Changelog
New features, improvements, and fixes — what's changed in Penlo.
Last updated 1 June 2026The releases below cover the past few weeks. Each item is tagged New, Improved, or Fixed so you can see at a glance what changed.
In this changelog
1 Smarter note dates
28 May 2026- New Original note dates, not sync dates. Penlo now reads the embedded date inside each PDF (creation, modification, and XMP metadata) so a note is dated when you actually wrote it, rather than when it happened to reach the cloud.
- New First-sync fallback for Onyx Boox. Boox re-stamps every file with a fresh date on each sync and leaves no reliable embedded date, so for those notebooks Penlo now falls back to the first time it ever saw the file. The result is a date that stays stable instead of jumping forward every sync. The logic is device-agnostic — it reads what's actually in the file, so it works the same way across Boox, reMarkable, Supernote, and others.
2 AI assistant access (MCP)
18 May 2026- New Penlo MCP server. Your handwritten notes are now reachable from AI assistants that support the Model Context Protocol — Claude, ChatGPT, Cursor, and others — so you can ask questions across your notebooks without leaving your assistant.
-
New
One-click desktop install. The connector now ships as a packaged
.mcpbbundle, so connecting Penlo to a desktop AI client no longer means hand-editing config files. - New Time-aware search. You can ask things like "what did I write about last week?" or "when did I last edit my schedule?" — search now understands when notes were created and last updated, and looks across both notebook titles and transcribed content.
- New MCP on the Power plan. AI assistant access is now part of Power, alongside unlimited OCR, the REST API, and webhooks.
- Improved Privacy Policy & Terms updated. Both documents now describe how data flows when you connect Penlo to an AI assistant via MCP.
3 Search & plans
15 May 2026- Improved Search covers titles and content together. Cross-notebook full-text search now matches both notebook titles and the transcribed text inside them in a single query, so a result turns up whether your term is in the name or on the page.
- Fixed Duplicate search results. Notebooks with more than one saved version were showing up multiple times. Search now returns only the latest version of each notebook.
- Improved Clearer pricing page. The plan comparison was rebuilt to reflect what each tier actually includes — cross-notebook search, unlimited cloud connections, the REST API, webhooks for Make.com / Zapier / n8n, AI auto-tagging, and batch re-OCR are now shown against the right tiers.
4 Reliability & interface
15 May 2026- Fixed OCR stalling and timing out. A truncated deployment of the note-processing function was causing OCR to start but never finish (and time out on longer documents). The full processing pipeline has been restored, so transcriptions complete reliably again.
- Fixed Failed deployment. A corrupted line in the search route was breaking the build. Repaired so new releases ship cleanly.
- Fixed Thumbnail flicker on refresh. Updated notes briefly flashed the placeholder Penlo thumbnail before the real one appeared. The crossfade now keeps the existing image in place until the refreshed thumbnail is ready.
- Fixed Missing thumbnail on the newest note. The most recently added note no longer shows up without a thumbnail.
- Fixed Removed the "Pending" badge. The note sidebar no longer shows a "Pending" label that didn't tell you anything useful.
- Fixed Tab alignment. The tab bar height now lines up with the top bar for a cleaner header.
5 Cloud sync
14 May 2026- Fixed Google Drive files not syncing. Drive folders could be connected and PDFs would appear, but stay stuck on "No PDF yet — sync in progress." Files now flow through and start processing as expected.