A whiteboard on your Mac's desktop, like the one on your wall

Think about where your sketches go. You open Excalidraw to draw a quick flow, it lands in a browser tab, and two days later that tab is gone, along with the drawing, unless you remembered to save the file. The next idea starts on a new blank board somewhere else.

A paper whiteboard doesn't work like that. It hangs on the wall, and what's on it stays there until you wipe it. You see it every time you look up. So in Koi 2.0 we hung the board on the wall of your Mac: the desktop.

1. The board sits on your wallpaper as a widget, under every window and on every Space, showing what you last drew.
2. Click it anywhere and it grows into a big window, one card springing between the two.
3. Draw. The tools are along the top, with Excalidraw's letters.
4. Press Esc, or ⌘W, and it shrinks back onto the desktop, still showing the board.

Clear your windows away, or swipe to another Space, and the board is there. The ⋯ in its corner makes it small, medium or large, and a drag puts it where you want it. When you're in another app, Board in the notch opens it without leaving.

The board is drawn by the Mac app itself, not a web page inside it. That's what lets it live on the desktop at all: a widget under every window has to be cheap to keep around and quick to wake up. It also means the board is a file on your Mac, not something kept in a browser's storage.

We kept Excalidraw's layout on purpose. Plenty of people already know it: the tools along the top with their letters, the properties down the left, the right-click menu, zoom and undo bottom left. If you've used it, you don't have to learn anything new.

The full list, from the eraser to the elbow arrows, is on the board's page.

Each board is a file in Koi's data folder, saved a moment after each change. Pictures and files you put on it are copied beside it. Boards are never uploaded. Like any window, Koi's AI sees a board on screen when your screen goes with a question.

Three things leave your Mac from the board itself, and only when you ask:

• A web link put on the board as a card: its title and picture are fetched once, straight from your Mac to that site.
• Text to diagram: what you typed goes to Koi's AI.
• Wireframe to code: a PNG of what you picked goes to Koi's AI.

Both AI requests count against your plan's Koi usage, and nothing of either is kept on our server. Mermaid to diagram is read on your Mac.

• No live collaboration and no sync: it's on one Mac.
• No iPhone or iPad app.
• The interface is in English, like the rest of Koi.

If you draw with a team in real time, Excalidraw, Miro and FigJam are built for that. We compared them in the best whiteboard apps for Mac.

The board is part of Koi 2.0. Pro is $20 a month, or $7 for a first week. Lifetime is paid once. There's no free plan or free trial. Step by step: how to use the board. Everything else that came in 2.0 is in what's new in Koi 2.0, and the plans are one click away.