MindMax blog

MindMax is a desktop app for macOS and Windows that reads, thinks and writes with you inside a folder you already own. Answers about your documents carry verbatim quotes you can click back to the page, and every AI edit to your writing arrives as a tracked change you accept or reject.

There are a lot of tools now that will read a PDF and talk to you about it. We built a different shape of thing, and it is worth being clear about why.

The first public beta build.

What is in it​

• Reading. PDFs, EPUBs, Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Markdown open from a folder you choose. Annotations anchor to the real position in the document and are stored alongside it.
• Region questions. Drag a box around a chart or table and ask about just that part of the page — useful when a paper stops making sense at a figure rather than at a paragraph.
• Checkable answers. Questions about a document come back with verbatim quotes that link to the page they came from. Quotes that do not match the source are dropped rather than shown.
• Canvas. 37 built-in AI Skills across six groups, for taking one question and working it over from several directions.
• Long-form writing. Outline approval before drafting, an argument ledger across chapters, and revisions presented as marked-up changes.

Known rough edges​

• Builds are not signed yet, so both macOS and Windows will warn on first open. The installation guide walks through it.
• Multi-column PDFs with interleaved figures are still the hardest extraction case; quotes from those pages are worth clicking through.
• No mobile app, no web version. Not planned.

Where to start​

Understand a paper in about 30 minutes is a good place to find out whether this is for you.