The desktop app

Teralo runs in a browser and always will. The desktop app is the same product in its own window, with the things a browser cannot give it: tabs that survive a restart, a system tray, native save dialogs, drag and drop from your file manager, and the ability to open a document in the application already installed on your computer.

It is the same account and the same data. Nothing lives only on the desktop.

Download it for Windows, macOS or Linux

The download page is teralo.co/downloads.

• Windows. One installer.
• macOS. Apple silicon only. An Intel Mac can install the file and will then fail to launch with an unhelpful message from Apple, so the button is labelled by architecture rather than by operating system.
• Linux. An AppImage and a .deb.

It installs without an administrator

Worth stating plainly, because it is the question an IT department asks first.

The Windows installer is per-user. It installs into your own profile, writes nothing to Program Files, and needs no elevation at first install or at any update afterwards. There is deliberately no MSI: the packaging format for one forces a machine-wide install, which would prompt for administrator rights on every update forever. Site staff do not hold local admin, so the app has to install and update without ever asking for it.

What it adds

Its own titlebar, with a File, Edit, View and Help menu bar, back and forward buttons, and the window controls.

Tabs. Ctrl and click, or middle-click, opens a link in a background tab. Ctrl+T opens a new one and Ctrl+W closes it. Your open tabs are remembered between sessions.

Window position and size are remembered, including whether it was maximised.

Native file dialogs. Downloading a document, or exporting a register to Excel or PDF, opens your operating system's own Save dialog rather than dropping the file into a downloads folder you then have to go and find.

Drag and drop from your file manager. Dragging files straight from Explorer or Finder onto an upload area works.

Deep links. Signing in with Google, Microsoft or Apple opens your normal browser and hands you back to the app when it is done.

The system tray, and what happens when you close the window

The app puts an icon in the system tray, and closing the window hides it there rather than quitting. Left-click the tray icon to bring it back; right-click for Show, Hide and Quit.

That applies to the X button and to Alt+F4. To actually exit, use File, then Quit, Ctrl+Q, or Quit from the tray menu. Closing the last tab also hides the window to the tray.

Keyboard shortcuts

Updates

The app checks for an update about ten seconds after it starts, and an automatic check never interrupts you. If it finds one it downloads it quietly in the background, and a small Restart to update button appears in the titlebar between the tabs and the window controls. Clicking it installs and restarts.

Help, then Check for Updates does the same thing on demand, with a dialog and a progress bar.

Downloads do not survive a restart. If you close the app between the download finishing and pressing the button, the next launch checks again and downloads again.

When an update is blocked

Before downloading, the app checks whether this particular install is able to replace itself, by writing and deleting a temporary file in the folder it lives in. If it cannot, you are told an update exists and told why, rather than being left in a silent loop that never applies it.

Three reasons come up.

An older machine-wide Windows install. Teralo used to ship a second Windows installer that put the app in Program Files. Those installs cannot update themselves without administrator rights. Download the current installer from the downloads page; it installs alongside into your own profile and takes over from there.

A managed machine. Application control policy, or a folder your account cannot write to. Your IT team has to allow it or install it for you.

macOS permissions. The folder holding the app bundle is not writable by you. Usually this means the app was installed by somebody else into a place you cannot change.

Edit a document in Word, Excel or Bluebeam

This is the one thing the desktop app can do that neither the browser nor the phone can.

From an organisation document, the row action Edit in desktop app downloads a working copy to your computer and opens it in whatever your computer opens that file type with. Work in it normally. Each time you save, Teralo uploads what you saved as a new version of the document. No download, no re-upload, no filename with _rev2 on the end.

It has been used through Word, Excel and Bluebeam. It applies to organisation documents rather than to a project's document register.

Two switches have to be on

They belong to different people and answer different questions, so both are needed.

Your organisation has to allow it. An administrator turns on Desktop editing in organisation settings. Absent means off: an organisation that has never seen the setting has not agreed to documents being copied onto local disks. See Setting up your organisation.

This computer has to allow it. The first checkout on a computer asks you, with a dialog explaining what happens to the file, where the copies live and how long they stay. After that, Settings, then Desktop is where you turn it on and off. The consent is per person and per computer, so one person's answer on a shared site PC does not carry to the next person who signs in.

After the first time, a save uploads without asking. A confirmation on every save would make this worse than the download-and-re-upload dance it replaces.

Working copies, and where they go

Settings, then Desktop lists everything currently checked out to this computer: the file name, where it is on disk, its size, when it was last saved and its state. Three buttons per row.

Show folder opens it in your file manager. Discard deletes the copy, and anything unsaved in it, after a confirmation. Save to Teralo appears on a copy with changes that did not make it up, which is what you use after a crash or a lost connection.

A saved copy is removed automatically fourteen days after its last save. A copy with unsaved changes is never removed automatically, which is the point of the fourteen days applying only to clean ones.

Turning the switch off never deletes anything. It stops new checkouts and stops watching for saves; the copies stay on disk and this page still lists them with Save, Discard and Show folder, so nothing is stranded. Turning your organisation's switch off refuses the next save at the server, and the bytes are still on your own disk to upload by hand.

Revit models cannot be checked out

A .rvt keeps the Edit in desktop app action, and clicking it explains why it is refused rather than making the action disappear. Autodesk does not support workshared models in a synced folder, and a Revit local file is not a single file that can be sent back, so the round-trip is the wrong shape however good the save detection is. Download a copy instead.

The action also stays in place, and explains itself, when your organisation has the switch off. An affordance that silently vanishes becomes a support call.

Offline on desktop

The desktop app can keep documents available with no connection, and that is the only part of offline it does. Pinning a document caches it on this computer and the viewer reads the cached copy when you are offline. Everything else, including creating and editing records offline, is a mobile capability.

See Working offline.

Notifications still arrive by email

The desktop app does not raise operating system notifications. Teralo reaches you by email, on every platform, and what you see inside the app is My Items. See Notification settings.