New and improved Snip desktop apps: macOS, Windows, and Linux

Today we are releasing improved Snip Apps for macOS, Windows, and Linux. You can still hit CTRL+ALT/CMD+M on your keyboard and get LaTeX instantly, but now you can do more.

What’s new?

Navigate all your Snips in List mode, and select the equation you’re looking for! You can still use your left and right arrow keys to navigate Snip by Snip, but now there’s a solution for when you need to find something fast. We’ve also added a screenshot button at the top left of the homescreen for making taking Snips even easier.

We have also made navigation and editing Snips easier by always showing the original image in addition to the rendered LaTeX. This not only makes it easier to find what you’re looking for, but also to find any potential recognition mistakes and fix them quickly and conveniently.

Another feature you may notice is that we now let you obtain image URLs from Snips, in addition to LaTeX. This feature is also convenient for saving, syncing, and pasting images that may not be OCR-able. The URLs tab gives you the original image URL in 3 formats: plain URL, Markdown image URL, and HTML <img> tag.

Need your Snips from your personal computer synced to your work computer? No problem. Snips now sync between apps!

In order to sync your Snips between apps, we have added Mathpix accounts. If you take a Snip on any platform, the LaTeX result will sync instantly with any other apps signed in to from your Mathpix account. Introducing accounts also allows you to control your preferences and privacy settings across platforms.

In order to sustain usage and development of Snip and our recognition engine, we will now be charging users who want to take more than 50 Snips per month. Since our service relies on speed optimized GPU servers, serving customers with heavy usage for free has become unsustainable. For $4.99 per month, you can use Snip an unlimited number of times every month.

How did we come up with this number of 50 free snips? We looked at our usage numbers and found a limit where the majority of Snip users (over 75%) will never have to pay! This way, we can still serve the vast majority of Snip users for free, and only charge users who rely heavily on our service, or those who wish to donate.

You can manage your account or upgrade your Snip plan at accounts.mathpix.com.

We get a lot of questions about privacy. The addition of Mathpix accounts also gives you the ability to have complete control over your images.

Until today, we have funded the development of our Snip Apps entirely from the sales of our MathpixOCR API service. We do, however, use some Snip user-submitted images to improve our recognition engine. Now, all Snip users can control whether or not to allow Mathpix to use their images to improve our recognition and add new features. You can opt out of (or back in to) Mathpix using your images to improve our recognition at any time, just Log in to your account to make changes.

For more information on this, and answers to common questions about how Mathpix handles your data, the images you send us, and our QA processes, check out our Privacy FAQ.

Please be aware that we will be deprecating old desktop apps in two weeks. You can download the Mac app, Windows app, or Linux app, or macOS users can update the app from the Mac App Store.

As always, if you have any questions, concerns, or requests for new features, please post a comment, or send an email to support@mathpix.com.