Every download is a fork
Nobody creates Offer_final_v2_FINAL_signed.pdf on purpose. Where the copies come from, what they cost, and how 0.2.0 lets you edit files without downloading them.
If you have worked with clients for more than a few weeks, you’ve met this file: Offer_final_v2_FINAL_signed.pdf. Nobody set out to make it. It grew one download at a time. Someone opened the attachment, changed a sentence, saved it under a new name and sent it back, and from then on there were two versions of the offer, each with a fair claim to being the real one.
Programmers have a word for this. When one line of work splits into two, they call it a fork, and they have whole tools for bringing the two back together. Most offices have a file name and good intentions. Encloq 0.2.0 is our attempt to stop the fork where it starts, at the download.
Every attachment is a copy. Send a contract to three people and there are four copies. Each reply with tracked changes adds another, and each download leaves one more in a folder on a laptop or a phone.
Copies are cheap to make and expensive to reconcile. Somebody has to compare two Word files paragraph by paragraph and decide which change wins, and that is rarely anyone’s favourite afternoon.
The reasoning drifts off as well. The question about clause 4 sits in an email, the answer came by phone, and whoever opens the document next year sees the clause without the why. Meanwhile every copy is one more place where a tax return or a contract lives, in mailboxes and on devices nobody looks after anymore. A sent email usually can’t be taken back.
Inside a team, naming rules and a shared drive keep this under control. They stop working exactly where confidentiality matters most: when the file goes to a client, who has their own inbox, their own software and no idea what your naming rules are.
Encloq grew out of a pattern almost everyone who works with clients knows. The draft goes out by email, the large files by transfer link, the quick question through a messenger and the signature through yet another service. Each tool does its job, and the exchange as a whole falls apart. Encloq is a confidential workspace that holds it together: the conversation with a client, the files, their versions and the signature, encrypted on your device before anything leaves it. Clients join by invitation and sign in with a passkey.
As Product and Design Lead, I look after how Encloq works, looks and reads, in the web app, the installed apps and on this website. Most of my decisions come down to four questions.
Does the file stay with the conversation it came from?
A file arrives in a conversation, and its versions, the questions about it and its signature stay attached to it.
Can a client finish without switching tools?
Invitation, upload, reply and signature happen in one place, on a phone as well as on a laptop.
Is the safe way also the easy one?
Content is encrypted on your device and you sign in with a passkey from the start. There is no secure mode to remember.
Does the screen stay out of the way?
Few warnings, no decoration for its own sake, and a clear state for everything that matters.
Version 0.2.0 is what came out when we asked the first of those questions about editing.
Encloq already kept the conversation, the file and its versions together. One step still forked: editing. You downloaded the file, changed it in another program and uploaded it again. The upload could become the next version, but the download stayed behind on the laptop.
With 0.2.0, Word documents, spreadsheets, presentations, Markdown notes and text files can be edited right in Encloq. A few decisions behind the editors were harder than they look, and they explain why things work the way they do.
Every save is a version. That can sound noisy. If you’re polishing your own draft, the save options offer “Replace current version”. Signed, shared and older versions are never overwritten, whatever you choose.
I’d rather keep one version too many than lose the state a client approved.
Unsaved changes stay on your device, sealed with your key so that only you can open them, and they are removed when you sign out. Whatever the editor can’t change stays exactly as it was: clients send documents from all kinds of programs, and opening one in Encloq shouldn’t quietly strip what our editor doesn’t understand.
Signing moved into the PDF editor. You click where the signature goes, with the date and place below it if you like, and signing saves a new version while the one before stays untouched. The same editor highlights, adds notes, reorders pages and fills in forms, even flat ones that never had fields.
Pictures and recordings come along too. You can crop, straighten and redact the photo of a receipt, or trim a recording without re-encoding it, so it keeps its original quality.
Not every file has an editor
The editors guide lists the ones that do. For other types, Encloq says so and offers the preview or a download, and for those files the old round trip remains.
If you work with the editors and something still sends you to your downloads folder, I’d like to hear about it. Write to us and tell me which file it was.
Everything in 0.2.0
All new features and smaller improvements, in the release notes.