An Excalidraw-style whiteboard on your Mac's desktop

Koi 2.0 has an endless board that works like Excalidraw, laid out the way Excalidraw lays it out, and drawn by the Mac app itself in Koi's look, not in a web page. Folded, it's a widget on your desktop wallpaper, under every window and on every Space, showing the board as you last left it.

1. Click the widget anywhere on it. It grows into a big focused window, one card springing between the two.
2. Draw. The tools sit along the top, the properties of what you picked down the left.
3. Press Esc, ⌘W or ⌘M, or click the red or yellow button top left, and it shrinks back onto the desktop. The green button fills the screen.

Board in the notch opens it too, from any app. The ⋯ in the widget's corner makes it small, medium or large, puts it back in its corner, or hides it from the desktop, and a drag moves it. Settings, Notch & tools, Board on the desktop turns the widget off; it's on to begin with. Step by step: how to use the board.

Like Miro, the board has a chat bar at the bottom: “Ask Koi to draw, change or explain the board”. Type or dictate into it, and Koi answers above the bar and draws on the board itself: a flowchart, a mind map, a table filled in, a step added after “Idea”. Each change is one undo. Its +, a drop or a paste attaches pictures and documents for it to work from.

On a call with the board in front, ask out loud and Koi draws the same way. Claude, Cursor or Codex can draw on it too, once you connect them to Koi.

Templates, top right, puts a starting board down in the middle of the view: for couples, a trip planner, system design, kanban, a weekly planner, a comparison table, a mind map, a flowchart, a mood board, and goals and habits. They're drawn by the app, so nothing is fetched.

If you know Excalidraw, you already know where everything is. The tools along the top carry the same letters:

• Hand, select, rectangle, diamond, ellipse, arrow, line, pen, text and eraser. Option brings back what the eraser marked.
• Sticky notes with today's date on them, on their own paper and ink.
• Tables (G) to type in, with a shaded header and zebra rows. Tab and Enter move between cells, and pasted rows fill them.
• A lock that keeps the tool picked after you draw.
• More: insert an image, stickers and icons, a laser pointer whose trail fades, a lasso, and a bucket that fills with the background in use.
• The pen draws smooth outlines, with pressure or even. Draw to shape (⇧X) turns a stroke into a shape, or every pen stroke as it's drawn.

Arrows hold on to anything but a line and follow it when it moves; hold Control while drawing to keep their ends free. Elbow arrows route at right angles out of the sides. Lines and arrows go a click at a time or in one drag, and a double click puts a line's points out to drag, add between or take away.

Pick something and its properties show down the left; pick nothing and they set what the tool draws next:

• Stroke and background: five colours each, or any from a spectrum.
• Stroke width, and solid, dashed or dotted.
• Sloppiness: architect, artist or cartoonist, a hand-drawn wobble that stays the same for each element.
• Sharp or round edges. Sharp, curved or elbow arrows, with heads at either end.
• Font: Excalifont, Nunito or Geist Mono, sizes S to XL, and how it's aligned.
• Opacity, layers, duplicate, delete and a link.

A right-click opens the menu for what's under the pointer: cut, copy, paste, copy as PNG or as text, copy and paste styles, group (⌘G) and ungroup, layers, flip, link, duplicate, lock and delete. On the board itself: paste, select all, zoom, insert, the background and unlock all.

Select with a click, shift-click, a marquee, the lasso or a ⌘-drag. Move, resize from eight grips and rotate. A double click writes inside a shape or a note.

• Drop or paste pictures, and put them in a frame: a Polaroid with a caption you write by clicking it, a photo booth square, a booth strip of several pictures, or taped down.
• Files dropped from Finder become cards that open on a double click.
• A library of stickers (the Mac's own colour emoji: hearts, love, travel, sweet things), line icons, and pieces of paper: torn kraft, crumpled cream, notebook and graph.
• The board's background: Koi's dots, plain or gridded dark, or kraft, crumpled, notebook or graph paper. White ink turns dark on paper and back.

• Frames (F) go round an area, carry what's inside, and take a name written on them.
• Web links become cards, with their title and picture fetched once from your Mac.
• Find on canvas (⌘F) opens a sidebar beside the library.
• A light, dark or Mac-matching theme for the board.
• Pan with the trackpad, a space-drag or the hand, with no edge in any direction. Zoom by pinch, ⌘-scroll or a mouse wheel, from a tenth of the size to thirty times.

Under Generate, Mermaid to diagram turns Mermaid code into a diagram, read on your Mac. Text to diagram and Wireframe to code use Koi's AI: Text to diagram sends what you typed, and Wireframe to code a PNG of what you picked, only when you ask. Both count against your plan's Koi usage, and nothing of either is kept on our server.

The main menu, top left, exports the board as a PNG, a PDF or an SVG wherever you pick, and copies it as a PNG. A right-click copies what you picked as a PNG, an SVG or its text. Wireframe to code's page copies, or saves as an HTML file.

Make as many boards as you like from the pill beside the main menu. Each one, and where you last looked, is a file of its own in Koi's data folder on your Mac, saved a moment after each change and when Koi quits, with their names in one list beside them. Pictures and files you put on them are copied there too. It isn't in your history, so Delete everything on this Mac leaves it.

Your boards are never uploaded. Like any window, Koi's AI sees a board on screen when your screen goes with a question. Stickers are the Mac's own emoji and the papers are drawn by the app, so nothing is fetched for them. A web link card is fetched once, straight from your Mac to that site; our server never sees it. A badge bottom right says so on the board too.

• It's on one Mac. There's no live collaboration and no sync.
• No iPhone or iPad app.
• The board's interface is in English, like the rest of Koi.
• It isn't sold on its own. It comes with Koi.

If you need to draw with other people in real time, Excalidraw, Miro, FigJam or tldraw do that. See the best whiteboard apps for Mac, the Excalidraw, Miro, FigJam and tldraw alternatives, and whether there's an Excalidraw desktop app. Why we built it: a board on your desktop.

Yes. The board comes with Koi on every plan, along with unlimited dictation and recorded calls: Pro, at $20 a month or $7 for a first week, or Lifetime, paid once: $199. There's no free plan and no free trial.

Drawing on the board runs on your Mac. The chat bar, Text to diagram and Wireframe to code use Koi's AI, and count against your plan's Koi. See the plans.