thaw-app/Thaw 2.0.0-rc.4

on GitHub

Please report issues at
github.com/thaw-app/Thaw/issues.

This release closes the field reports against rc.3 — hidden items dead
for the first minute after launch, and a cache stall with no deadline at
all — and pays down the debt that made them possible: the item manager's 11,500-line file, the hand-rolled identity
matching that drifted, and a test suite that wrote into the real settings
of whoever ran it.

Highlights

• Hidden items work from launch, and the cache can no longer stall for good — on a cold start the item cache froze for a full minute on unresolved identities: every Thaw Bar tooltip read "Menu Bar Item" and every click silently did nothing until the settling deadline expired (#943). In the worse interleaving the settling task deadlocked awaiting itself, past every deadline — one report had the cache rejecting every refresh for 20+ hours, with the Visible row in Settings → Layout permanently empty (#945).
• The Thaw icon stops drifting left across restarts — the stalled early apply executed a minute late with the desired order it had narrowed at launch, when only a handful of identities had resolved. Everything that resolved during the stall was re-inserted as "unmanaged" at saved indices, which changed the chevron's planned neighbors and moved it left of the leftmost item; macOS remembers the new position, so each restart ratcheted it further (#947).
• Items stop shuffling mid-session on localized systems — saved-order ghosts namespaced by a localized app name (Control Centre:WiFi, minted while a bundle ID transiently read nil) counted as "real owners" and deleted their genuine com.apple.controlcenter twins from the saved order on every load. The live items then planned as unmanaged and were repositioned by every apply, with the cursor contested for each synthetic drag (#949).
• Spanish onboarding restored — two strings shipped as translated-but-empty, so Spanish systems rendered a blank tour slide description and a blank New Items badge hint.
• XPC session race closed — a stale cancellation handler could tear down a healthy, newer session and race the lock every other access went through.

Menu bar & layout

• The settling-period early apply no longer waits for settling to end while holding the serial cache gate. The wait deadlocked the pair both ways: when the launch cache cycle owned the gate, settling's early exit needed a cache cycle the held gate rejects, so it ran the full 60 s deadline with the item cache frozen on fallback tags — generic names in Thaw Bar and Search, and every click aborted with no return destination (#943). When the settling task's own poll owned the gate, the apply awaited the very task it was running on, and the deadline check inside that blocked loop could never fire — the gate stayed held indefinitely and every later recache was rejected (#945).
• Clicking an item whose cached tag predates source-PID resolution re-maps it onto its freshly fetched counterpart by windowID, so the click survives a stale cache snapshot instead of dying in the return-destination lookup (#943).
• Because the early apply now runs the moment it is dispatched, it plans against the bar it narrowed itself to. Executed at the deadline instead, its restriction inverted: identities that resolved during the stall were no longer provisional (which excludes them) but "unmanaged" (which re-inserts them at saved indices), and the re-insertion handed the chevron a move to the far left of the bar (#947).
• Saved-order pruning no longer counts a localized display-name namespace as a real owner, and drops such a ghost when its canonical twin exists — the Control Center entry sharing its title, Thaw's own control items by their reserved titles, or a real owner claiming the same non-generic title. A display-name entry with no twin survives, since it may be the only identity a bundle-ID-less app ever got (#949).
• The namespace fallback recovers a transiently nil bundle ID through the app's bundle URL before reaching for the window's owner name, so localized ghosts stop being minted in the first place (#949).

XPC service

• The session cancellation handler cleared the stored session outside the lock that guarded every other access, and a handler outliving its session could clear a newer one created after it. Storage now synchronizes internally, and invalidation is identity-guarded so only the cancelled session is dropped.
• The single-window sourcePID request was dead wire protocol — the batch request replaced it in production — yet its round-trip tests were the only wire-format coverage at all. The request is gone and the tests now exercise the batch case both sides actually use.

Localization

• The Spanish descriptions for the Hotkeys & Automation tour slide and the New Items badge hint were empty strings marked translated. A catalog sweep found exactly these two; both are filled in the register the catalog already uses.

Internal

• MenuBarItemManager.swift (11,526 lines) is now a folder of per-concern files cut along its existing MARK seams, each importing only what it uses; sonar and the SwiftLint input list follow the new paths.
• Item identity matching (tag plus effective PID), the click-target refetch chain, and live-bounds reads are single-sourced helpers instead of hand-rolled copies across the manager and the IceBar — the same drift that produced #943.
• The test process points the Defaults facade at a scratch suite before any test runs, so no suite can write into the real com.stonerl.Thaw domain of whoever runs the tests. The tour-slide test that failed on Spanish-locale machines while passing on English CI is green everywhere.
• The search panel reads AppState from its SwiftUI environment instead of reaching through the item manager's back-pointer, which no external caller uses anymore.