Arguing with the explanation
1.2 · September 21, 2026
Every paragraph now has a second marker: the slide does not say this. You press it, it reads the slide again, and if you were right it rewrites the paragraph in front of you. And from here on, new versions install themselves.
New
- «The slide does not say this», next to the marker for what you did not get. It is not a switch: it opens a review. If you were right, the paragraph is rewritten with the made-up part ruled out in writing and given a new voice; if you were not, it tells you that it was on the slide after all and nothing is left marked.
- New versions install themselves. Filmina tells you when there is one, downloads it from inside the app and puts it in place, without going through the macOS screen saying it could not verify the file. Every version travels with a signature of its own, and what does not check out against it is not installed.
- «Start with this one», the button that moves the slide you are looking at to the front of the queue. Skipping past a few slides left the one explaining stuck on an earlier one, and now the voice also hands over between sentences instead of finishing the whole paragraph.
- «Back to the start», on the third step back in a row. Once you get there it turns into «Back to slide 55», which is the slide you left from: it is the second trip that makes the first one cheap.
- Look at the slide up close with two fingers. What gets bigger is the whole canvas and not the image, so the frames marking what is being explained keep pointing at the same place. Changing slides brings it back whole.
- The wave of your voice while you tell the slide back, above the microphone button. With the screen still, there is only one thing you wonder, and it is whether it is listening.
- Mina listens: she tilts her head the opposite way from thinking, opens her eyes a little and nods every few seconds. And while she goes over what you said she starts thinking, which is the longest wait of the four questions and was the only one where the face said nothing.
- Mina celebrates the one you get right and looks puzzled at the one you miss. Puzzled and not sad: missing one in four is part of answering, and a sad face would be the program passing judgement on you.
Improvements
- The multiple choice question can be answered without leaving the keyboard: up and down walk the options, the numbers pick one straight away, and left and right go back to changing slides with the question open.
- The autoplay switch is gone: the viewer always moves on to the next slide. What stops the run is the question, which waits for your answer, and anyone who wants to stay on a slide pauses.
- What you said now fades at the edges instead of being cut off flat, and the veil only appears on the side that has more to show.
Fixes
- A segment no longer tells what belongs to the one after it. When the voice ran ahead, the list was heard twice and the frame was left pointing at something else.
- The glow of the format sheets, on the start screen, is no longer clipped into a square. The filter was on the SVG, which ties the blur to the size of the drawing, and the edge of the light showed on both sides of the row.
The first thing you see
1.1.1 · September 19, 2026
The welcome screens no longer let the home screen flash by before covering it, and the language can be changed right there, on the first of the five.
Improvements
- The language can be changed from the first welcome screen. The app opens in the system language, and anyone opening it in one that was not theirs had five screens to get through before reaching the setting.
- The window no longer writes its own name up top. On a black sheet, "Filmina" was the only thing there to read, and it was read by someone who had just opened Filmina.
Fixes
- The first time, the home screen flashed by for a frame before the welcome covered it. It waited for the engine to answer before deciding what to show; now that is decided before anything is drawn.
Listening is not remembering
1.1 · September 19, 2026
Every slide now ends with a question, and one in four asks you to tell it back out loud. Whatever does not come out stays marked for later.
New
- Four ways of asking, taking turns: multiple choice, filling the gap, telling it out loud, and the open question. One of them alone, forty slides in a row, would always be the same exercise.
- Tell it back: you talk for thirty seconds and it tells you which ideas you covered and which you did not. Explaining something is the only way to find out you did not understand it.
- The model that listens downloads once, weighs 290 MB and runs on your Mac. The audio is not kept: it is transcribed and deleted, and closing the document releases the microphone.
- What you did not get is marked in the script with one click, and from the home screen you go straight back to the first marked slide. Missing a question marks it on its own, and unmarking it brings the count back down.
- Questions are thought up in the background, after the slide can already be played, so they never keep you waiting. The one that does not pass the checks is not shown, and a slide that is a title and a drawing is not asked about at all.
- The first time, full screen: what this is, that every slide ends with a question, and that everything happens on your Mac. That is where you pick the model that explains and the one that listens.
- The models download in the background: you pick, and keep using the app while they come down. The download can be paused and picked up later, and the settings row keeps saying how much is left.
- The app settings, bottom left: the language and the models, with what each one weighs and a button to take them off the disk.
- Tell us, right next to it: your name and whatever you want to say. It is the only thing in the app that goes out to the internet, and only if you send it.
Improvements
- The PDF title is no longer explained on every slide. It repeated at the top of all of them, and on a slide that was just an image it ended up explained as if it were the subject.
- A slide with nothing to read sends you to look at it, said in your language and without naming the slide number.
- While the app starts up, the wait is the logo beating and nothing else. The caption narrating what it was doing asked to be read at the one moment there was nothing to do.
Fixes
- If the engine you already had running was shut down, every explanation failed until you restarted Filmina. Now it starts its own and carries on.
The first one
1.0 · September 18, 2026
You drag a PDF in and someone explains it to you slide by slide, out loud, while a frame points at the part being talked about. It ships at a launch price: half of what it will cost, for a few days.
New
- It all runs on your Mac. The PDF never leaves your machine, there is no account and there is no server of ours in the middle.
- Summary, full and extended, from the top bar. Summary goes for the core ideas, full covers everything the slide says and extended adds the why and the usual mistakes.
- The whole document is queued. While you listen to one slide, the rest is generated behind you, so in the long run you don't wait on any of them.
- Opened recently: the list of your PDFs, with how far you got and how many slides are already done.
- It comes back with the same settings you were listening with: voice, model and level of detail. That is what makes what was generated usable as is.
- The bin deletes the whole document: the file, the rendered pages, the explanations and the audio. It asks for confirmation and takes itself back after four seconds.
- Coverage is verified in code: it is checked that no block of text was left unexplained and, if one is missing, the model is asked again for that one only. It doesn't depend on the model behaving.
- Headers, footers and diagram labels are discarded before explaining, so nobody reads you the file path printed at the bottom.
- Mathematical notation is turned into words before synthesis: «P of A given B» and not the symbol read out loud.
- Playback speed, which doesn't regenerate the audio.
- The indicators can be turned off from the interface, in case they distract. It is remembered.
by @ignaprados