Karea In ChatGPT And Claude, A Greeting At The Door, And A Task Window Rebuilt

The Release That Lets You Take Karea With You

The biggest thing in this release is not inside Karea at all. It is the part that lets you use Karea somewhere else: in ChatGPT, in Claude, in Claude Code, and on your phone. Alongside that, opening the app now greets you properly, creating a task has been rebuilt, and descriptions finally have working checkboxes.

Here is everything, and why.

Karea In ChatGPT, Claude And On Your Phone

Karea has had an MCP server for a while. MCP, Model Context Protocol, is the standard that lets an AI assistant use an outside tool: connect Karea to ChatGPT and you can ask it to create a task, check what is overdue, or close something, and it happens in your real board.

Connecting it used to be the problem. There are two ways in, they need different settings, and nothing in the app explained which one you wanted.

• A new Help section, "Connect AI assistants", walks through each one: ChatGPT, the Claude desktop and mobile apps, Claude Code, and the Claude and ChatGPT phone apps. Every URL on the page is one click to copy.
• The API keys page now says the short version too, with a link through to the full guide.
• The hosted connector actually connects. The discovery document that ChatGPT and Claude look for during sign-in was served at one address and asked for at another, so the apps reported that no server was found at the URL. Both addresses now answer. If a connector failed for you before, remove it and add it again.

The address for the hosted connector is https://karea.app/api/mcp. Claude Code users running the local server do not need to change anything.

Opening Karea Now Greets You

Karea used to open on a half-drawn dashboard. It now opens on a full-screen greeting, in black with Karea's green, which doubles as the loading screen: it is the first thing the browser paints and it stays until the app is ready.

The greeting knows what time it is in your timezone, and the line underneath it comes from a dictionary of a hundred. While the app is genuinely still loading, a third line tells you what it is doing, and it changes as you wait rather than sitting frozen.

It appears when you open Karea, which means logging in, refreshing, opening a new tab or following a link in. It does not appear while you move around inside the app, because that is not arriving.

And the late-night lines were rewritten. Anyone who opens a task manager at one in the morning has already decided to work, and the app telling them to go to bed is not charming.

Creating A Task, Rebuilt

The new-task window is now three sections that open as you fill them: what the task is, where it goes, and the details. Each one folds up once you are done with it, so the window stays short instead of asking you twenty questions at once.

Tab moves you forward through the form, Shift+Tab moves you back, including backwards into the previous section. Enter creates the task from anywhere in it. The section you have not finished stays open and marked.

Duplicate detection comes with it. Type a title that looks like something you already have and Karea says so before you create it, showing the tasks it means. Saying "this is not a duplicate" is treated as an answer: the warning collapses to an icon you can reopen, and the window stops glowing at you.

Typing /nt in the chat, on its own, opens the same window.

Descriptions You Can Actually Tick

Checkboxes in a task description are now real checkboxes. Click one and it ticks and saves, including checkboxes written into the middle of a sentence rather than in a list.

The editor has two views, Markdown and Visual, and the same toolbar works in both: bold, italic, strikethrough, links, headings, lists, checkboxes, code blocks, tables and dividers. Switching between the views keeps everything, including the checkboxes.

Review Stages, Finished Properly

Review stages, the custom steps a task passes through between "in review" and "done", got the pass they needed.

• Stage names keep the case you gave them. "QA Testing" is not silently rewritten as "qa testing".
• Every stage shows in its own configured colour, everywhere: the board, the task page, the side panel, search results and the command palette.
• Renaming a stage carries the tasks sitting in it, instead of orphaning them.
• Undoing a task you just closed puts the stage back, not only the status.
• Hovering the status offers moves that make sense for where the task actually is. A task that is merely open is no longer offered a way "back" to a state it was never in.

Smaller Things

• Clone a status system, including the standard one, when setting up a new project.
• Clicking Projects while you are in a project opens that project's settings, not the first one in the list.
• Overdue is no longer a pill competing with the title for space. It is a thin line under the card, reading how long the task has been late.
• The chat panel closes again.
• A board that hides tasks behind a filter now says how many, with a way to show them.
• Opening a task from the command palette no longer opens it twice.
• Countdowns like "starts in 14 min" now actually count down, on every screen that shows one.
• Alerts for a closed task arrive wherever you closed it from.
• The duplicate warning, the greeting dictionary and the review stage logic all ship with unit tests, so none of this quietly comes undone later.

Nothing To Do

Everything above is live. No migration, no settings to change. The one thing worth doing is reconnecting the ChatGPT or Claude connector if it failed for you before, because the reason it failed is fixed.