How to use IdeaM.

Toolbar → Import menu → Research & Import

Import Anything is the heart of IdeaM. Pull in content from many sources at once — YouTube videos, PDFs, web pages, audio, images, and documents — and IdeaM reads them and synthesizes everything into one unified, structured outline. You can merge new sources into your current outline, or create a fresh one.

1. 1Open the Import menu (the bold down-arrow in the toolbar) and choose Research & Import.
2. 2Add your sources — paste YouTube or web links, drop in PDFs and documents, upload or record audio.
3. 3Choose whether to create a new outline or merge into the current one.
4. 4Click Import — IdeaM reads everything and builds one structured outline from all of it.

• YouTube videos — paste any URL; the transcript is extracted automatically and the video title becomes the default name.
• Audio & conversation — paste a transcript, upload an audio file, or record live; speaker diarization identifies who said what.
• Documents — PDF, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and images with OCR text extraction.
• Web pages, plain text and notes, existing outline files, and video files (audio extracted).

Toolbar → AI menu → Capture from image

Turn any image into a structured branch of your outline — a whiteboard photo, a sticky-note brainstorm, a hand-drawn mind map, a screenshot of slides or a textbook page. On iPhone and iPad you can take the photo right from the dialog.

1. 1Open the AI menu and choose Capture from image, then pick (or take) a photo.
2. 2Optionally add a short hint about what the image shows.
3. 3Review the proposed structure in the preview — rename or remove items inline before anything lands.
4. 4Click Add and the new branch appears under your selected item. Undo reverses the whole capture in one step.

Toolbar → Import menu → Import Email (turn on Email tools in Settings first)

Bring an email — a single message or a whole thread — into IdeaM as a clean, structured outline. Instead of a wall of quoted text, the AI distills it into Summary, Key Points, Decisions, and Action Items.

Email tools are off by default. Turn them on in Settings → Professional Customization, then choose Import Email from the Import menu.

1. 1Open the Import menu and choose Import Email.
2. 2Paste the email or the entire thread into the box — and/or drop a .eml file.
3. 3Choose where it goes: create a new outline (the default), add to the current outline, or save into your Second Brain.
4. 4Click Import. Suspected junk (promos, spam, newsletters) is filed into a clearly-labeled “Filtered — likely junk” branch — never deleted — so you can rescue anything it got wrong.

Toolbar → Import menu → Research & Import

Import multiple sources simultaneously and IdeaM does the research and the synthesis — finding connections across everything and producing one coherent, structured outline of what matters.

When you create a new outline (rather than merging), the root gets an AI-generated introduction that summarizes everything below it, and chapter nodes get short introductions that preview their children — no empty headers. Node names stay concise (2–6 words) while the detail lives in each node’s content.

The merge behavior means you can keep building knowledge on a topic from many sources over time. If a merge produces bad results, the Unmerge button restores your outline to its exact pre-merge state.

1. 1Open the Import menu → Research & Import and add several sources on your topic at once.
2. 2Choose Create new outline for a fresh synthesis, or Merge to build on an outline you already have.
3. 3Review the result — one coherent outline with concise headings and the detail inside each item.
4. 4If a merge disappoints, click Unmerge to restore the outline to its exact pre-merge state.

Right-click an item → Refresh from Web

Documents go stale; your outlines don’t have to. Refresh from Web checks an item and everything under it against the latest information on the live web and proposes updates — with citations. Nothing is applied until you approve it.

1. 1Right-click the item you want to bring up to date (or the top of the outline for the whole thing) and choose Refresh from Web.
2. 2Choose Merge & augment — keep what’s accurate, fix what’s outdated, fold in what’s new — or a full regenerate.
3. 3Review every proposed change side by side and accept or reject each one. Items you edited by hand are automatically protected.
4. 4Apply. Each refreshed item keeps a Sources chip with its citations, and that provenance travels with the outline.

Toolbar → 🧠 Second Brain menu, or AI menu → Ask Your Outlines

Your Second Brain is an always-present outline where you accumulate everything you want to remember — notes, research, ideas, articles, images, anything. It becomes a private, searchable library you can question in your own words.

Save any node (and everything under it) with a right-click → “Save to Second Brain”. Then query it two ways: a free, instant, offline keyword Search that filters your saves as you type, or Ask Second Brain, which sends your question to the AI and writes an answer across your saved content.

1. 1Save anything worth keeping: right-click an item → Save to Second Brain (or press Cmd+Shift+B).
2. 2To ask, open the 🧠 Second Brain menu → Ask Second Brain — or the AI menu → Ask Your Outlines.
3. 3Pick the scope — this outline, all outlines, or just your Second Brain — and ask in your own words.
4. 4The answer streams in, referencing the sections it drew from. For a free instant lookup instead, use Search Second Brain — a plain keyword filter, no AI.

• Ask Your Outlines has three modes: the current outline, all your outlines at once, or just your Second Brain.
• Answers stream in word-by-word, and reference the specific sections they came from.
• Everything is based only on your own content — it never makes things up from outside your outlines.

Toolbar → 🧠 Second Brain menu → Quick Capture (Cmd+Shift+I)

A thought worth keeping shouldn’t wait for you to find the right outline. Quick Capture opens a small box from anywhere — type or paste, press Enter, and it lands in your Second Brain’s Inbox. The AI suggests a few topical tags automatically, and the free, instant, offline Search filters everything you’ve saved as you type — no AI, no internet, no cost.

1. 1Open the Second Brain menu (the brain icon in the toolbar) and choose Quick Capture — or press Cmd+Shift+I.
2. 2Type or paste the thought and press Enter. It lands in the 📥 Inbox at the top of your Second Brain, auto-tagged.
3. 3Find it later with Search Second Brain — the free, instant keyword search across everything you’ve saved — or open the Dashboard to see recent saves, top tags, and a revisit pile of older entries.

Toolbar → AI menu — plus the AI button for plain-English commands

The everyday moves that keep an idea growing. Generate a whole sub-outline from any topic, have the AI write or expand a section’s content, or reformat an item by describing the format you want in plain words. And the AI command bar acts on your outline conversationally — say “add an item called Budget” and it happens, always through a preview you approve first.

1. 1Generate: select an item, open the AI menu → Generate Suboutline from Topic — the topic is pre-filled from the item’s name.
2. 2Write & expand: use the Expand button in the content toolbar to write, expand, or summarize the current item’s content.
3. 3Reformat: AI menu → Reformat with AI — describe the format (“turn into a table,” “make each line a heading”) and approve the before/after preview.
4. 4Command: click the AI button in the toolbar and ask in plain English — it answers questions and makes changes to your outline, and every edit waits for your approval.

AI menu → Ask Your Outlines — the chip row under the question field

Some of the most useful prompt techniques get passed around as insider tricks — “be brutally honest with me,” “red-team this,” “explain it like I’m ten,” “give me the 20% that matters.” There is no good reason those should stay folklore, so IdeaM puts them on buttons. A row of chips labelled “How should AI answer?” sits under the question field; tap one, or combine two or three.

Your words lead. The style you pick is added underneath your request as guidance — IdeaM never rewrites what you typed. And there are no sticky surprises: your picks stay visibly lit for that conversation, reset next time you open it, and a Clear link switches everything off at once.

Answer Styles are prompt text only, so they add no cost and no separate allowance, and they work the same on IdeaM’s on-device AI as in the cloud.

1. 1Open the AI menu and choose Ask Your Outlines.
2. 2Under the question field, tap the styles you want from the “How should AI answer?” row — two or three combine well.
3. 3If you pick Expert View, type whose way of thinking you want in the small field that appears.
4. 4Type your question as you normally would and send it. The answer comes back in the styles you chose.
5. 5Tap a chip again, or click Clear, to switch styles off.

• Blunt Truth — straight talk, with no flattery and no agreeing just to please you.
• Explain Simply — plain words and analogies, as if explaining to a ten-year-old.
• Poke Holes — attacks the reasoning and names the weak points and missing evidence.
• What Matters — the few things that drive the result, plus an explicit list of what to ignore.
• Question Me — asks you pointed questions instead of answering, to sharpen your own thinking.
• Check Assumptions — surfaces the beliefs baked into your thinking that may be worth dropping.
• Timeless Advice — principles that have held up for decades rather than what is currently trendy.
• Sound Human — writes like a person instead of generic AI prose.
• Expert View — answers from a named expert’s way of thinking; a small field appears so you can type whose. It is a perspective, not an impersonation: IdeaM will not write in a real person’s voice, present text as authored by them, or invent quotes.
• Looking Back — answers as your future self, with hindsight about what will have mattered.

Toolbar → AI menu → Summarize outline

Distill a whole outline down to its key points — a short, well-organized gist instead of every bullet. Perfect when a detailed capture has grown so many bullets that the main point gets buried.

1. 1Open the AI menu → Summarize outline.
2. 2Pick how short you want it: Standard gist (key points with a little structure) or Brief (maximum compression).
3. 3Choose what to do with the result — Save as a new outline (the safe default, leaving your original untouched) or replace the current outline in place.
4. 4Review the preview (it shows how much it condensed), then create the summary.

Toolbar → AI menu → Transform outline with AI

Change an outline’s structure, length, or style on demand by describing what should change in plain English. Where Reformat rewrites the contents of one node, Reshape changes the shape of the outline itself — adding, removing, renaming, merging, splitting, or moving nodes.

1. 1Open the AI menu → Transform outline with AI. With a node selected it works on that branch; with nothing selected, the whole outline.
2. 2Type how you want it changed — e.g. “reorganize alphabetically,” “merge small chapters into a Misc chapter,” “promote leaf nodes about X to top-level chapters.”
3. 3Click Preview. A Before/After tree shows color-coded changes (added, removed, renamed, moved) and a one-line count.
4. 4Click Apply to commit, tweak your instruction, or cancel. An auto-snapshot is written first, and Cmd+Z undoes it.

Settings → Professional Customization → Your Voice

Teach IdeaM how you write, then have it generate work that sounds like you instead of like generic AI. This is strictly your own voice — it never imitates anyone else. Your Voice is off by default; turn it on in Settings.

1. 1Paste a few things you’ve written — posts, emails, notes. A few hundred words is plenty. Or pull a sample straight from your Second Brain.
2. 2Click “Learn my voice.” The AI writes a short, plain-English voice profile describing your tone, formality, sentence rhythm, favorite words, and any emoji or hashtag habits.
3. 3The profile appears in an editable box, so you can see exactly what was learned and tweak it. Add more samples and regenerate anytime.
4. 4In the output wizards (Export Email, Summarize, social posts and more), tick “In my voice” and the result is written in your style.

Toolbar → AI menu → Show Me…

Tell your outline what you want to see — “show me unfinished design work” — and it folds down to just the matching items. Everything else is compressed out of the way, never hidden or deleted, so you’re always looking at your real outline, just focused.

The magic is that the filter is visible: your request becomes editable condition rows you can inspect, adjust, or build entirely by hand — the whole feature works without AI. It recreates a beloved search-shaping feature from the founder’s 1988 outliner.

1. 1Open the AI menu in the toolbar and choose Show Me…
2. 2Type (or dictate) what you want to see, or build the conditions by hand — either way, the filter appears as visible, editable rows.
3. 3The outline folds to the matches as you refine. Tweak a row, and the view updates instantly.
4. 4Save the result as a named view. Saved views are living: reopen one later and it re-applies to your outline as it stands today, new matches included.

Right-click any item → Board View

See any section of your outline as a board: its sub-sections become columns, and their items become cards you can drag between them. The board is a live projection of your outline — not a copy — so dragging a card to another column genuinely moves that item to the new section.

1. 1Right-click the section you want to see as a board and choose Board View.
2. 2Each sub-section appears as a column; the items inside become cards showing their name, color, and tags.
3. 3Drag a card to another column to move it there in the outline; drop it above or below another card to set its position.
4. 4Made a move you regret? Undo (Cmd+Z) brings it right back. Board View is free, local, and uses no AI.

Settings → Professional Customization → Capabilities → Project Management

Turn any outline into a working plan: task items with statuses, priorities, due dates, and prerequisites — plus clear warnings when a task is blocked, and five instant reports. It’s opt-in and off by default: flip it on and the project features appear everywhere; flip it off and they hide again without ever deleting your data.

1. 1Turn it on in Settings → Professional Customization → Capabilities.
2. 2Right-click any item → Project → Set Status: Not started, In progress, Done, or Blocked. Or create typed Task items — with built-in Priority and Due date fields — from the new-item menu.
3. 3Add prerequisites with Project → Set Prerequisite. A task that depends on unfinished work shows a clear “Blocked by” warning until its prerequisites are done.
4. 4Run the five instant reports from the Wizards gallery — What’s Blocking Me, In Progress, Waiting / Blocked, Completed, and Status Overview. They’re pure logic: no AI, no cost, and they never modify a task.

Toolbar: Search, Zoom In, and the tag filter — plus the right-click menu

The power basics that keep a big outline navigable — all free, all local.

• Search reshapes, never hides: the outline unfolds to show every match with the path leading to it, and everything else folds out of the way. One click on Expand All restores the full view.
• Zoom In focuses one branch and tucks everything outside it away, with a breadcrumb to step back out.
• Filter by tag narrows the outline to just the items carrying the tags you pick.
• Multi-select — Cmd/Ctrl+Click, Shift+Click for a range, long-press on iPhone and iPad — for bulk moves, colors, tags, and deletes.
• Link one outline to another: a link item jumps straight to the target outline, which also nests under it in the sidebar.
• Dictation: a mic button lives wherever you can type, and in Settings you can have it start listening automatically when a dialog opens.

Toolbar → AI menu → Wizards

Wizards are one-click recipes that run a whole workflow end to end — no buttons to babysit. Four are live today: Automatic Book (a short guided dialogue — topic, depth, tone, audience — that delivers a full outline with AI-written sections as a brand-new outline), Website Building, Podcast, and YouTube Video.

Five more appear in the gallery as previews, clearly marked coming soon: Research Digest, Study Guide, Screenplay, Invention / Patent, and Explain Anything.

1. 1Open the AI menu in the toolbar and choose Wizards.
2. 2Pick a Wizard from the gallery.
3. 3Answer a few friendly questions that shape the result — or just press Run for smart defaults.
4. 4The Wizard runs the whole recipe and hands you the finished outline, website, podcast, or video.

Right-click a node → Generate Podcast

Turn a chapter into a narrated audio episode in real voices.

Your podcast is a two-host conversation, not a monotone read-through — and it starts playing the moment it’s ready.

1. 1Right-click any node and choose Generate Podcast.
2. 2Configure it: style (Two-Host Discussion, Single Narrator, Interview, or Debate), voices, length (Brief, Standard, or Detailed), and quality.
3. 3Click Generate — the AI writes the script and synthesizes the audio.
4. 4Preview in the built-in player and read along with the script viewer, then save the MP3.

• Your podcast always records and is never silent. With your own OpenAI key you get natural AI voices; without one, it still records using your Mac’s built-in voices (free, offline, no key).
• On iPhone and iPad, keyless users get an audible two-voice podcast synthesized right on the device.

Desktop app → Export menu → Generate Video

Turn a chapter into a finished, branded narrated slideshow video — great for posting to YouTube, sharing in a class, or dropping into a presentation. The video is built right on your Mac, so nothing is uploaded to a server.

1. 1On the Mac app, select the chapter you want, open the Export menu (the bold up-arrow), and choose Generate Video.
2. 2Style it: your logo, an accent color, a dark or light theme, a narrator voice, slide visuals, and how deep to go.
3. 3Click Generate — a live progress bar tracks the slides rendering and the video stitching together.
4. 4The finished MP4 lands in Documents → IdeaM Videos, ready to post. Ten videos are free to try; Pro removes the small watermark and the limit.

• Customize the look: your own logo on every slide, an accent color, a dark or light theme, and slide visuals (auto-drawn mind maps, free public-domain photos, and moving video clips).
• Choose a narrator voice and how deep the video goes (Overview, Standard, Deep, or the full outline).
• It always narrates — with your OpenAI key you get natural AI voices; without one it uses your Mac’s built-in voice.
• A live progress bar shows exactly where the render is up to; the finished MP4 lands in your Documents · IdeaM Videos folder.

Generate Video dialog → Scene style → Cinematic AI video (your Google key)

Take your videos beyond designed slides: IdeaM can render real AI-generated footage for every scene, matched to what that part of your outline is about. It runs on your own Google key, pay-as-you-go — typically about $1 to $2 per scene, billed by Google directly to you, estimates only — and IdeaM shows you the estimated total and asks before anything is generated.

• Scenes you haven’t changed are cached — regenerate the video later and untouched scenes are reused, never billed again.
• If a scene ever fails to generate, it falls back to the designed-slide look for that scene, so your video always finishes.
• No Google key on file? The option simply isn’t in play — designed slides remain the free default.

Generate Video dialog → Music

Add a soft, themed instrumental under your video’s narration. The music automatically ducks beneath the voice, so the narration always stays clear. It’s generated on your own Google key — typically about 5 to 10 cents per video, billed by Google directly to you, estimates only — and the cost is included in the ask-first estimate before your video renders. A music bed you’ve already generated is reused on updates, not billed again.

Generate Podcast / Generate Video — appears when you’ve made this one before

Regenerating a podcast or video you’ve made before? IdeaM notices — “You’ve made this before — 2 of 4 changed” — and offers Update Changed next to Start Fresh. Update Changed rebuilds only the sections or scenes whose outline content you actually edited, and reuses the rest: faster, and cheaper on paid voices and AI-generated scenes. Start Fresh honestly rebuilds everything, whenever that’s what you want.

Desktop app → Export menu → Slide Deck

Turn an outline into a branded slide deck — a real .pptx file that opens in both PowerPoint and Keynote (and Google Slides). Each chapter becomes a slide with a clear title and tidy bullets, styled with your brand look, so you can present straight away or fine-tune it in the app you already use.

When a section contains numbers — a small table or a list of figures — IdeaM automatically turns them into a clean chart on the slide, so your data shows up as a visual instead of a wall of digits.

1. 1Open the Export menu and choose Slide Deck.
2. 2Pick your brand look — logo, accent color, light or dark theme — and how deep the deck should go.
3. 3Click Generate. Chapters become slides; numbers become charts.
4. 4Open the finished .pptx in PowerPoint, Keynote, or Google Slides and present or fine-tune.

• Opens natively in PowerPoint, Keynote, and Google Slides — no conversion, no lock-in.
• Your logo, accent color, and a light or dark theme on every slide.
• Numeric data is auto-charted; the rest becomes clean titles and bullets.
• Pick how deep the deck goes, then save the .pptx and present or edit it anywhere.

Content toolbar → Image → Mind Map or Flowchart

Turn any item’s structure into a visual — a mind map or a flowchart drawn directly from your outline. It’s free and instant: the drawing is generated from your structure, no AI involved, and it never counts against anything.

1. 1Select the item whose structure you want to see.
2. 2In the content toolbar, choose Image → Mind Map or Flowchart.
3. 3The visual is drawn from your outline and inserted into the content — free, no AI used.

Toolbar → AI menu → Translate this section

Produce your work in 21 languages. Translate any node and its descendants into another language, with the same preview-and-approve safety as the other AI transforms. Formatting (headings, lists, bold, links) is preserved, and proper nouns and code stay as-is.

1. 1Select the node you want to translate (or the top of the outline for the whole thing).
2. 2Open the AI menu → Translate this section and pick a target language.
3. 3Click Translate & preview — each node’s translation is shown side-by-side with the original.
4. 4Reject any you don’t want, then apply. Nodes you edited by hand are auto-skipped so translation never clobbers your edits.

Right-click a branch → Export Email (turn on Email tools in Settings first)

Turn any branch of your outline into a ready-to-send email. Sketch your thoughts as an outline, then let the AI shape them into a real message with a subject line and a readable body — greeting, flowing sentences, tidy bullets where they help, and a sign-off. IdeaM never sends email for you and never touches your inbox — you always review and hit send yourself.

1. 1Pick a tone — Friendly professional, Formal, or Casual — and optionally add a one-line instruction like “keep it short.”
2. 2Click Draft email. You get an editable preview — tweak the subject and body freely.
3. 3Send it four ways, no login needed: Open in Gmail, Open in Mail, Copy email, or Download a .eml file.

Right-click a branch → Share to Social (turn on Social export in Settings first)

Turn one idea into ready-to-post content for X, Instagram (branded square carousels), LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, and YouTube — each written to fit that network, and in your voice if Your Voice is on. IdeaM never posts anything for you and never connects to your accounts; you always review and post yourself.

1. 1Turn on Social export once in Settings → Professional Customization.
2. 2Right-click the branch you want to share → Share to Social, then pick the platform and format.
3. 3Tick “In my voice” if you’ve taught IdeaM your voice. The draft appears in an editable preview with live character counts.
4. 4Post it yourself: copy, download, or use the one-click compose hand-off where the platform supports it. IdeaM never posts for you.

• X — a thread (each post within 280 characters) or a single post.
• Instagram — branded 1080×1080 carousel images that match your video slides, plus a caption with hashtags.
• LinkedIn, Facebook, Threads, and Bluesky — each a platform-appropriate post; Threads and Bluesky offer a one-click hand-off to their compose window.
• YouTube — a publish package (title options, description with chapter timestamps, tags, and a thumbnail idea) that pairs with Make a Video.

Export menu → Share Suboutline as… → Website

Turn an outline into a polished, multi-page website. Pick from 8 professional templates — Marketing, Informational, Documentation, Portfolio, Event, Educational, Blog, and Personal — and your structure becomes the site’s pages and navigation.

1. 1Select the branch you want to publish (or the top of the outline for all of it).
2. 2Open the Export menu (the bold up-arrow in the toolbar) and choose Share Suboutline as… → Website.
3. 3Pick a template and customize the look.
4. 4IdeaM generates the finished site, ready to view and share. Prefer one click? The Website Building Wizard runs the whole recipe for you.

Export menu → Share Link

Publish any outline — or just a branch — as a clean, read-only web page on our own domain, and send the link to anyone. No login is needed to view it, and the page is safety-sandboxed to protect your readers.

1. 1Open the Export menu and choose Share Link.
2. 2Pick a page style — Showcase, Overview, or Guide — and publish. You get a link on our domain to copy and send.
3. 3The page is a snapshot: press Update anytime to re-publish the latest version to the same link.
4. 4Unpublish whenever you like — the page immediately stops showing your content. A Manage shared links list shows everything you’ve published.

Toolbar → Export (the bold up-arrow)

Your work leaves IdeaM in whatever shape the job needs — 23 formats, each one checked so nothing is silently lost on the way out. Documents (PDF, Word, Markdown, HTML, LaTeX), an e-book (ePub), slides, outliner formats (OPML, Obsidian, Notion, Workflowy, OmniOutliner, and more), mind-map formats, and data (CSV, JSON, XML, YAML). You’re never locked in.

The document formats are built like documents, not dumps: Word exports open with a cover page, real heading styles, and a navigable table of contents; ePub opens in your e-reader with a cover and chapters you can jump between.

1. 1Click Export — the bold up-arrow in the toolbar. (Its partner, the bold down-arrow, is Import.)
2. 2Choose Export Current Outline for the whole thing, or right-click any item → Share Suboutline As… for just a branch.
3. 3Pick your format and save. Outliner formats import cleanly into their target apps — Obsidian exports carry wiki-links, and OPML opens in nearly any outliner.

Mac app → Export menu → PDF

Export any outline as a polished PDF. On the Mac app it’s a real document, not a text dump: a title page, a table of contents, and an index — built automatically from your structure. Big outlines export fast, you can cancel anytime, and the finished PDF opens for you immediately.

1. 1Open the Export menu on the Mac app and choose PDF — or right-click an item → Share Suboutline As… → PDF for just a branch.
2. 2The document is built from your structure, with the title page, table of contents, and index generated automatically.
3. 3The finished PDF opens for you immediately, ready to share.

When you ask AI to change your outline — trim it, reorganize it, rewrite a section — IdeaM never just does it. Instead you see the proposal in place: deletions struck through, additions as pending items, rewrites shown before-and-after. Bulk operations list every affected item with its own checkbox. Approve it all, cherry-pick, or discard — and even after approving, Undo brings everything back.

Connect an assistant like Claude Desktop and it can read and search your outlines to answer questions and do research with your own material. It cannot edit your files — it can only propose changes, which appear in IdeaM for your approval like any other Proposed Change. Your outlines stay untouched until you say otherwise.

Assistant connections are in early access — the capability is real and working, and setup is being opened up gradually. Today it is a one-time, hands-on setup on your Mac.

1. 1Set it up once: IdeaM provides a small connector that you add to your assistant’s configuration — for Claude Desktop, that’s one short entry in its settings file pointing at the connector — then restart the assistant.
2. 2The assistant can now list, read, and search your outlines directly. Ask it “list my outlines” or “search my notes about marketing.”
3. 3When it wants to change something, the change is recorded as a suggestion — never applied. A green dot appears on IdeaM’s Import button, and Import → Suggestions lists each proposal in plain English.
4. 4Review each suggestion with the same approve-before-apply preview as the app’s own AI. Nothing changes unless you approve it, and Undo works afterward.

Toolbar → shield button (Backup & Restore) — plus automatic layers that are always on

Your outline data is treated as precious, with layered protection. One Undo (Cmd+Z) reverses anything — text edits, moves, AI transforms, pastes, imports. An automatic snapshot is written before every AI transform and every restore. AI transforms save their result as a new outline by default, leaving the original untouched. And the desktop app keeps timestamped automatic backups — each one verified by reading it back after it’s written, with a loud warning if a backup ever fails.

1. 1Open Backup & Restore from the shield button in the toolbar to take a labeled snapshot, or to restore any previous one — every snapshot is listed newest-first with a preview.
2. 2Automatic snapshots fire on their own before AI transforms, so a result you don’t like is one restore (or one Undo) away.
3. 3Prefer never touching the original? Transforms default to “Save as new outline” — the result appears nested under the original with a small fork badge, and the original stays exactly as it was.

Settings → AI Provider, and Settings → Data & Privacy

Your thinking stays yours. IdeaM stores all your data locally on your device — your outlines are never uploaded for storage, and data is only sent to an AI service when you explicitly invoke an AI feature.

Run AI entirely on your own machine with local AI (Ollama / Google Gemma) — no API key, no cost, works offline. Or bring your own key for premium cloud models. Either way, you choose, and you can toggle AI data processing on or off anytime.

IdeaM runs natively on Mac, iPhone, and iPad, and instantly in any modern web browser — nothing to install. Your work goes with you.

The interface adapts to each device: full keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus on desktop, and touch-friendly tap-again, swipe, and long-press equivalents on iPhone and iPad.

Automatic — plus Toolbar → AI menu → AI Activity

Nothing expensive ever runs by surprise. Before any AI operation that could cost real money — premium voices, cinematic video scenes, AI music — IdeaM tells you who pays (your key, billed by your provider, or your plan) and what it typically costs, with honest “typically…” estimates, and waits for your yes.

And every AI operation you run is recorded in a private usage ledger on your own device — what ran, when, and which provider handled it, for your eyes only. Open it anytime from the AI menu → AI Activity. Nothing about it leaves your machine, and no prompt or content text is ever recorded — just the activity itself.

Every AI draft of a factual output runs through an automatic quality check before you send or publish it — always on, nothing to switch on. Right after the AI writes an email draft, a social post, a summary, or an imported-email outline, a second pass re-reads it against the source it came from and looks for claims the source doesn’t actually support (invented names, numbers, dates, quotes, or facts).

If it spots any, it flags them right in the preview under a “Please review these” note, and can offer a corrected version you can accept or ignore. It never rewrites your draft silently — the final review is always yours. The check runs on the free on-device AI, so it costs nothing and never uses your monthly generations.

A planned capability, not yet available: unify your email and your physical mail into one AI-organized inbox — so everything that comes to you lands in a single, structured place that IdeaM helps you triage. This is in development; the rest of the guide describes what ships in IdeaM today.