OpenAI's ChatGPT is available as a web and mobile app and will be coming to iOS 18 as part of Apple Intelligence in the coming months. There is also an impressive macOS app, which has received a major upgrade and is now more widely available.

It has a fairly slick interface and can be triggered by hotkeys, but one of the common complaints was that it often got lost if you had a lot of windows or other apps open.

Now, with the new update, there is side-by-side access to a powerful chatbot, which means it can fit into your workflow much easier, among other new features including custom GPT mentions and enhanced security.

According to the OpenAI release notes: "In the macOS desktop app, you now have side-by-side access to ChatGPT in a new companion window. It appears before all other windows so you can be more productive while working across ChatGPT and other apps"

.

This means that you can easily refer to the data presented by ChatGPT at a glance instead of constantly finding windows and putting them in front of other apps. Its position, keyboard shortcuts, and reset time can all be customized within the app's settings.

Otherwise, the app offers expandable views of tables and graphs, making it easy to adjust and download charts for other purposes. The app can also be activated upon login and "@mention" the GPT.

Combined with "enhanced security for local data storage" and "improved performance when streaming chat responses," this update seems worth the download.

Sadly, Windows users will have to wait - at the time of writing, the native version is not yet available, so for now they must use the web-based version of ChatGPT.