Hey everyone,
This beta brings native macOS 26 (Tahoe) support, adopting the new Liquid Glass design language throughout the app. It also expands the thaw:// Settings URI scheme for advanced automation.
Important
This release requires macOS 26. Users on macOS 14 or 15 will not receive this update and will remain on 1.3.0-beta.1. For more information see here #427
New Features
- macOS 26 (Tahoe) Support: Thaw is now built exclusively for macOS 26. The minimum deployment target has been raised accordingly.
- Liquid Glass Design: Adopted the new macOS 26 Liquid Glass design system across the main interface, Settings window, and Search window.
- Settings URI — Write Support: Change Thaw settings programmatically via the thaw:// URI scheme. Supports boolean, double, enum, and per-display settings with live UI sync.
- Settings URI — Read Support: Read the current value of any Thaw setting via URI, enabling external tools and scripts to query your configuration.
- Version Copy Button: Click the version number in About settings to copy it to the clipboard.
Improvements & Fixes
- Show-on-Click Reliability: Overhauled the click-guard logic to close race conditions on dual-display setups, double-click reveal, second-click edge cases, and spurious startup rearms.
- App Menu Click-Through: Refined detection of application menu regions to more accurately distinguish AX states, reducing false triggers when clicking File, Edit, View, and other app menus.
- Hover & Rehide Stability: Hardened hover rearm retries near the menu bar and improved smart rehide detection to prevent items staying visible longer than intended.
- Startup Performance: Reduced menu-bar scan overhead at startup and improved source PID resolution with a timeout to prevent indefinite blocking.
- Layout Bar Colors: Layout bar preview, badge, and notch indicator now correctly adapt colors to the active display's menu bar background, including on notched MacBooks.
- Settings Sidebar: Sidebar width now auto-fits its content, icons are correctly sized, and the selected item foreground color is correct for inactive windows.
- Settings Window: Removed fixed maximum size constraints so the window resizes freely.
- Reset Layout Drag Errors: Increased the delay after Reset Layout to prevent drag errors immediately following a reset.
- Tooltip Layout: Fixed tooltip panel positioning with an improved label container layout.
- Thaw Bar Foreground Color: Fixed brightness detection ignoring its screen parameter, causing incorrect icon colors on secondary displays.
- Screen Capture: Replaced deprecated CGWindowList API with SkyLight private API for more reliable empty-space hit testing and background capture.
- App Termination Handling: App termination replies are now handled asynchronously with a single-attempt scope to avoid hangs.
- Presentation Mode: Fixed a crash when the app menu frame was nil during presentation mode calculation.
- New Items Badge: Profile capture now correctly saves the new items badge position.
Full Changelog: 1.3.0-beta.1...2.0.0-beta.1
New Contributors
Full Changelog: 1.3.0-beta.1...2.0.0-beta.1
Donations
If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat.
- GitHub Sponsor: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl
- Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/stonerl