It looks like I’ve been remiss in blogging about Zavala’s releases. The last blog post was about Zavala 4.1, the Markdown Import release. Now we’re up to release 4.4. There’s a fair amount to talk about. Let’s get to it.

Zavala 4.2

Released April 1, 2026

Outline Locking

Being able to encrypt and prevent others from accessing an Outline is a feature I’ve long wanted and have gotten requests for. This feature encrypts the Outline on disk and also when syncing using iCloud. For more on the details of how it works and how to use it, check out Locking an Outline.

Added Find Shortcut Actions

The Find style Shortcut actions are more powerful than the existing Get Outlines and Get Rows actions that I had originally created for Zavala. Among other things, they allow you to limit the number of results and to sort them. I’m glad that I finally added Find Outlines and Find Rows actions to Zavala.

Zavala 4.3

Released July 29, 2026

Print Screen

This feature prints your Outline while respecting the UI changes currently in effect on the screen. It uses the current Filters applied and Row collapsed state to determine if it should print an element of the Outline.

Honestly, I didn’t realize how important this feature was until recently. I would have added this no-brainer feature sooner had I understood how it would be used. The lights-on moment for me was when a teacher told me that they might want to print an Outline for students, but that they wouldn’t want Notes to be shown. Suddenly I could see a teacher outlining things a student should be improving on, but not wanting that student to see the Notes associated with the Topics that they teacher was identifying.

Zavala 4.4

Released September 16, 2026

Web Clipper

A web clipper is a common tool included with other Personal Knowledge Management (PMK) systems. It takes the contents of a web page and imports it into the PMK system. Implementing this for a standard note-taking application is fairly straightforward because notes are fairly unstructured as are web pages.

It is much more complicated to change a web page into an Outline because an Outline is very structured. In Zavala we do our best to put a round peg into a square hole. The results are surprisingly good.

For more information on Zavala’s web clipper, read Share Extension. It talks about what it is in more depth and why you would want to use it.

HTML Import

This works the same as the web clipper except it lets you select a file from the local file system instead of downloading the HTML and images from the web.

HTML Export

I wasn’t going to add this because you can do the same thing with Shortcuts. Just export as Markdown and then convert to Rich Text and then convert to HTML. I’ve long used this trick to turn Outlines into blog posts.

I gave in and added it because, one, lots of people still don’t understand how to use Shortcuts and two, it seems like if we can import HTML that we should be able to export it. We gotta keep things symmetrical.

Japanese Translation

Japanese seemed to be the most logical next translation for Zavala. Japan is second only to German for downloads outside of the United States.

I used the new Translation Coordinator with Claude in Xcode to do it. It seemed to work well. The process includes context for the translation and LLM’s seem to do translation well. I don’t have any way to verify that the translations are correct though. Now I wait for bug reports…

Next Steps

I’m going to try to get iPhone Duo support done for the next release. I find the iPhone Duo very interesting. The UI changes Apple made to accommodate the new form factor are fascinating and are Apple at their best. I don’t know if it is the right phone for me yet, but I definitely want first-class support for it in Zavala.

Siri AI integration is also something I’d like to bring to Zavala. I’m not sure yet how good it will work or if I should wait to see if eventually Apple trains Siri to understand Outliner apps. Currently it will understand note-taking apps. That might be all the better I can wish for.

While I think Zavala is a mature application and am trying hard to keep it simple, change keeps on coming. Stay tuned for more releases.