stonerl/Thaw 1.1.99-beta.4 on GitHub

Hello everyone,

this beta contains more performance and stability improvements contributed by @7a6163, fixes some newly discovered bugs and refines the overall UX.

Mission Control Integration:
- The menu bar overlay now hides instantly during Mission Control and App Exposé for a seamless system transition.
- Implemented an invisible "probe" window and high-frequency timer to reliably track system-wide window transformations.
Enhanced Search Window:
- Added a magnifying glass icon and clickable edit buttons to the search panel bottom bar.
- Improved keyboard handling: pressing Esc now clears the search field or closes the window if the field is empty.
- Search results now feature a periodic refresh loop to keep animated icons, like sync spinners, live while the panel is open.
Advanced Customization:
- Added a configurable "Icon refresh rate" slider (1–30 fps) to Advanced settings, allowing users to tune the live refresh interval.
- The application now persists and restores specific item orders per-section for more reliable layout management.

Performance & Battery Life:
- Rewrote the transparency check engine to read alpha bytes directly from memory, eliminating constant allocations during the refresh loop.
- Reduced interaction latency by 100-500ms when clicking Ice Bar items by skipping redundant input pause polling.
- Moved initial cache preloading to background tasks to ensure smoother UI transitions in the settings and search panels.
Menu Bar Stability:
- Fixed a race condition that could cause missing menu bar items after a drag operation.
- Improved stability for external drags and suppressed caching during active move operations to prevent layout flickering.
Bug Fixes & Maintenance:
- Removed debug log spam from computed properties that were evaluated dozens of times per render pass.
- Excluded internal control items from image captures to eliminate unnecessary failure and retry cycles.
- Updated the Sparkle framework to version 2.9.0 for improved update reliability.

Full Changelog: 1.1.99-beta.3...1.1.99-beta.4

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat.