Updates

Clew 1.5

Clew 1.5 is the biggest update yet—a new iPad experience, a redesigned look for sources and highlights, on-device Apple Intelligence, better bulk import options, and a whole lot more.

New features:

A New Way to Navigate on iPad 🖥️

Clew now uses a three-column layout on iPad—collections, your list, and the detail view side by side. With a hardware keyboard you can drive the whole app: arrow keys to move between columns, ⌘F to search from anywhere, ⌘1–8 to jump between sections, ⇧⌘O for Quick Search, and ⌘⌫ to delete.

A Redesigned Look for Sources and Highlights 🎨

Book, song, album, and web page pages have been rebuilt around a color wash drawn from the artwork itself, with a contained jacket layout on iPad. Highlight pages get a source-themed footer, a cleaner card surface, one consistent color hierarchy, and a marker stroke behind the quote that follows the words instead of boxing them.

Get Started Faster 👋

New to Clew? A first-run welcome walks you through the app, with optional starter highlights you can explore and clear out whenever you like.

Built on Apple Intelligence ✨

Clew now uses Apple's on-device foundation models to understand your library. Tag suggestions read what a highlight is actually about to suggest existing and new tags. This runs on device—your highlights never leave it, and no data is shared.

Import from Spreadsheets 📄

Bring in highlights from CSV and XLSX files, with columns matched for you automatically. Imported books are enriched with covers, ISBN, and publication year.

Other new and improved features:

• Siri, Shortcuts & Spotlight—App Shortcuts and Siri intents (search highlights, quick-save, get highlights by source, Open in Clew), plus full Spotlight indexing of your library.
• Multi-window support—open highlights in their own window on iPad.
• Drag and drop highlights between tags and sources.
• AI tag suggestions for untagged highlights, right in the detail view.
• Selectable text—select ranges of highlight and note text.
• Typography—set text size across the whole app, and give the quote on a highlight's page any font installed on your device.
• Stats: Standouts—record-holder cards for your longest, most-tagged, and most-revisited highlights, plus year-in-review stats.
• Widgets—song artwork, a new artwork-split layout that pairs the cover art with the quote, and refreshed built-in themes.
• Streamlined list controls—filter chips and sort menu combined into one row with a sort-direction arrow.
• Filter by Tag in reach—on iPhone the tag filter moves into the bottom bar beside search on a source's page, so filtering and searching the same list sit together.
• Delete confirmation now counts the highlights attached to a book, web page, or song, and lets you delete them alongside it or keep them.
• Faster source attachment—Add Source is one tap into the picker, and source detail pages keep an add-highlight button in reach as you scroll.
• Better undo/redo descriptions when you shake your device or use three-finger gestures.
• Book search now defaults to Apple Books everywhere.
• Copy URL button on web page details.
• Privacy policy moved to a web-hosted page.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where a failed backup restore could damage existing data. Older backups that previously failed to import now restore correctly.
• Fixed crashes opening results from Quick Search and Spotlight.
• Fixed editing a book adding a "finished reading" date it never had, and preserved the original date when toggling a book's read status.
• Fixed restored books losing their read status when a backup recorded a finished date but no read/unread flag.
• Fixed More From Tags showing the wrong number of highlights on a tag.
• Fixed cover images being lost or attached to the wrong item.
• Fixed tag colors not updating in list rows.
• Fixed landscape photo orientation causing incorrect text recognition.
• Fixed the keyboard dismissing while editing scanned text chunks during bulk import from photos.

I'd appreciate an App Store rating if you're enjoying Clew. If you have a suggestion or noticed a bug, contact me.

Clew 1.4.6 Update

Here's what's better in Clew v1.4.6—available now!

New features:

Improved Scanner and Photo Import 📷

Use the camera button to take a photo of a book's page or import images from your camera roll. The button is on the main highlights list and above the highlight text box when creating or editing highlights.

Bulk photo import is better too: tap a page's thumbnail when reviewing it to open a full-size Live Text view of the photo, where you can highlight right on the photo to select text.

New Related Clusters and Connections 🔬

Find Connections between highlights that share 2 or more tags with each other, and see Clusters of highlights that share exactly the same sets of tags.

Other improvements:

• Improved source creation via web API search when creating a highlight.
• Fixed a bug where the camera view's close (X) button didn't work.
• A bunch more lil bug fixes.

If you love Clew, I'd be grateful for a rating in the App Store. If you have suggestion or noticed a bug, contact me.

Clew 1.4.5 Update

Check out what's new in Clew!

New features:

Scan Multiple Book Pages 📸

Quickly capture highlights from multiple book pages or documents using the camera. Now, you can finish a chapter—or even a whole book—and then add all your annotations to Clew at once. This includes improved metadata extraction and book auto-selection, better margin detection and page recognition.

On-Device AI Insights (Beta - iOS 26+) ✨

For devices with Apple Intelligence, Clew now discovers meaningful connections in your highlights. Echo Detection finds highlights with similar themes, Cross-Pollination reveals connections across different books and sources, and Tag Evolution shows how your interests develop over time. All AI processing happens privately on your device with no data sent to external servers.

Your Library, Visualized 📊

A new Stats view shows your reading patterns at a glance. See your most-used tags, track highlight counts over time, and discover insights about your collection through beautiful charts and graphs.

Other improvements:

• Smarter book covers
• Smarter backup management
• Improved Dynamic Type support for large text
• A smoother experience on the Mac
• Fixed book web search
• Fixed author name matching
• Fixed disappearing paste and hide keyboard buttons

Thank you for using Clew! If you love it, I'd appreciate a rating in the App Store. If you have suggestion or noticed a bug, contact me.

Clew 1.3 Update

The Clew app just got even better! Here's what's new.

New features:

• I've added a tip jar! If you love using Clew, you can show your support with a selection of tip options in settings.

Fixes:

• Fix: The Share extension now properly shows a webpage's title instead of arbitrary numbers.
• Fix: Recently created and selected sources now appear for quick selection when creating a highlight. You can customize the number of items to show in settings.

Thank you for using Clew! If you love it, please leave a rating in the App Store. If you'd also like to leave a review, I'd appreciate it!

And if you're feeling especially generous, check out the tip jar and help power upcoming feature development! ☕️

Clew 1.2 Update

My collection in Clew has more than 1,000 highlights at this point, and I noticed that a previous change had made navigating around the app weirdly slow and laggy, especially with large collections. So, I fixed that, and now the app is snappy and buttery smooth to use again!

New features:

• Share Highlights: Quickly share your highlights as text or Markdown to friends and other apps.
• Shortcuts Integration: Quickly save text as highlights via the iOS Shortcuts app and Siri. Much more to come!
• Huge performance improvements: Even with thousands of items in your collection, lists and detail views will load quickly, scroll smoothly, and respond instantly.

Other improvements:

• Fixed potential sync issue between devices.
• Better grouped views for browsing your content by people, websites, and albums.
• Scanner improvements, with better paragraph detection, margin handling, and smart hyphen removal.
• Quick navigation menus in detail views so that you can jump from a detail view to another list view right from the top menu bar.
• Smart image quality enhancement system.
• Better author/artist management with auto-matching and creation.
• Year published sort option for books.
• Selectable ISBN on book details.

Get ready, because your Clew experience is about to change in big ways this fall.

Clew 1.1 Update

Clew 1.1 has some exciting improvements in the way the app looks and what you can do with it.

New features:

• Redesigned for LIQUID GLASS: You'll see glassy elements in the buttons, toolbars, and more!
• MUSIC SUPPORT: In addition to books and web pages, you can now use songs as sources for your highlights. You'll see the album artwork along with artist information, and you can even group songs by albums.
• Intelligent Tag Suggestions: AI-powered tag suggestions when creating highlights.
• Redesigned Widget System: New lock screen widgets, Control Center widgets, configurable widget themes, and an optional quick-add "+" button to add a new highlight directly from a widget.

Even more improvements:

• Enhanced list and item views, a quick navigation menu, and new customization options.
• Overhauled book page scanner for even faster highlight creation.
• Keyboard shortcuts and search, including Command+Shift+H to create a new highlight from anywhere.
• Improved backup and restore system, including a complete settings backup, as well as advanced data management features.
• Share extension improvements.
• Many, many bug fixes.

Get ready, because your Clew experience is about to change in big ways this fall.

Clew 1.0.7 Update

Clew 1.0.7 brings the following features and improvements:

• NEW: Keyboard shortcuts to search, create, save, and show settings
• NEW: Search field shows item count
• Improvement: Some minor UI enhancements and bug fixes

As always, check out the Roadmap to see what's coming next!

Clew 1.0.6 Update

Clew 1.0.6 brings the following enhancements:

• WIDGET CUSTOMIZATION: Personalize your home screen and lock screen widgets with font styles, text color, background color, and more. With widget themes, each of your widgets can have a different style.
• BACKUP AND RESTORE get new features: Your complete database is already backed up automatically once per day. You can also manually back up at any time. Now, it's easier than ever to completely restore from a backup. Or, choose Compare with Backup to compare your current data with any backup so that you can easily restore specific items if you accidentally deleted something.
• BETTER SCANNER: The scanner continues to improve, with better handling of paragraph breaks and punctuation.
• ACCESSIBILITY: The app's UI components are now more accessible with VoiceOver.

More improvements:

• The add highlight button is now conveniently visible on all views.
• Widgets are more interactive - you can tap a book title or author name to quickly open that page.
• You can filter highlights by untagged or tagged only, in addition to showing all.
• The web search for autofilling new book information has better, more comprehensive results from multiple sources. It also now uses a work's original publication year instead of the specific edition's publication year.
• When editing a highlight, tapping Add Note will automatically focus the note text editor, and tapping Add Tags will automatically show the select tags sheet.
• The plus (+) button on widgets is optional now. You can add/remove it by tapping and holding on a widget and choosing Edit Widget.
• There's a new, convenient Add Source button when you're viewing a highlight that doesn't have one yet.

As always, check out the Roadmap to see what's coming next!

Clew 1.0.3 Update

Clew 1.0.3 brings a few new features and enhancements. There's a new scanner button, which you can use to quickly snap a photo of a book page or document and select the text you want to add as a highlight. The scanner will conveniently separate it into paragraphs or sentences.

When you scan a book page, Clew now looks for the title, author, and page number in the margins and automatically applies that information to the new highlight or suggests book options if it finds multiple matches in your library.

You can also now sort books by their number of highlights.

As always, check out the Roadmap to see what's coming next!

Clew 1.0.1 Update

Clew 1.0.1 is a minor update that improves iCloud syncing, adds intelligent tag suggestions when editing highlights, and includes some other visual enhancements to the app and Share Sheet experience.

Check out the Roadmap to see what else is cooking.

Clew 1.0 Launch

After 12 TestFlight builds and 4 years of development, Clew is live on the App Store and available to download for free.

"Clew was born from a simple idea—what if your highlights, thoughts, and margin notes could follow you anywhere, across all your books and media, rather than be trapped in individual apps and platforms?"

Thank you to all the beta testers who helped make this possible! Your feedback and suggestions have been instrumental in creating version 1.0 and directing where Clew will go in the future.