Updates

Windows: the AI now sets itself up on the first launch (the game gave up on a slow first start of its engine and never fetched the model). Mac: the app was called "damaged" once downloaded — its signature is valid now — and it also comes as a zip. A new trailer that follows one day in the department.

First public release. A six-floor department with ten research groups and their labs, a security gate, canteen, roof café and terrace; a hundred people who work, talk, remember and change; your PhD with three papers, hidden skills to find, weekly goals, the seminar, the viva and the career after it. Talk, email or ask anyone in person, by typing or by voice. The AI engine (Ollama) is inside the installer and the model, IBM Granite 4.2 3B, downloads itself on the first launch. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

Patch release: AI ▸ Connect to Claude now opens. In 0.1.5 the dialog failed to load, so the menu item did nothing. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

KherveCAD now trades files with other CAD: open and save STEP, IGES and Rhino .3dm, with OpenCascade and rhino3dm built into the installer, and fillet or chamfer the true edges of an imported STEP part. Rhino-style tools arrive too — draw 3D curves with snaps and typed points, then loft, sweep, patch, revolve or extrude surfaces from them; SubD smooth surfaces from an editable cage; Make2D line drawings of the view; Gumball move/rotate handles; and draft, curvature and zebra heat maps. Sculpting grows up with drag sculpting and new brushes, a Blender-style Edit Mode (inset, loop cut, knife, bridge, spin), armatures, shape keys, Skin, hair strands, displacement and creature skins, scatter on surface and vertex paint — and walking monsters can be sent to PlanetCraft. Also: reflective metal shading, light-direction sliders, Cut Through capped in each part's colour, 35 Raspberry Pi 5 enclosures and printer test parts in the library.

First public release. Libraries are folders versioned with Git and synced through any Git remote. Add references by dropping PDFs, folders, DOIs, arXiv ids or ISBNs (details fetched from doi.org / Crossref, arXiv and OpenLibrary); import Zotero, BibTeX / BibLaTeX, RIS, EndNote XML, PubMed and CSL-JSON. BibLaTeX and BibTeX export, a library.bib for KherveTeX, PDFs opened in KhervePDF, citations in Word in 35+ styles plus any journal style, a Covers view, Undo / Redo, local AI summaries through Ollama, and Claude over MCP. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

First public release. Instrument booking for one lab: an All instruments calendar, with each booking in its instrument's colour, and a calendar for each instrument; booking by dragging, or by press-and-hold; free-time slots (daytime, evening and weekend) or fixed sessions; auto, trained-only or manual approval; user, super user and lab manager roles; hourly rates and session prices for each user category, fixed when a booking is made; problem and out-of-order reports; finance and usage reports with charts, lab report PDF and Excel, and PDF, Excel and CSV statements; import from PPMS; optional booking web pages on the lab network; Claude as lab manager over MCP. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

First public release. Write on one endless page while Whisper transcribes the talk offline into a Speech panel, line by line with the time of day; notes and speech linked by time. Sections, key points, questions, lists, equations, camera pictures and attached PDF / Word / PowerPoint documents, with KhervePDF included to open the PDFs. Claude over MCP (Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor): it reads the note and the speech, fills in sections from what was said, adds sections and exports — local-only, off until you enable it. Local AI (Ollama) for the same jobs on your own computer. Export LaTeX, a continuous PDF or A4 pages — tectonic and the TeX files are built in, so PDF export works offline. Notes save themselves, keep earlier versions and survive a crash mid-talk. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

Documents now compile on a new Windows PC: the installer bundles every font and package its templates use (0.214 missed common fonts, so ordinary documents had to download them and failed on slow networks), a missing font is fetched instead of printing blank text, and a compile never hangs waiting for input. The PDF opens in its own window beside the editor. Compiler menu: compiler status and the package cache folder. Claude can control KherveTeX over MCP.

The Visual tab now looks like the final paper — real pages, typeset numbered equations, columns — so the PDF moves to the side. First macOS release. Also: new equation editor, KhervePaint-based drawings and flowcharts, project Documents panel, .ktex format, Claude over MCP, offline compiles, printing.

Linux packages: Debian / Ubuntu (amd64) and Raspberry Pi (arm64), with the tectonic engine and LaTeX packages included. The PDF opens in its own window for existing installs too. Slides compile on a new computer: the installer includes every LaTeX package KherveSlide uses, so the first compile works at once, even offline (0.168.170 shipped the engine without its packages). New Compiler menu with the compiler status and Download offline bundle. First public release: a Visual slide canvas — drag, resize and stack text and picture boxes — with a drag-to-reorder navigator, the generated Beamer LaTeX and compiler console, and the compiled PDF live in its own window beside it (or side by side, or hidden). The tectonic engine is bundled, so no LaTeX install is needed (the first compile downloads the packages it uses). Themes with a preview gallery, templates and example presentations; equations, chemistry, drawings and flowcharts; PowerPoint import and export, printing and handouts; a slideshow with presenter view. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

First public release. Three denoising methods — VMD, wavelet and FFT filter — each with a view of what it keeps and drops, an Auto rule, batch create and a Raw / Denoised / residual figure. Import Excel, VAMAS, plain data files and the Thermo, Kratos, PHI, Scienta, MRS, VG-Microtech, Igor, Diamond and SDP instrument formats; export to a KherveFitting workbook, CSV or a figure. Undo, .knoise projects, an in-app User Guide, and Claude over MCP. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

The new KherveDB, rewritten in React + Tauri: a 4 MB installer instead of ~200 MB, also available as a web app. Tabbed Other Databases & Properties window that follows the selected element, right-click XPS information (electronic structure, peak positions, overlaps), entry details, histogram plot, welcome window and signed auto-update.

Classic wxPython version: fixes the "failed to load NIST_BE" error of the packaged app, Edge WebView2 browsers with cookie banners declined, right-click XPS information, hover help, starting image, welcome window and auto-update.

KherveCAD now speaks six languages: the interface and the User Guide are translated into Chinese, French, Spanish, Japanese and Hindi. A public MCP link lets ChatGPT and other cloud assistants connect to the open document, not just Claude. Design your own objects from shapes and give them a finish of their own; sofas come upholstered in fabric, velvet, leather or bouclé, and tables and cabinets get realistic wood grain. Blueprint offers architectural scales from 1:25 to 1:1000 and takes any typed ratio. The library adds split-system air conditioning and a modern house with a pool.

A corrected Shirley background: the last part of the range, at the highest binding energy, was calculated wrongly and is now right across the whole region. Multi-region Shirley backgrounds tune their offsets automatically during the fit, with a lock that keeps the background continuous at each join, so complex spectra get a sensible background without hand adjustment. A bug that made complex fits oscillate between iterations is fixed — fits now converge steadily and much faster. A new Monte Carlo button estimates the uncertainty of each peak position and the other fitted parameters, with a correlation matrix and scatter plots, and survey spectra are identified automatically, reporting an element only when its main line is present. Also: an in-app User Guide (F1) with screenshots, multiplet envelopes, Wagner plot and ARXPS layer model tools, B07 .dat import, and statistical weights from the raw counts.

First public release. An interactive OpenGL 3D ball-and-stick viewer with a 2D skeletal sketcher over one shared structure; build molecules by hand with valence checking. About 700 molecules, 122 crystals, 60 surfaces, graphene, nanotubes and fullerenes, 40 polymers and 36 balanced, animated reactions. Export STL, 3MF, OBJ, PLY, GLB, XYZ, MOL, SDF, PDB, CIF, PNG and SVG for KhervePaint; SMILES and .mol / .sdf / .pdb import are included because RDKit is bundled. Connect Claude Desktop, Claude Code or Cursor over MCP. Windows installer and portable zip, and macOS disk images for Apple Silicon and Intel.

The engine catches up on Windows. The installer now bundles a recent OpenSCAD snapshot (2026.09.18) with the fast Manifold backend instead of 2021.01, and ships manifold3d, so exact preview booleans, Bevel, Wireframe and push/pull work out of the box. New since 0.1.328: Blender-style modelling nodes (Decimate, Remesh, Shrinkwrap, Bevel, Cloth), push/pull and inset on any face, inverse kinematics, drop-and-settle physics, photoreal renders through Blender, print-check heat maps, a Collections tab, and My Library — saved designs the AI finds and reuses. The library grows with houses, porches, trees with real leaves, stadiums and sport, people and animals, Lego, cars, molecules and the Solar System. Fixes: a click on a finely faceted circle now gives a diameter, and the local photo-to-3D command keeps Windows paths.

Build houses, whole cities, nanoparticles and molecules. The House Builder lays out rooms, walls, roofs, furniture and a garden floor by floor, with house styles from around the world. The City Builder grows villages, towns and cities across hills and valleys, reads real places from OpenStreetMap and LiDAR, and adds libraries of skyscrapers, landmarks, bridges and trees — and Send to PlanetCraft lets you walk through them. For the lab: a crystal builder with unit cells and supercells, crystal particles scattered over an area, a Surface Builder that cuts any (hkl) slab, and a compound builder that makes molecules from SMILES, with about 240 molecules in the library and units down to nanometres. Also new: sculpting, meshes from photos, GLB import, a paintable human figure, and Cut Through and exploded views on the 3D toolbar.

The vibe-designing release. Claude now has 45 tools in the open document, up from 32, and checks its own work: render_view waits for the exact render and looks from any angle, and new tools measure, section, weigh, print-check and interference-check a part. Publish to Printables assembles the whole upload, and Blueprint draws third-angle engineering drawings to PDF, SVG, PNG and DXF. New modelling tools: fillet or chamfer the edges you click, shell, patterns, loft through sections, sweep, organic nodes and deformers, sheet metal and materials. Mates gain flush, concentric, hinge, gear and limit, with exploded views; the 3D view moves to OpenGL with cavity shading and a platform shadow; and the library adds Lego bricks with a Lego Builder and realistic chemistry glassware. KherveCAD now updates itself — on Windows, and on Macs, which get native Apple Silicon and Intel builds.

Crystals get a toolbar palette of their own — supercells up to 30 repeats per axis, per-cell tilts that model a defect rather than a detached grain, and VESTA-style translucent coordination polyhedra. KhervePaint is now an MCP server too: connect Claude and it drives the real application through 26 tools, and can see a PNG of the canvas to check its own work.

Connect Claude Desktop or Claude Code straight to the open document over MCP — no API key needed: AI > Connect to Claude (Simple) configures the assistant for you. Thirty-two tools cover the object tree, the generated code, the parts library, instances and mates, and render_view hands the assistant a picture of the 3D preview so it can see what it built. apply_code turns a program into real, editable nodes rather than a frozen blob, and one tool call is one Ctrl+Z. Both assistants now sit under a new AI menu, with the API-key ChatBox hidden until you want it. Instances also carry their own colour and opacity, so you can colour a part from the Main tab and two copies of one Object can differ.

The VAMAS, Kratos, PHI (.pro / .spe / .sxi) and VGD importers now build a .kfit project directly instead of writing a full workbook and reading every sheet back — the format is asked once, up front, and the .xlsx + .json route is unchanged. Area scans and images gain the most: the data-building stage of a 50x50 map drops from ~15 s to ~0.02 s. Iterated Shirley now follows the fitted peaks during a fit, recomputed each pass from the peak envelope so the background settles as the fit does. A new Help > Workshops & Announcements panel shows courses and events without needing a new release, and Sample Manager can average a selection n spectra at a time instead of collapsing the whole column. Preferences applies the saved plot style to the very first plot and gains a "No Fill on All Peaks" tick. Fixes: Export to TXT / CSV / DAT and the plot-script export now read .kfit projects; Spectral Denoising and standard PCA create sheets in .kfit projects; Help > Buy Me a Coffee is back; and the About dialog no longer crops the tester list or the QR code.

First release. The installer bundles the OpenSCAD engine, so the 3D view shows the exact rendered mesh — booleans really cut — with nothing else to install. Parts and assemblies, click-two-faces snapping, a parametric vacuum-hardware library, an AI assistant, and a big Examples menu.

The mini window gains Open Folder and New Instance, so you can switch project without leaving the cockpit — and opening a folder now opens its entry point (main.py, or a script named after the folder) so Run works straight away. Also fixes Run in the installed build: interpreter discovery skips the Microsoft Store python.exe placeholder and falls back to registered and standard Python install locations, even when Python was never added to PATH.

Errors now show in red in the Output panel, which reads like a real console — the interpreter, script and working directory are echoed before every run, and a failed Run can no longer be silent. Projects never run in KhervePY's own virtualenv. The mini window shrinks to a real cockpit (Output left, Log right), and KhervePY can now check GitHub for updates and install them.

KherveFitting now updates itself — it checks GitHub Releases, installs the new version silently and reopens, showing a What's New panel filtered to what changed. Export to KherveSheet carries the plot as well as the numbers: series colours, axis ranges and a picture of the figure, with each chart series bound to its own cells and fitted peaks shaded. The 3D waterfall is rebuilt with intensity shading, a floor map, peak tracks, 32 colour ramps and settings that persist, and Sample Manager can replace the spectrum number with a custom sample axis. Fixes: VAMAS import reads the .vms in place and releases the workbook, and F2/F3/F4 image export no longer uses the single-plot size.

ARPES becomes a full workspace — dispersion heatmap on the main plot, constant-energy and Fermi-surface views, two arrow-key crosshairs, 3D cut-away cube and stacked-slice views, Brillouin-zone overlay, and Diamond I05 NeXus / netCDF import. Sample Manager gains .kfit drop-to-merge and insert-plot-as-image, the Tools and Import menus are reorganised per technique, and plot image export size and DPI are now set per kind of plot.

Fixes a crash on a fresh install where opening any file failed with "'MyFrame' object has no attribute 'usage_tracking'". Preference defaults now apply whether or not a config file exists, and a new installation creates its settings from a shipped default configuration on first run.

Note (rich-text) cells and File-attachment cells with inline previews for xlsx, ksheet and kfit; SVG drawing tools with grid and snap that open in KhervePaint; open code in KhervePY and sheets in KherveSheet with reload-on-save; and Help ▸ Report an Issue.

New single-file .kfit project format (much faster for large projects), KherveSheet export, Spectral Denoiser, PCA noise analysis, ARPES import, D-parameter calibration, and per-user settings/library/backups so it works when installed under Program Files.

New Measure menu — scale bar, mm edge rulers, protractor, and a live shape-size readout in mm. Right-click the canvas for tools and the symbol library. The eraser and pencil now edit the pixels of imported images.

Live program output now streams into the Output panel as it happens (python -u). Adds Check requirements.txt to flag & install missing packages, and runs scripts in the project's own virtualenv.

Type directly in the Terminal — the console is editable in place, like a real shell. New KPy icon, rendered natively at every size.

NIST XPS binding-energy database viewer.

A Jupyter-inspired computational notebook as a native desktop app.

Hideable AI assistant sidebar grounded in the active document.

AI panel on by default with a toolbar toggle; equation-editor slot UX.

An Excel-inspired spreadsheet workbench for scientific data.

Fixed a Windows encoding crash in git/pip output, themed folder icons.

Hybrid raster + vector drawing for scientific figures.