1.0.1-beta.8

Hello everyone,

This will be the final beta before we release version 1.1.0. This update focuses on optimizing background performance and adding display support for modern MacBook hardware.

Changes

New Features

• Notched Display Support: Added a new option to use the Thaw Bar exclusively on notched displays.

Improvements & Fixes

• Performance Optimization: Reduced CPU overhead by skipping expensive timer work when panels are not visible.
• Refined Rehide Logic: Simplified the rehide system by removing the temporary item delay setting, as the smart rehide logic now better handles user activity and open menus.
• Setup Updates: Refined the Homebrew installation instructions in the README.

Localization

• Traditional Chinese: Received further translation updates.
• German: Received further translation updates.

New Contributors

• @p-linnane made their first contribution in #101

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.7...1.0.1-beta.8

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl

1.0.1-beta.7

Welcome to beta.7! This update focuses heavily on under-the-hood performance improvements, multi-monitor stability, and refining the overall feel of the app to make interactions smoother.

A huge thank you to everyone contributing translations and reporting bugs!

Changes

Performance

• Faster Restarts: Added a disk cache for images, meaning Thaw will boot up and restore your layout much faster.
• Reduced Background Usage: We've heavily optimized the image cache to debounce and cancel redundant updates, significantly cutting down on background processing.
• Smoother Dragging: Refactored the move logic to remove unnecessary "nudges" and simplified item targeting by using the center of the items.

UI & Interaction Refinements

• Menu Bar Interaction: You can now double-click the "Always-Hidden" section when in "Show on click" mode.
• Context Menus: Added SF Symbol icons to all context menus (including the status item and menu bar right-clicks).
• No More Ghosting: Replaced SwiftUI shadows with native NSPanel shadows to eliminate visual artifacts/ghosting when the Ice Bar is hidden.
• Flicker Prevention: Added a 500ms grace period to stop the Ice Bar from flickering right after being shown.
• Smart Search Panel: The Menu Bar Search panel now automatically closes when it loses focus.
• Warning: Implemented a new warning that notifies you when macOS system settings are hiding your section dividers.

Multi-Monitor & Stability Fixes

• Notch & Space Awareness: Improved the app menu hiding logic to properly account for screen notches and limited space across different monitors.
• Layout Race Condition: Fixed a bug during layout resets by ensuring background tasks finish completely before the cache refreshes.

Localization

Our community translators are amazing!

• 🇫🇷 French, 🇩🇪 German & 🇨🇳 Simplified Chinese translations are now 100% complete!
• Added and updated 🇮🇩 Indonesian, 🇰🇷 Korean and 🇹🇼 Traditional Chinese.
• Updated 🇪🇸 Spanish localization.

New Contributors

• @yurihan made their first contribution in #68
• @priesdelly made their first contribution in #77
• @volcbs made their first contribution in #80

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.6...1.0.1-beta.7

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl

1.0.1-beta.6

New Features

Expanded Localization:

• Simplified Chinese (zh-Hans) translation by @picpo
• French localization is now 100% complete.
• Improved translatability for various labels.

Enhanced Diagnostics:

• High-priority system messages are now written to both the console and diagnostic log files to assist with troubleshooting.

Improvements & Fixes

System Reliability & Self-Healing:

• Implemented a health check and recovery system for HID events and event taps; the app now automatically detects and resets if system monitors become stuck or invalidated.
• Added a 5-second timeout to internal semaphores to prevent the app from permanently disabling input if a task is delayed or lost.

Menu Bar & Multi-Monitor Logic:

• Hot Corner Protection: Adjusted synthesized drag events to stay 5 pixels from the top of the screen, preventing accidental activation of macOS Hot Corners.
• Active Screen Targeting: On multi-monitor setups, the hidden section and Ice Bar now only appear on the monitor with the active menu bar.
• Position Verification: Added a polling loop and post-move verification to ensure items actually reach their destination and stabilize before interaction.
• Improved rehide detection for apps with non-standard popup windows using a 2-second grace interval and window scanning.

Ice Bar & Layout Stability:

• Icon Scaling: Icons in the Ice Bar now scale to fill the available height, preventing them from appearing too small on large displays.
• Show Desktop Fix: The Ice Bar now remains stationary and visible during "Show Desktop" gestures.
• Layout Refresh: The layout pane now correctly refreshes new items even if the Settings window was already open.
• Persistence: Added logic to automatically relocate items back to their original sections if an app quits or relaunches unexpectedly.

Image Cache:

• Reduced the blacklist cooldown from 5 minutes to 30 seconds for faster recovery of transient items.
• Cached images are now preserved for items with recent capture failures to prevent empty icons.
• Added deduplication to prevent duplicate window reports during move operations.

New Contributors

• @Mutzki13 made their first contribution in #52
• @picpo made their first contribution in #58

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.5...1.0.1-beta.6

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl

1.0.1-beta.5

This beta focuses on bringing Thaw to a global audience with extensive localization support and refinements for macOS 26 stability.

Localization

• French Support by @UYTR5
• German Support by @Mutzki13
• Spanish Support by @diazdesandi
• Traditional Chinese by @7a6163

Project-Wide Localizability: Refactored the codebase to ensure all user-facing strings in AppKit and SwiftUI components are localizable.

Improvements & Fixes

Enhanced Image Caching:

• Raised the maxCacheSize from 50 to 200 to prevent icons from silently disappearing for power users.
• Optimized LRU eviction to skip items in currently displayed sections, preventing capture-then-evict cycles.
• Improved logging to track the full LRU order for better debugging.
• Notched Display Awareness: Added a getMenuBarHeightEstimate() helper with a three-tier fallback (live query, cached value, or notch-aware default) to prevent icon clamping issues on MacBooks.
• Ultra-Wide Monitor Fix: Implemented chained 9,999pt spacers to ensure hidden items are pushed fully offscreen on displays wider than 5,000 points.

Watchdog & Stability:

• Increased the watchdog timer to 6 seconds during layout drags to prevent premature cursor restoration.
• Added logic to reset the layout UI automatically after a watchdog timeout.
• Restored millisecond/microsecond cases in timeouts to satisfy linter requirements.
• Temporary Item Logic: Added a grace period to prevent temporary menu items from rehiding instantly when window layer detection fails.

Diagnostics

• New Logging Pipeline: Added a user-facing toggle in Advanced settings to enable diagnostic logging for the menu bar item cache pipeline.
• Finder Integration: The "Show Log Files in Finder" button and latest log filenames now remain visible whenever logs exist on disk.

New Contributors

• @UYTR5 made their first contribution in #45
• @7a6163 made their first contribution in #47
• @diazdesandi made their first contribution in #48

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.4...1.0.1-beta.5

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl

1.0.1-beta.4

Important

Due to essential internal changes in how Thaw manages menu bar items, your current icon positions will be reset to "Always Visible." I sincerely apologize for the inconvenience, but this manual re-adjustment is unavoidable to ensure future stability.

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.3...1.0.1-beta.4

1.0.1-beta.3

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.2...1.0.1-beta.3

1.0.1-beta.2

Full Changelog: 1.0.1-beta.1...1.0.1-beta.2

1.0.1-beta.1

Full Changelog: 1.0.0...1.0.1-beta.1

1.0.0 – The Big Thaw

Hello everyone,

Earlier than expected, but here is the first stable release of Thaw. I hope that all bugs, that surfaced during the beta releases, are fixed now.

Overview

Fixes

• Fixed a soft lock, when the chevron section dividers where enabled and a user would move the chevron for the hidden section into the always-hidden section #11.
• Fixed an issue where menubar clicks would not be recognized by Thaw anymore.

Known Issues

Bug #1 is still not fixed and needs further investigation. If you are on macOS 14/15, continue using Ice for now. If you are satisfied with the default settings in Thaw and don't use the Thaw bar (floating bar) you should be good to go, though.

A big thank you to all who helped to test and wrote me encouraging messages, @BillChirico who convinced me to go forward with the fork, and of course @jordanbaird, for creating Ice in the first place.

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-beta.4...1.0.0

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl

1.0.0-beta.4

Hello everyone,

It feels like groundhog day 😁, a new release. This is the fourth and most likely final beta release of Thaw. If you have set the update channel to Development in Thaw now is a good time to switch back to Stable.

This release primarily addresses bug-fixes for macOS 14/15 and should finally resolve #1.

Overview

Changes

• On macOS 14/15 temporary icons should now show up again when the Thaw icon is enabled.
• Rehiding temporary icons on macOS 14/15 do not trigger the "Apple Menu" anymore.
• The settings importer now only shows up when old Ice settings are detected.
• Double-clicking the Thaw icon now reveals the always hidden section.

Full Changelog: 1.0.0-beta.3...1.0.0-beta.4

Donations

If you find Thaw useful and want to support its further development, consider throwing a coin in my hat: https://github.com/sponsors/stonerl