A first in ten years, and Franz learns to listen.

Forty degrees, and nobody wants to type.

Vienna hit 40.8 degrees yesterday afternoon. That is the highest temperature ever measured in Austria, and it was measured about twenty minutes from my desk. Productivity takes a real hit at these temperatures. Unless you are blessed with an air-conditioned office, and most of us here are not, everything costs a little more effort than it should.

Which makes it a fitting week to tell you what I am building, because all of it is about Franz asking less of you.

Last dispatch I asked when you actually do email. The answer came back with unusual clarity: all day. Not a slot in the morning, not a quiet half hour once the house is asleep. All day, constantly. If that is the real shape of the day, then every keystroke I can take out of it is worth taking out.

So Franz is learning to listen. Speech-to-text that runs on your own machine, on Windows, Linux and Mac alike. The voice note somebody sent you at eleven at night becomes text you can read in a second, without playing it twice at half speed with the phone against your ear. And the part I am most excited about: holding one key, speaking, and watching the words land in whatever box you were about to type into. Any box. Franz Mail, a Slack reply, a WhatsApp thread.

And it stays on your machine. Not in a cloud, not on my servers, not on anyone's. No audio leaves your computer, and there is no new permission dialog to click through on the way in.

On a recent Apple Silicon Mac, Franz can now hand the work to Apple's own native speech engine, which is faster and noticeably more accurate, and understands thirty languages. Every other machine keeps transcribing locally the way it already does.

A first in ten years: the Mac App Store.

Franz has passed App Store review. In the next few days, for the first time since this whole thing started in 2016, you will be able to install Franz straight from the Mac App Store.

Ten years is a long time for a Mac app to stay off the Mac App Store. Getting there meant rebuilding parts of Franz to live inside Apple's sandbox, and I will spare you the details, but the result is exactly the thing I wanted. For anyone who prefers it that way, installing Franz becomes one click inside a store you already trust. No download, no dragging anything anywhere, no dialog asking whether you are really quite sure you want to open this.

Nothing changes if you already have Franz. The copy on your machine keeps updating itself exactly as it does now, and it stays the fuller build. The store version plays by Apple's rules, which means a few things sit outside it.

The Windows Store is next on the bench, and that work is already underway.

And the newspaper for your inbox, the thing I showed you last dispatch, is still on the workbench and still without a public name. You will hear about it here first, as promised.

I asked because I was about to spend a good chunk of that summer doing the same work again for the Windows Store, and I would rather know whether it matters to you before I start.

The cable is always open. Reply to any dispatch, about anything, and you are writing straight to me.

— Stefan, founder of Franz