ALLO v17

We've been quiet for a while. This is what we were building.

It's the biggest update we've ever shipped, and almost none of it was our idea. You sent the bug reports. You asked for the same things over and over. You built workarounds when something was easier to dodge than to use. We finally went through all of it.

Most of v17 isn't even a feature. ALLO turned ten this year, and ten years leaves a mark. Buttons that worked one way here and a different way there. Code nobody wanted to touch. A Home page that loaded your entire workspace just to show you a list, which is about as slow as it sounds. We rebuilt the interface and pulled most of that out. The app is quicker now, and it stops contradicting itself. None of that screenshots well. It's also the thing the rest of this release stands on.

There's AI in here too. It doesn't sit in a chat box off in the corner, because that's not what ALLO is. You build on a canvas, with your team in it. So that's where we put it.

The short version of what's new:

• AI generation, right on the canvas: docs, tables, images, audio, web pages.
• A rebuilt interface and a dark theme, and the whole app runs faster.
• A wide-open Freeform Whiteboard.
• OKRs that import from a doc, and load and run faster.
• And, in early access, a developer API for everything in your workspace.

Make things on the canvas

The canvas can build things now. Hand it raw material that's already on the board, a file, a link, a few objects, and it makes something from them. A doc. A table. An image, a clip of audio, a whole web page. Don't feel like choosing? Leave it on Auto and it works out whether to write, talk it through, or just build the thing.

A chatbot answers you and the answer dies in your history. This doesn't. What you generate is an object on the canvas, sitting next to whatever it came from, and the rest of the team can grab it and keep going. Same as any other object on the board.

In practice:

• Ten PDFs and a pile of notes turn into one brief, and everyone's reading the same one.
• That CSV you've been avoiding becomes a table, parked next to last week's chart.
• A YouTube link or a live URL comes back as research notes, or the rough first cut of a deck.
• An image already on the board becomes five variations, at whatever aspect ratio you want.
• A script, or just your notes, turns into audio you'd actually sit through.
• And the web pages are real pages. Layout, charts, the works, opened as a live preview.

Once you start it, it runs on our side. Close the tab if you want. It'll be finished when you get back.

Keep working on what you made

Whatever you generate isn't locked. Talk to it and it changes, right where it sits, with the chat next to it.

• Tell it to be shorter, or darker, or punchier. It redraws in place.
• Read the doc. Scrub the transcript on an audio clip. Flip a web page between desktop, mobile, and the code itself.
• Links and uploaded files are the exception. You can't rewrite those, so ALLO builds off them instead and tells you so before you waste time trying.
• Every AI object gets a small badge, and it lights up when there's a reply you missed.

Files you can actually read

Files used to open as a wall of code. Now they open as files, and you can ask them questions without going anywhere.

• HTML shows up as a page. Markdown comes through formatted.
• HWP, HWPX, DOCX, XLSX, XLSM, PPTX, PDF: all of them preview where they sit.
• PDFs are quicker and cleaner, and the huge ones only load the pages you're on.
• Korean docs render Hangul right. Finally.

OKRs without the blank page

Writing OKRs from a blank page is the worst, so hand it off. Drop in a doc, a spreadsheet, or paste some text, and ALLO writes a first draft of the objectives and key results for you to fix.

• It keeps your real units. Business days, hours, whatever, instead of cramming everything into a percent.
• Pull a number from a document and its progress comes along with it.
• One shared state runs across the list, detail, tree, chart, and snapshot now, so a single check-in moves all of them.
• Drag to reorder or reparent. Paste a stack of lines and make key results all at once.
• The list, detail, and tree open faster, because they stopped loading things they never showed.

Cleaned up and modernized

This is where most of v17 actually went.

One design system. Ten years of drift, undone.

• Buttons, menus, modals, tabs, tooltips: they all behave the same way now.
• Notifications come up in one spot.
• Menus close when you click off them, and they stop running off the edge of the screen.
• Settings and admin read live data.

Faster. The fix was boring. Each screen loads only what it's showing you.

• Home opens in about half the time, then backfills in the background.
• A canvas stops dragging in templates and a member list you never look at.
• Big workspaces don't pull every member at login anymore.
• Edit a canvas you aren't even on, and it no longer redraws your sidebar for no reason.

The new whiteboard. Freeform Whiteboard is one big surface, not a stack of pages. It opens around 12,000 by 16,000 and keeps growing as you fill it. Post-its, shapes, drawings, tables, images, generated objects, all on the same board, and it doesn't choke as it gets crowded.

Dark theme. Pick system, light, or dark. It's there from the first screen. On a whiteboard the whole thing flips with it; slide-style canvases stay white.

The canvas itself.

• New canvases open at a sane 1x with 14px text, so they're quick and they hold up on a phone. Old ones look how they always did.
• More fonts for Korean, Japanese, and the rest.
• Paste text and it keeps more of your links.
• Thumbnails refresh more often, so previews stop going stale.
• Fold a page out of the way, or see them all at once in Slides Overview.
• Comments pop up off the bubble now. No side panel.

The desktop app. Desktop V2 finally acts like a browser.

• The tab and window shortcuts you'd reach for all work.
• Your tabs come back where you left them after a quit or an update, on the right monitor.
• Updates show up as a small toast with a Restart button, not a system pop-up.
• Downloads use the native flow, login opens your actual browser, and a notification gets you back to the right canvas.
• Windows V2 holds together better across the tray, the window controls, and both update channels.

Everything else

The rest of ALLO got the same pass.

One place for every file.

• A File Directory at /home/files now holds every file in the workspace, and you can search it.
• Preview, download, or jump straight to the canvas a file lives on.
• Narrow it down by project, canvas, or OKR session, then share that filtered view by link.
• Global Search is rebuilt. Open it from the header or with Cmd/Ctrl+K.
• Starred takes drag and drop from more places, and you can group things into sections and reorder them.

Projects, tasks, and calendar.

• Every project opens straight to whichever view you want, Dashboard, Kanban, Calendar, List, or Timeline, and changes land without a refresh.
• Tasks open faster and take pasted lines as subtasks.
• The new Calendar puts your ALLO schedule and your Google Calendar in the same place, across Month, Week, Day, and Agenda.
• Click an empty slot to start a canvas on that day, or drag an event to move it.

Home and inbox. Home opens to something useful instead of a cold start: recent canvases, today's schedule, the comments waiting on you, and what actually changed since you left. Inbox is one drawer, New and Completed, and every notification does something.

• Accept an invite right there.
• Grab a finished PDF from its link.
• Reply to a mention without leaving.
• Open an OKR check-in and see the status before and after.

Workspace and admin.

• Member management lives in one place across People and workspace settings.
• One shared Trash for canvases, projects, OKR sessions, and dashboards, with a 30 day countdown.
• A Usage view shows your AI credits against your plan.
• Account Security lists every signed-in device, so you can sign one out, or all of them.
• Hit your device limit and it warns you instead of logging you out.

What's next: ALLO for developers

Cleaning up the legacy did one more thing. It made ALLO's data clean enough to open up.

Everything in ALLO, every project, canvas, task, OKR, and comment, is a node in one graph. We're building an API for it.

• Read the graph with intent, or write small commands, like creating a task or logging a check-in.
• Listen for the events you care about.
• Every call runs under the caller's own permissions, on the server. No raw workspace dumps.
• Search and summary endpoints hand back compact, cited, permission-aware context, sized for a model.

It's built for the AI tools your team already runs and the agents you're building. The developer platform is in early access.

That's v17. Almost none of it started as our idea. You found the rough edges, told us what you actually needed, and most of this release is just us catching up to you. We're not done.

Back to building.

Thank you, Ray