It has been quiet for a while, and this time there is plenty in it. The core of it: summaries finally have a place of their own, and the ad blocker actually does something for the first time. What Distill is and what it can do is on the project page.
NEW
Summary as a section of its own
The AI summary no longer lands in your notes, it now sits in its own section above them. Editable, still transferable via “Copy into notes”, an own section in the Markdown export, and visible on all devices through iCloud. Even an iPhone without Apple Intelligence shows the summary the Mac created. Your notes belong to you again.
Ollama instead of Apple Intelligence (Mac, for advanced users)
If you run a local Ollama, you can select it as the engine under “Summary” in the settings, including a choice from the models you have installed. That gets rid of Apple’s safety filter, which serious articles tend to get caught in, and of the small context window. Everything stays local on the Mac. Category suggestions and hashtags still use Apple Intelligence.
Automatic preparation (Mac, off by default)
Settings, “Prepare new articles automatically”: the Mac fetches the full text for new entries in the background and writes the summary along with it. In small batches after each RSS fetch, pausing in low power mode and when the machine is warm. Whatever you share from your iPhone while out and about is prepared by the Mac as well, and the summary syncs back.
Renaming categories
The pencil next to a category in the settings renames it. All entries move along automatically, including those in the archive and in the trash. Until now the only way was to delete and recreate, and the affected entries lost their assignment in the process.
FIXED
The ad blocker has never worked since it was introduced. The block rules were in a format that WebKit silently discards, visible only in the console. Embarrassing, but the list now demonstrably compiles and ad and tracking networks do stay out of the original view. Pages load faster and need less memory as a result.
“close notice” and other invisible scraps of text in the extracted text are gone. It was the screen reader label of a banner that ended up at the front of heise articles and travelled from there into summaries. Affected entries come out clean with the next “Extract again”.
Understandable messages when the AI does not play along. Until now a raw system message could appear there. Now it says what is going on: safety filter, text too long, models not loaded yet. That was necessary for the safety filter in particular, whose detection probably never worked on German-language devices.
iPad in portrait: on the 11-inch model, article and notes sat side by side even when there was not enough room. Buttons wrapped, fields ran to the edge. Now the notes move below the article, which gets the full width in return. Large iPads and landscape stay unchanged.
WHAT YOU COULD LOOK AT
Does the summary feel right in its new place, or do you miss the old route into the notes?
If you switch on automatic preparation: does the Mac keep up, and is the quality of the full texts right?
Does the original view load noticeably faster?