What's New in Karea: Meetings, Placeholders, and Notes That Summarise Themselves

Two Months of Work, In One Release

Karea just got its biggest update since launch. Meetings and calendar sync are new. The planner learned to hold the things you have not decided on yet. Notes can summarise themselves. JIRA now connects per project instead of per account. And the free plan quietly got a lot more generous.

Here is what changed, and why.

Meetings, Prepared Instead Of Attended

Most meeting tools record what happened. The problem is usually what happened before: nobody wrote down the three questions that made the meeting necessary.

Karea now has a Meetings section. Connect Google Calendar and your events come in with their titles, times and attendees. From there you can write prep notes, attach the open questions you need answered, link the tasks the meeting is about, and paste the transcript afterwards so the decisions live next to the work instead of in a document nobody opens again.

Questions raised in a meeting stay linked to it. When one gets answered, you can see which meeting it came from.

The Planner Holds Unfinished Thoughts

Not everything that occurs to you is a task. "Look at the invoice thing" is not a task. It has no deadline, no project, and forcing it into one produces a backlog full of noise.

The planner now has placeholders: short, dated notes that sit on a day without pretending to be tasks. They never appear in search, never land on a project board, and never count towards anything. Drag one to another day when the day gets away from you. When a placeholder turns out to be real work, one click converts it into an actual task.

Alongside that, tasks can now span multiple days on the planner, and a task ending at midnight stays on the day you put it.

Notes That Summarise Themselves

Long-running tasks accumulate notes. Twelve updates in, picking the task back up means reading all twelve.

Every note now has a summarise button, and every task can summarise its whole note thread into a short briefing: where things stand, what was decided, what is blocked. Summaries are deliberately terse — if you would rather read the notes, the summary failed.

They are also honest about age. A summary is tied to the exact text it described, so editing, adding or deleting a note marks it Outdated rather than quietly showing you a summary of text that no longer exists. Nothing is generated until you ask for it.

JIRA, Per Project

JIRA used to be one connection for your whole account, which is wrong the moment you work with two clients, or one company with two Atlassian sites.

Each Karea project now connects to its own JIRA site, with its own settings for what syncs and in which direction. Links survive a disconnect: the issue key and site stay on the task, so history does not evaporate when a contract ends. Notes pulled from JIRA are marked as such, edited comments are detected, and deleting a note asks what should happen to the JIRA comment.

Search now matches JIRA issue keys too, so you can find a task by the id your client uses.

A Browser Extension

Capturing something from a web page into a task usually means copying, switching windows, pasting, and losing the formatting on the way.

The Karea extension puts a capture button on JIRA issues and Google Classroom items, and can capture any page you are on. It keeps the formatting — bold, lists, code, links — rather than flattening everything into a wall of text. On a JIRA issue it links the new task to the issue when your project is connected to that site, and quotes the key and URL when it is not.

It also shows your workload, your focus check-in and what you are doing right now, opens instantly from cache, and keeps an unfinished capture if you close it to go and copy one more paragraph. It is heading to the Chrome Web Store shortly.

The Free Plan Got Better

Full API and MCP access is now on every plan, including Free. Karea's whole point is that your coding agent can drive it, and putting that behind a paywall meant the most distinctive thing about the product was the thing a new user could never try.

The free active-task limit went up to 50 as well — and completed and cancelled tasks have never counted towards it, so your history stays unlimited. The integrations are available on every plan too.

Everything Else

• Reminders on tasks, separate from deadlines
• Subtask promotion — turn a subtask into a standalone task, kept linked to its former parent
• Recap now shows tasks that changed, not only tasks that closed
• Resources load faster, remember which folder you were in, preview CSVs as tables, and let you move folders
• Note editing keeps pasted formatting, marks edited notes, and collapses long descriptions to the first few lines
• Onboarding actually guides you through a first project instead of dropping you into an empty board
• A new interactive demo on the homepage, so you can try the interface before signing up

What's Next

The extension goes to the Chrome Web Store, meeting prep gets deeper, and Outlook calendar support follows Google's.

If something in here is not working the way you expect, the feedback button in the app reaches us directly — most of the list above started there.