MindooDB Blog

Product updates and engineering notes

Selected articles about MindooDB, Haven, the App SDK, and the open-source sample apps built on top.

RSS Feed

  • A faster sync, live updates, and a workspace you can recover from a sheet of paper

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    The quieter half of this summer's work is under the hood. Haven's sync got a new version that moves less data and puts less load on the server, our servers can now nudge your devices the instant new data arrives so collaboration feels immediate, and the Sync page can push your changes out the moment you make them. And there is a lovely bit of paranoia-as-a-feature: a printable recovery sheet, a page of redundant QR codes protected by a security question, that can rebuild your whole workspace even if every device is gone - scan the codes, sync, and you're back.

  • Mindoo Teacher's Desk - a teacher's whole working day, on data that stays private

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    Mindoo Teacher's Desk is our new commercial app for teachers, and the biggest thing we have built on Haven so far. It brings a teacher's whole day into one place - timetable, calendar, lesson planning and delivery, classes and learners, grades, seating plans, materials, parent conversations, tasks and notes - and because it runs on MindooDB, the sensitive data it holds (children's names, grades, observations) is encrypted so the server operator can never read it, syncs across all your devices, and keeps working offline. It ships in eight languages, installs from the Haven App Store in one click with a demo data set to explore, and its Word-document editing now works on phones and tablets thanks to a document editor we forked and are extending ourselves.

  • Mindoo TeamSketchbook - collaborative drawing for tablets and pens, free and open source

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    Mindoo TeamSketchbook is a new open-source sample app for MindooDB Haven: a multi-page sketchbook you draw in by hand, made for tablets with a pen like the Apple Pencil or Samsung S-Pen, but happy with a mouse or your finger too. Pen, marker and eraser, a choice of paper - blank, squared, lined, dotted, music staves and more - and portrait or landscape per page. Because it is built on MindooDB, two people can draw in the same sketchbook on different devices and their strokes merge together on the next sync, with a full revision history so you can flip back to any earlier version of a drawing.

  • The Haven App Store - one click from empty workspace to working app

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    Haven's Applications page now opens a built-in App Store. Every app is presented like an app on your phone - a proper icon, screenshots, and a description - and installing one is a single click: pick the app, choose which tenant should hold its data, and it opens ready to use. It is the same catalogue behind our sample apps like Mindoo Vega, TeamEdit, TeamGrid, TeamSketchbook and Teacher's Desk, and organisations can even host their own catalogue of internal apps. Haven itself now speaks eight languages, so more teams get all of this in their own.

  • Search everything in Haven - including the text on the paper on your desk

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    Haven now has real full-text search: type a word and find it inside long notes, e-mails, Word documents and even the files attached to them. It is built and kept up to date right on your device, so it works offline and the server never sees what you searched for. Better still, Haven can read the text inside scanned images and photos of paper documents with built-in OCR, store that recognised text once, and sync it everywhere - so a snapshot of a handwritten-looking invoice becomes findable on every device. And a new Quick-Scan button in the sidebar turns your camera into a document scanner in one tap.

  • Instant answers across thousands of documents - without opening a single one

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    Searching, filtering, sorting and grouping your data used to mean unlocking and reading every document first - slow, and a real problem when everything is encrypted. Haven now keeps a small, always-up-to-date summary of the searchable bits of every document, so questions like 'all open tasks owned by Alice, newest first' are answered instantly, in memory, without ever unlocking the full documents. The same summary powers live lists that update themselves as data arrives, groupings with running totals, and views that combine data across several databases - even across the boundary into a partner company's tenant - while every tenant only ever exposes what it could already read.

  • Governance for teams - access control, policies and admin-blind keys in Haven Enterprise

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    MindooDB has always protected your data by encryption - only people who hold the right key can read it. The new governance layer in Haven Enterprise (beta) adds the other half organisations need: rules about who may create, change or delete what, recorded in the same tamper-evident, append-only history as the data itself. Because every change is stamped with a trusted date the moment it reaches the server, those rules hold even when people work offline on devices whose clocks can't be taken at face value - and you can look back and answer 'who was allowed to do what, and when?' long after the fact. Haven Enterprise is in beta and is unlocked with a license key; Haven Community stays the free, keyless base everyone already knows.

  • A busy summer for MindooDB and Haven - everything new since May

    Karsten Lehmann · 11.07.2026

    A lot has happened since our last post at the end of May. Haven got a governance layer for organisations, instant search over encrypted data, full-text search with built-in text recognition for scanned paper, a one-click App Store, a new open-source drawing app, our most complete app yet in Mindoo Teacher's Desk, and a leaner, more real-time sync with a paper-based recovery kit. Here is the whole picture in one place, with a link to the deep dive on each.

  • Mindoo TeamEdit update - collaborative Word/.docx editing on MindooDB Haven

    Karsten Lehmann · 25.05.2026

    Mindoo TeamEdit gains a Word/.docx editing mode alongside the existing collaborative Markdown editor. Two people can now open the same .docx file in two TeamEdit instances, type into the same paragraph, drop in images, reshape a table, accept tracked changes, leave threaded comments - and watch the merged result appear on both screens through MindooDB's Automerge sync, with only the actually changed spans on the wire. TeamEdit also handles multiple documents open at once - a Window menu lists every open Markdown brief and Word memo and lets you flip between them. Under the hood the document is mapped to Automerge's rich text format (formatting spans plus block markers) on top of the EigenPal docx-editor we picked after evaluating SyncFusion and Apryse - chosen for its Apache 2.0 license, OOXML round-trip fidelity, and ProseMirror foundation that lets us plug in MindooDB's collaborative storage cleanly.

  • Mindoo TeamGrid update - virtual view sheets, 280 Excel formulas, charts and templates in MindooDB Haven

    Karsten Lehmann · 21.05.2026

    Four days after the initial release we are shipping a big round of updates to Mindoo TeamGrid, the open source collaborative spreadsheet for MindooDB Haven. The headline feature is Virtual View Sheets - pick any virtual view configured in Haven (including views that combine your private data with work data and with data from a partner company's tenant) and drop it into your workbook as a normal worksheet that Excel formulas, charts and XLSX export can read. Alongside it: a much larger formula engine with 280 Excel-compatible functions courtesy of fast-formula-parser, the four chart types Excel users actually use day to day (Column, Bar, Line, Pie), spreadsheet templates with File / New from template..., hidden rows and columns that survive an Excel round trip, automatic cell type detection from typed content, and a selection and keyboard model much closer to what people expect from Excel. And all of it still merges across two laptops, two devices, and four tabs the same way it did on day one.

  • How MindooDB stores attachments - encrypted chunks, append-only history, and on-the-fly MP4 streaming in Haven

    Karsten Lehmann · 19.05.2026

    Attachments in MindooDB are not stored as one blob hanging off a document. Each file is a chain of small encrypted chunks (256 KB by default, encrypted with the document's own key), and each chunk points back at its predecessor. The document only references the *last* chunk - which turns growing a file into appending one chunk, makes earlier document revisions automatically see only the bytes that existed then, and reduces moving or duplicating a large attachment between documents to copying a tiny JSON entry. Chunks are deduplicated by a hash of their encrypted bytes, so the same file inside one MindooDB database occupies storage once and syncs once. On top of all that, Haven streams long media attachments straight from those decrypted chunks - and for older MP4 files that browsers refuse to stream, Haven rebuilds them on the fly into a streamable shape with a lazy-loaded mp4box.js pipeline.

  • Document scanning in MindooDB Haven - turn any paper into an attachment with one button

    Karsten Lehmann · 18.05.2026

    Hold a phone over a piece of paper, press one button, and it lands inside the document you are working on - cropped, deskewed, rotated, and saved as a clean PDF or image. The new Scan document feature in MindooDB Haven is built on a custom, size-optimized OpenCV WebAssembly build that finds the page corners automatically and lets you nudge them by hand. Pick A4, Letter, a square or just keep the original aspect ratio, rotate in 90-degree steps, then Add to document - where it becomes a regular MindooDoc attachment - or, on iOS, iPadOS and desktop Safari, press Share file to hand the scan straight to the system Share Sheet without any upload at all. Available out of the box to every MindooDB app via the MindooDB App SDK.

  • Application time travel in MindooDB Haven - launch any app as it was at any moment in time

    Karsten Lehmann · 17.05.2026

    MindooDB Haven application registrations now carry an optional time travel date. Set it, launch the app, and every mapped database, every virtual view, every document and every attachment is served as it would have looked at that exact moment - read-only, all the way down to the historical attachment bytes. Duplicate the registration, pin two copies to two different dates, switch the runtime mode to 'Open in new window', and compare last sprint's plan against today's plan in two browser windows side by side. Audit, retrospective, regression debugging, and historical reporting - rendered in the real application UI, backed by MindooDB's signed, blockchain-style change history. Available out of the box for every MindooDB app running in Haven.

  • Mindoo TeamGrid - free collaborative spreadsheet editor for MindooDB Haven

    Karsten Lehmann · 17.05.2026

    Mindoo TeamGrid is a new open source sample app for MindooDB Haven that demonstrates how a spreadsheet workbook can be collaboratively edited across devices, with stable IDs that keep formulas valid through concurrent row and column changes, Excel import and export via file and clipboard, and a new granular JSON patch API in the MindooDB App SDK.

  • Mindoo TeamEdit - free collaborative markdown editor for MindooDB Haven

    Karsten Lehmann · 30.04.2026

    Mindoo TeamEdit is a new sample app for MindooDB Haven that demonstrates collaborative markdown editing built on the new text edit API in the MindooDB App SDK, alongside custom document IDs, undelete, and historical attachment access.

  • Haven - a peaceful, encrypted workspace built on MindooDB

    Karsten Lehmann · 26.04.2026

    Haven brings notes, files, apps, and data into one offline-ready team workspace, built on MindooDB so collaboration stays encrypted and under your control.