguments and results inline. While the turn is active, keep one separate EchoBird-style status line after the activity stream. Its left edge uses Coffee-CLI's compact Braille-dot spinner. It uses TierNote's warm orange status color, the complete supported-language verb lists, the left flower glyph sequence, typewriter erase/type timing, a caret during rewrites, and the EchoBird left-to-right text shimmer. Add an elapsed clock only after 15 seconds; the muted elapsed clock does not shimmer. Completed rows become static muted text, failures retain a clear semantic error state, and raw provider reasoning remains private.
• In the right conversation history, replace the active working conversation's delete action with an always-visible loading indicator. Restore delete only after work finishes; its icon and hit area must remain comfortably legible without dominating the row. Conversation rows have no persistent borders: ordinary rows are transparent, while hover and the current conversation use one soft neutral background. A working row keeps that background with a small static theme-color dot. When work completes outside the conversation currently being viewed, keep the same background as an unread-completion signal until the user opens that conversation. Keep the status dot geometrically centered in the action area.
• In light mode, the chat composer and user message bubble use layered neutral gray surfaces with neutral ink, never the inherited green/teal treatment. The user bubble keeps a compact Codex-like rounded shape rather than becoming a card.
• Reserve matching scrollbar gutters on both sides of the center scroll area so page content remains optically centered and aligns with the fixed composer.
• Desktop scrollbars hide the native WebView chrome and use a narrow, real-DOM, low-contrast neutral slider with no track or arrow buttons. The slider appears only during scrolling, pointer/keyboard interaction, or editor activity, then fades after a short idle delay. It floats over the edge so content never shifts; scrolling and thumb dragging always remain available.
• AI conversation records use the same restrained desktop context menu as note content. Copy prioritizes selected text and otherwise copies the record under the pointer; Select all covers the visible transcript.
• The AI composer textarea uses the complete desktop editing context menu. Keep selection-sensitive commands disabled when they have no applicable text, and read the clipboard only after the user explicitly invokes Paste.
• Saved conversation rows expose a restrained right-click menu for rename, identity, local-file access, and deletion. Rename fades into place inline without changing the row height, surface, typography, or spacing; its editable title has no visible border. Destructive hover uses semantic red, while all other actions remain neutral.
• Remove redundant dashboard cards, helper copy, metrics decoration, and duplicated labels as each screen is migrated.
• Prefer one clear action per region. Secondary actions use familiar icons from Lucide.

Typography

• UI and body target: Source Sans 3 with Noto Sans SC for Chinese coverage. Self-host before switching production CSS.
• Current migration fallback: Segoe UI Variable, Segoe UI, Noto Sans SC, Microsoft YaHei, sans-serif.
• Data: Use tabular numerals for token, cost, date, and count values.
• Scale: 16px body, 20px section title, 28-32px page title; 15px left navigation (matches the EchoBird sister app); 14px directory/file tree and controls; 13px minimum for all readable/interactive UI text; 12px metadata floor for counts, shortcuts, timestamps, and tiny badges only.
• Minimum size rule: No readable desktop UI text below 13px and nothing below 12px anywhere. If a component cannot fit its label at 13px, enlarge the component; never shrink the type to fit.
• Weight: Use 400 for body, 550-600 for controls and navigation, and 650-700 only for page titles.
• Letter spacing: 0. Avoid uppercase tracking except tiny technical metadata.
• Brand exception: The compact title-bar TierNote wordmark reuses the bundled Lora bold-italic face from the AI-chat identity at 16px.

Color

• Approach: Codex/iOS surface hierarchy. Shell controls, icons, and text stay monochrome; a barely tinted environmental surface separates navigation from the white work area without becoming a brand color. The homepage alone may use restrained category color to make its core prioritization model memorable.
• Light: ink #2c2c2e, muted #77777b, canvas #ffffff, sidebar #f0f5f0, grouped surface #f7f7f5, line rgba(60, 60, 67, 0.12).
• Interaction: graphite #3a3b3d; hover #252628; soft state rgba(58, 59, 61, 0.07).
• Dark: canvas #1c1c1e, sidebar #242426, ink and interaction #f2f2f7 / #d1d1d6.
• Workspace content ink: the center workspace and contextual rail reuse the fixed interaction neutral (#3a3b3d in light mode and #c7c7c7 in dark mode) instead of introducing another color token. Keep the left navigation's existing hierarchy unchanged.
• Semantic color: Reserve red, amber, and green for errors, warnings, and success only. Do not use semantic colors as branding or decoration.
• Tier color: T1-T5 use muted rose, amber, yellow, teal, and green. Color stays in the homepage tier strip, softly tinted label cells, the compact note priority button, and the menu's small tier swatches; it does not enter navigation, article content, or settings surfaces. The priority button keeps its tier-tinted background unchanged on hover/open. Menu hover and selection use one neutral background with no colored border or glow.

Spacing And Shape

• Base unit: 4px.
• Density: Comfortable and work-focused: 8px between related controls, 16px within regions, 24-32px between major regions.
• Radius: 4px for compact controls, 7px for inputs and list selections, 8px maximum for cards and dialogs. Pills are reserved for statuses.
• Borders: Use only for pane boundaries, inputs, dialogs, and meaningful grouping. Avoid cards inside cards.
• Text-input focus: Desktop text inputs and textareas use only their own 1px border to indicate focus. Never add an outer outline, glow, or focus shadow; this is the shared default for new fields. Buttons and links may retain a keyboard-visible outline for accessibility.
• Shadows: Dialogs and floating menus only. Main page regions stay flat.

Motion

• Approach: Minimal and functional.
• Timing: 90ms for hover/focus changes, 150-200ms for panels and dialogs.
• Behavior: No decorative movement, scale-on-hover, or animated gradients. Respect reduced-motion settings.
• AI activity: Tool rows and history indicators stay static. The active turn's separate line animates its compact Braille-dot status, while its EchoBird-style status line is the chat animation exception: its warm orange text shimmer runs linearly for 8 seconds while the left flower glyph and rewrite caret follow the matching typewriter cycle. The elapsed-time text updates once per second after the first 15 seconds but stays muted and static. Reduced motion disables the shimmer and caret.
• Home weather exception: Tiny condition-specific motion may communicate the current weather inside the greeting readout: slow cloud drift and sparse rain or snow only. It stops under reduced-motion preferences and must remain lower contrast than the greeting and tier list. Do not animate the surrounding page.

Migration Order

1. Establish the monochrome interaction system and neutralize the title bar.
2. Rebuild the app shell and left navigation around a Codex-like quiet hierarchy.
3. Simplify the homepage so the tier list dominates and dashboard cards disappear.
4. Unify note reading and AI chat inside the same center-workspace grammar.
5. Rework the right rail as contextual information that can collapse when it is not useful.

Decisions Log

Date	Decision	Rationale
2026-08-07	Adopt a Codex-informed desktop direction	The current multi-color dashboard treatment makes the product feel smaller and less focused than the local-first tiered-note model deserves.
2026-08-07	Remove accent-color customization	One fixed visual system reduces noise and prevents user themes from fragmenting the product identity.
2026-08-07	Join the top bar to the left rail and the center to the right rail	This reproduces the spatial grammar the user values in Codex: one quiet navigation shell around one coherent work surface.
2026-08-07	Make the desktop product monochrome	Neutral black and gray give the repeated-use workspace broader appeal; color is reserved for semantic feedback rather than branding.
2026-08-07	Adopt Codex/iOS surface colors	A soft environmental sidebar, white work surface, warm grouped controls, and dark-gray type remove the cold electronic-screen feeling while keeping icons and emphasis monochrome.
2026-08-07	Make the homepage the color exception	Three low-saturation entry cards and muted T1-T5 colors give the core screen identity while the repeated-use shell and note-reading surfaces stay quiet.
2026-08-07	Keep website design separate	The public site is expressive brand communication; the desktop app is a repeated-use work surface.
2026-08-07	Enforce a minimum type scale	Left navigation, directory tree, and right-rail text at 10-13px was too small to read. Floor: 13px readable / 12px metadata; 15px navigation (EchoBird reference), 14px directory tree.
2026-08-08	Use the default arrow except for pane resizing	A hand cursor is a web pattern; ordinary controls and content keep the default arrow, while the dividers between the three panes use native directional feedback during resize.
2026-08-08	Move the product identity and app menus into the shared title bar	A compact 16 x 16 icon, Lora bold-italic TierNote wordmark, page history, and File/Edit/Help menus match the native Codex-like shell while letting Home align directly with the workspace top edge.
2026-08-08	Gate My Contexts retrieval per note	Five default-on local switches make AI inclusion explicit; a backend allowlist enforces the same state for question-aware and always-on personal context. Cards remain direct neutral navigation entries rather than selectable options.
2026-08-08	Treat managed starter content as user-owned after first creation	Demo and My Contexts seed files are generated only for an empty first-run directory. A permanent marker prevents upgrades from overwriting, backfilling, or recreating edited and deleted files; current localized names remain temporary.
2026-08-09	Replace the settings dialog with a global settings workspace	A persistent category rail and one merged content surface match the desktop shell, remove the dated modal feel, and give model and appearance settings room to remain legible. Library switching remains with Home and File.
2026-08-09	Use models.dev for provider/model directory data; keep TierNote request configuration independent	A live catalog removes hard-coded model names and prices. Anthropic alone uses its native Messages API; every other provider uses the industry-default OpenAI-compatible path. TierNote always exposes five reasoning levels for reasoning models and lets provider endpoints normalize them. Composer selections change actual requests.
2026-08-09	Add ambient weather beside the Home greeting	Home keeps only a quiet animated condition image; its click panel is a read-only current and multi-day forecast with a compact single-line city header. City selection is explicit, local, and replaceable, while Home remains quiet.
2026-08-19	Split General and Appearance settings	General owns language, generated-file location, and the local weather city. Appearance owns system/light/dark mode and color schemes. The Home weather gear and empty state therefore direct people to Settings > General.
2026-08-19	Show the complete workspace file tree	Ordinary non-hidden files of every format appear in the directory tree. Markdown opens in TierNote; other formats show a quiet unsupported-preview state but remain selectable through single click, multi-select, and the context menu as path-based AI context.
2026-08-14	Make paired phone chats full TierNote conversations	A linked private chat should behave like the desktop composer rather than force every message through link capture. Ordinary messages get ordinary AI replies, link-only messages implicitly become saved notes, and all turns share the local conversation history visible in the desktop rail. Pairing, credentials, cursors, and recoverable jobs remain local.
2026-08-14	Adopt a restrained turn-status shimmer	One theme-colored activity line with a left-to-right text shimmer and delayed static elapsed time replaces the repeated Braille spinner; tool rows and conversation history keep static marks.
2026-08-15	Remove leading icons from borderless modal headers	Text-only titles make the lightweight dialogs quieter and more refined while one shared header keeps title and close-action alignment consistent.
2026-08-16	Treat Skills as two-level management	The first level manages installed packages and source actions; opening a package reveals an uncapped two-column list of its concrete skills with independent switches and a clear back action. This separates installation from capability control and remains usable for repositories containing hundreds of skills without implying an in-app download marketplace.
2026-08-16	Preserve official plugin artwork in Skills	Package and child-skill rows use the nearest Codex plugin manifest's compact icon directly, without a second backing tile or border, and fall back to the standalone neutral skill mark. This makes large official collections scannable without adding labels or card decoration.
2026-08-16	Make Tier drag channels geometrically continuous	Visual spacing remains airy, but every wrapped line is divided at card center lines so each pixel maps to a deterministic insertion slot. A gap must never fall through to the row-end position.
2026-08-17	Establish the plugin-market architecture	Plugins are distribution units, skills are Agent actions, and shared runtimes are managed once by the application. TierNote Media is the first manifest-driven official plugin; Git skill sources remain prompt-only community extensions.
2026-08-17	Generate presentations in the shared native runtime	TierNote Presentation submits one structured deck to an application-level engine that creates editable .pptx files without a per-skill environment. The initial layout and density contract favors reliable, restrained slides over unconstrained drawing commands.
2026-08-17	Separate recognition and generation providers	Keep one Multimodal models destination with compact internal capability tabs. Recognition falls back to its own external image model when the active model is text-only; image, speech, video, and music generation use independently configured providers. Local OCR remains a later capability.
2026-08-17	Ship TierNote Video as the safe fallback video workflow	The built-in plugin turns copy into scene images, configured speech, burned captions, restrained motion, and an MP4 through an application-managed encoder. Community Git skills may improve storyboards and prompts but only call the same guarded tools; they cannot execute bundled scripts or runtimes.
2026-08-17	Make note creation actions skill shortcuts	Generate PPT and Generate video beneath a note title select their corresponding one-shot built-in skill and focus the composer without sending. The current note remains explicit context. Remove the disabled Mobile long image placeholder instead of expanding the row with an unrelated future export.
2026-08-17	Generate DOCX and PDF through one native document runtime	TierNote Documents contains two independently switchable skills that submit the same heading/paragraph/list/quote model. The app writes editable Open XML DOCX and locally typeset PDF files without requiring an Office installation.
2026-08-17	Extend note creation shortcuts to document exports	Generate DOCX and Generate PDF join PPT and video beneath the note title. All four actions only select a bundled skill and focus the existing composer; none sends automatically.
2026-08-18	Make generated file destinations explicit	PPTX, DOCX, PDF, and MP4 default to the current user's Desktop, while Settings > General allows a custom directory. The conversation renders the backend-returned absolute path with direct copy and reveal actions so file discovery never depends on model wording.
2026-08-18	Direct the storyboard before generating assets	TierNote Video exposes both Cinematic storyboard director and Text to video skills. Both share one provider-neutral specification: director brief, beat map, continuity bible, motivated camera movement, concrete physical action, and paired keyframe/motion prompts. Storyboard-only requests stop before generation; rendered videos map the same plan onto guarded TierNote Video tools.
2026-08-19	Follow the selected workspace for generated files	With the complete file tree now showing ordinary files, PPTX, DOCX, PDF, and MP4 default directly to the selected workspace root and automatically follow workspace switches. A fixed custom directory remains available for people who want their workspace to contain notes only.
2026-08-19	Make video model presets protocol-aware	Video generation offers selectable official OpenAI and Runway model IDs while preserving stored custom model values. Runway receives its own protocol and a non-generating credential check; other vendors stay custom until their task creation and polling contracts are implemented.
2026-08-19	Add protocol-aware music model settings	Multimodal models gains a fifth Music generation tab with official Google Lyria, ElevenLabs Music, and MiniMax Music presets. Connection checks only read model or account metadata and never submit a billable generation request. The configuration is intentionally not exposed to the Agent until a guarded audio-generation and local-save workflow exists.
2026-08-19	Separate STT from generated audio	Audio to text remains the recorded-file STT/ASR surface and adds protocol-correct OpenAI, Deepgram, AssemblyAI, and ElevenLabs choices, including speaker-labelled diarized responses. Multimodal models gains an independent Sound effects generation tab instead of mixing effects with music. Both music and sound checks are non-generating, and neither capability reaches the Agent before guarded local audio saving exists.
2026-08-20	Separate manual speech setup from Agent troubleshooting	Audio to text keeps the normal runtime Install and model Download actions. Each Runtime engines heading also has one 疑难检测 action that exits Settings, opens the AI conversation, and submits a diagnosis-and-repair task for the visible engine. This technical task uses an always-present managed workspace rather than depending on the selected note directory. The Agent may use only TierNote's guarded transcription deployment tool; ordinary local transcription never triggers a hidden download.
2026-08-19	Expose the full direct video-provider catalog	Video generation lists Runway and direct Seedance, Kling, Vertex AI Veo, MiniMax/Hailuo, Luma, Vidu, Pika, Wan, Tencent Cloud Hunyuan/Youtu and PixVerse, LTX, Adobe Firefly, and Sora services with protocol-specific endpoints, model IDs, and credential fields. Safe account endpoints are used where available; otherwise Check configuration validates completeness locally and never starts a paid render. Sora remains for migration but is marked with its announced shutdown date.