What's new

Your world, drawn

• A new screen in the sidebar: the Connection map. Every character, place or faction becomes a dot, and every relation you created becomes a thread between them.
• In Focus, pick one entry and see only its neighbourhood — one or two hops away, with the names inside the dots.
• In World, the whole map, with diagnostics beside it: who ended up with no connection at all, which clusters formed on their own, and which entries are bridges — the ones that, if they left, would split your world into pieces that never touch.
• In Chapters, each chapter becomes a dot with the entries it mentions hanging around it. It shows who turns up alongside whom without wiring everyone to everyone.
• Drag the dots to arrange them your way, and use the category filters to clear off whatever is not the point right now.

Calling a character what the scene calls them

• Type [[Johnny:: and pick who that refers to: the sentence shows Johnny, and the link goes to John Smith's page.
• Before, you could find someone by a nickname, but the text always showed the registered name. That does not work for fiction — the same character is "Johnny" in one scene and "John Smith" in the next.
• The label is free text, so it also works for "the old man" or "the man in the cloak", which would never be registered nicknames.
• If you delete the entry later, the label stays in the sentence, just without the link. The connection goes, your prose does not.

A new face

• Universos has a real brand now, and it arrived everywhere: the icon in the Start menu, on the taskbar, on the Android home screen and here on the site.
• If you had already downloaded the installer, you will notice the difference. It had been showing the generic installer icon — that ball with a blue arrow — rather than the app's own. It had been that way since the first version.

Fixes

• The text about notes on the EPUB export screen described the app from two versions ago: it spoke of a "Notes" chapter at the end of the book and of only the first mention in each chapter becoming a link. None of that has existed since 1.6.0 — and that was the very text you read to decide how to export.
• With the app in English, a few spots still showed Portuguese: the create-entry menu, the word for "words" in the editor footer and the removed-entry notice.
• The EPUB cover was not the one the preview showed. If you had never saved a cover, the book came out with a pale background and blobs — while the builder displayed the dark one. There were two different defaults, and only one of them was on screen. What you see is now what gets exported.

A cover that is yours

• The new Book button in the title bar gathers the name, the synopsis and everything that goes into the EPUB — and beside them, a cover builder.
• Pick a background colour or image and drag the title, your name and a free line of text wherever you want them. The preview is the cover: what you see there is what ships.
• Covers now come out at 3:4, the proportion of most e-reader screens. If you were already exporting, you will notice it is less elongated — that is so it fills a Kindle screen instead of leaving dark bands down the sides. The old proportions are still available, for when the destination is a store thumbnail.

Notes that behave like notes

• Explanations of characters, places and objects no longer become a chapter at the end of the book. Tapping a name while reading now opens the note right there, without leaving the page.
• And every mention is tappable, not only the first one in each chapter.

A sidebar that fits a big world

• Chapters, categories and tags can now be collapsed by clicking the section title itself. Each category collapses on its own, and the app remembers what you left closed.
• The book settings moved out of Settings, which now holds only what applies to the program: About, appearance and sound, and privacy.

The text breathes better

• Mentions of characters, places and objects are no longer coloured tags sitting mid-sentence: they are now underlined text in the category colour. They wrap along with the paragraph, like any other word — before, each name became a little block that interrupted the reading.
• The chapter gained a comfortable reading width, and the other screens now use the space on a large display instead of being squeezed to the left.
• On a character, place or object screen, the summary holds more text and the description uses the full column.

Finding things

• Search moved up to the title bar, next to the menu, giving the sidebar back the room it used to take — room that now belongs to your chapters and entries.
• Clicking Mentioned in now scrolls to the passage and lights it up for a few seconds, instead of dropping you at the top of the chapter to hunt for it.
• The sidebar got quieter: Overview and Writing stats no longer look like buttons, and the tag list has room to breathe.

Less friction

• The window opens maximised.
• Confirmation prompts now look like the app, rather than the grey Windows dialog.
• The monthly goal became a number with an edit button: it only changes when you decide to change it.
• Settings were reorganised into blocks, centred on screen, with the EPUB fields in two columns and an About section showing your version.
• Discreet scrollbars, and the first-run tour steps no longer change size as you advance.

Sharing and exporting

• The share image is properly centred now — the content used to drift downwards — and it shrinks the type to fit a long passage instead of cutting it. Character and place names are back in the shared text.
• In the exported book, a mention is now ordinary text. Colouring made sense in the app, where you can click; in an EPUB only the first mention of each chapter leads to a note, and the reader marks links its own way.

Open your world with a double click

• Worlds are now saved as .universo, the app's own format. Double-clicking one opens Universos straight into that world, with no need to hunt for the file from inside the program.
• With the app already open, a double click reuses the window you are working in rather than opening another — and asks first if anything is unsaved.
• The .universo.json files you already have keep opening normally. Nothing needs renaming or converting.

A heads-up when a new version is out

• Anyone who installed from the Windows installer or the APK had no way of knowing an update existed. The app now says so, with a discreet bar you can dismiss.
• The check happens at most once a day and sends nothing about you or about what you write. If you would rather the app not do it, turn it off under Settings → About.
• Anyone who installed from the Microsoft Store or Play Store keeps being updated by the store itself, as always.

About, and compatibility between versions

• An About section in Settings shows which version you are running — until now nothing in the app answered that.
• The file now records which version of the app saved it. If you ever open, on an outdated computer, a world saved by a newer version, the app warns you before letting you edit — because saving over it could discard exactly what the older version cannot understand.

Universos now speaks English

• The app follows the language of your computer or tablet: any variant of Portuguese opens in Portuguese, and the rest of the world opens in English. There is nothing to set up the first time.
• Prefer another language? Switch it in Settings — the choice is kept on the device and applies to everything, including the images you share and the EPUB books you export.
• Dates and numbers now follow the convention of the chosen language, not the system's.
• The name stays Universos in every language.

Keyboard shortcuts

• Ctrl+S saves, Ctrl+Shift+S saves as, Ctrl+O opens another world.
• Ctrl+K jumps straight to search, Ctrl+Shift+N creates a chapter and Ctrl+Shift+H returns to the overview.
• Ctrl+Shift+E is the useful one: select a name mid-sentence and it becomes a character, a place or an object, with the mention already standing where your selection was. It's for the moment you write a name and realise right then that it deserves a page.
• Bold, italic, undo and redo keep working as they always did.

Nothing is lost when you close

• Closing the app with unsaved changes now asks first instead of simply quitting: save, discard, or go back to writing.
• On Android, when writing over the open file isn't possible, the app asks for a new destination instead of failing with no way out.

Share what you write

• Select a passage in the editor and click Share: Universos turns it into an image, ready to post. Choose between story (9:16), portrait (4:5) or post (1:1), in four themes — two light, one dark, and one that takes the colour of the entry's category.
• Characters, places and objects become images too, with the name in focus and the summary below.
• Everything is generated on your own computer. Nothing you write ever leaves it.

A collection of your best lines

• Every passage you share is kept in the world file, along with how many times you came back to it. Over time that list becomes a portrait of the lines you like most — with nothing for you to assemble.
• Because it lives inside the .universo.json, the collection travels with the file when you sync between computer and tablet.

An overview of your world

• A new place in the sidebar showing what you could do today, by looking at your actual world: a character mentioned in twelve chapters with no description, someone you created who has not appeared anywhere yet, a place with no link to anything else.
• And observations only something that knows your world's connections could make: who runs through the most chapters, two central figures who have never met, the chapter that grew out of proportion.
• Progress shows through what you have already done — words written, days you wrote in the last month. No streaks to keep, no days to make up.

EPUB export

• Entity notes fixed: they no longer repeat at the end of the chapter. Each character, place or object now has a single note in a "Notes" chapter at the end of the book, and the first mention in each chapter links to it, with an arrow back to where you were reading.
• Long descriptions stopped breaking the note: the whole text goes in, as a single paragraph, opening with the name of the entry — the Notes chapter doubles as a glossary of your world.
• The file comes out with a cover (generated from the world name and the author), a title page and metadata — author, language, synopsis, keywords and date — so the e-reader shows everything properly in the library.

Stats and history travel with the file

• Writing stats and version history moved inside the .universo.json itself, rather than being tied to the device. Sync the file between computer and tablet and your progress and old versions come along.

Less risk of losing work

• If the app closes unexpectedly with unsaved changes, it offers to recover them next time you open it.
• Closing the window with pending changes now asks for confirmation.
• Deleting an entry or a tag asks for confirmation too, as chapters already did.
• If something goes wrong in the interface, instead of a blank screen the app keeps an emergency copy of your work and offers to reload.

Settings in one place

• World name and synopsis, export metadata, theme, sound and privacy now live on a single screen, reachable from the sidebar. The top bar was cleared out.

Interface and accessibility

• Proper icons in place of emoji, which looked different on every system.
• The start screen lists the worlds you opened recently, to switch between them without going through the file browser.
• The "Mentioned in" list moved out of the narrow column and now spans the page, with the passages readable.
• Keyboard navigation: chapters, entries, tags, mentions and search results respond to Tab and Enter, and Esc closes menus and dialogs.

Works fully offline

• Fonts now ship inside the app, so it looks identical without an internet connection — and no external request is made beyond the optional telemetry, if you accepted it.

First public release, in Portuguese only. Everything below started here.

Writing and linking

• A rich text editor per chapter, with a live word count.
• Type [[ to link a character, place or object — pick an existing one or create it on the spot, without leaving the text.
• Automatic backlinks with surrounding context, and a timeline of where each entry appears across the story.
• Labelled relationships between entries, appearing on both sides of the link.

Organising and finding

• Categories with their own colour and default fields; free-form tags with autocomplete.
• Search grouped by where the match happened — title, content or tag — with typo tolerance.
• Version history per chapter and entry, with a visual diff and one-click restore.
• A writing stats page: words per period, per day and per chapter, plus a monthly goal.

Yours, and only yours

• Everything lives in a single portable file. No account, no cloud, no subscription.
• Light and dark themes, a guided tour on first run, and a help page.
• Optional, anonymous telemetry — off until you accept it. See the Privacy Policy.
• Windows installer and a signed Android APK.