Releases: GarbisT/Glassdeck-releases
Release list
GlassDeck 1.5.1
Album colours that match the album
1.5.0 carried the cover's colour through the whole widget, which made it much
easier to see when that colour was wrong. And it often was. The picker ignored
black, white and grey entirely and chose whichever hue had the most saturated
pixels, so:
- a cover that is almost all black with a line of red lettering turned the
widget orange-red; - a black-and-white photograph turned it blue, from the faint cast its dark
areas pick up in compression.
Colours are now measured by how much of the cover they fill, and black,
white and grey count like any other colour:
- The glass takes the cover's largest colour, and only when that is a real
hue. A mostly black cover keeps neutral glass. - Play, the progress bar and any mode that is on take the colour you would
point at: the yellow band on a mostly grey photograph. It has to be bright
and cover a real part of the sleeve, so specks of colour no longer count.
With no such colour, the controls stay plain. - The spectrum blends the cover's main colours in the proportions they fill
it. A cover split between black, white and red sweeps through all three.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.5.0
The album's colour, properly
With Match album artwork on, the cover's colour used to reach one place you
could actually see: the progress bar. The glass got a wash so faint that on the
lighter presets it was hard to tell it was there.
Now the colour carries through the whole widget:
- The glass holds a pool of the cover's colour, strongest beside the artwork
and fading across the panel, with the rim catching it on that side. Your tint
Strength slider still sets how far it goes. - The spectrum sweeps the cover's hue and its neighbours instead of the
fixed pink, violet and cyan. - Play, and any mode that is on, shuffle, repeat or the star, take the
colour. Anything off stays plain, so the colour still means "on".
Black-and-white covers stay black and white. A cover with no real colour
gets a silver spectrum, plain controls and a neutral progress bar, rather than
a grey with a stain of whatever hue the cover leaned toward.
Choosing a swatch keeps the quieter look it always had, and the slim bar is
unchanged.
Settings stay put while you move the widget
With settings open, the first click on the widget used to close them, and a
second was needed to start dragging. Settings now stay open while the widget is
dragged, follow it, and can be dragged by their own header too.
Fixed
On dark glass, the settings panel's switches and slider handles could open
invisible, reappearing only after changing the scheme or touching them.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.4.0
Your own files
Four local players are now read: Swinsian, VOX, VLC and IINA.
Swinsian is the best-supported source in the app. Title, artist, album, an
exact playhead, scrubbing, the full transport, shuffle, and all three repeat
modes, which is more than Spotify's own app reports. No star: Swinsian has a
rating rather than a like, and a star would overwrite whatever rating you had
given the track.
VOX gives everything except two things VOX itself will not report. Repeat
shows as on or off rather than off, all and one, and shuffle can be switched
from the widget but never read back.
VLC and IINA are read only while they are playing audio, judged by the
file. Both are video players as often as music ones, and without that rule
starting a film would hand the widget over to it. IINA ships no scripting at
all, so it is read the way a screen reader reads it, and its transport is found
by the arrangement of its buttons.
Artwork for all four is read from the file itself, so a tagged file shows its
cover. An untagged file shows its filename as the title, because that is all the
player knows.
Tidal gains shuffle, repeat and the heart
Tidal's player bar reports all three, so the widget now reads and presses them,
repeat across all three modes.
The fix behind that
GlassDeck read the first media element on a page, and some sites keep a spare.
Tidal keeps two: one finished and silent, one playing. Reading the wrong one
meant Tidal reported a paused track with the previous song's length, so the
widget treated it as a tab nobody started and would not show it at all while it
played out loud. It now reads whichever element is playing and audible, and
control and seeking follow the same rule.
If a web player ever showed you the wrong time, or refused to appear while
plainly playing, this is the likely cause.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.3.0
Keyboard shortcuts
Play, pause, skip, shuffle, repeat, favourite, the visualizer and showing the
widget can all be driven from the keyboard while any app is in front.
Nothing is bound until you bind it. A global shortcut takes a keystroke away
from every other application on your Mac, and no combination is safe to claim on
your behalf. Open Settings, find Shortcuts, and record what you want. There is a
suggested set on one click if you would rather not choose: Control and Option
with P, the arrow keys, S, R, F, V and G.
Two modifiers are required, because one modifier and a letter is where apps keep
their own commands. A combination macOS already uses is named before you commit
to it, and one another app is holding is reported rather than left looking bound
and doing nothing.
Each shortcut does exactly what its button on the widget does. Repeat and shuffle
advance from whatever your player currently reports, so they never disagree with
the buttons.
Click the source to go to it
The small icon beside the artist is now a button. Press it and you land on
whatever is playing: the app comes forward, and in a browser the right tab is
selected first. It works in Chrome, Brave, Edge, Vivaldi, Safari and Opera.
That icon also appears on every layout now, not only the wide one.
Get out of the way when nothing is playing
Optional, off by default, in Settings under Behaviour. The widget fades out once
the music has been paused or gone for 30 seconds, a minute, two or five, your
choice, and comes back the moment something plays. Pausing counts, since nothing
here has a stop button. It never withdraws while you are using it, whether that
is hovering over it, holding a menu open or working in the settings panel.
Usable without looking at it
Every control is now named for VoiceOver, the playhead is a real slider that
speaks its position, and the title announces as one sentence with the play state
in front of it.
Reduce Motion now stops the turning record and the standby light's pulse, and
holds a scrolling title still.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.2.2
A way to chip in, if you want to
There is now a Support GlassDeck row on the widget's right-click menu and
on the menu bar menu. It opens a GitHub Sponsors page in your browser.
That is all it does. No payment goes through the app, nothing is unlocked by
it, and GlassDeck is free with or without it. If you would rather it were not
there, it is one line in a menu and it never asks twice.
Nothing else changed in this release.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.2.1
The artwork tile turns over
On the Full layout, switching between the album cover and the record no longer
cuts from one to the other. The tile turns over on its vertical axis, half a
second, with the cover on one face and the disc on the other. They are two faces
of the same object, so it turns rather than swapping.
If Reduce Motion is on in System Settings, the change happens at once with no
movement. That is new here, and it is the first thing in the widget to honour
the setting.
Nothing else changed. Same permissions, same sources, same data handling as
1.2.0 — which is to say, nothing leaves your Mac.
macOS 14 or later. Universal, and notarized.
Apple silicon is tested. Intel is built for but still untested — if you run one,
a note through Report a Problem would be welcome.
GlassDeck 1.2.0
GlassDeck 1.2.0
The full panel's artwork can be a turning record
A new button beside the visualiser one swaps the album art for a record with
the cover as its label. Just the disc — no tonearm, no status light, because a
112-point tile has no room for an arm to sweep. The two square layouts already
offer a record, so this is only on the wide one.
Six scrubber handles
The grab handle used to be a white disc with a small Apple glyph in it. Now
it is a choice: Dot, Note, Star, Bolt, Record or Apple, with everything but the
disc drawn on its own at full size.
They take your tint and push it toward white on a dark panel or black on a
light one, so the handle stays yours and stays visible where it crosses its own
progress. The plain disc is still the easiest thing to aim at, and the settings
note says so.
The source is now its app's own icon
Instead of the word "Music" or "Chrome" after the artist, the widget shows that
application's icon, read from your Mac rather than shipped inside GlassDeck. A
long artist name can no longer squeeze it off the panel — the artist truncates
instead.
Report a problem, from inside the app
Under About on either menu, and in the settings panel. Pick a category, write a
sentence, and GlassDeck fills in the rest: version, macOS, both permission
states, what it is reading and what that source can do, and your current
appearance. You see the whole thing before anything happens, and can edit or
delete any of it.
Nothing is transmitted. One button opens a pre-filled GitHub issue in your
browser, the other copies the report so you can send it however you like. The
track and artist are deliberately left out.
When a browser refuses, it now says so
If your browser will not run JavaScript, GlassDeck could not tell you — the
refusal looked identical to "this browser has no music playing", so it stayed
silent and appeared to be stuck on whatever played last.
It now says so, and names all three causes, because they are indistinguishable
from the outside: the Apple Events switch being off, the browser sitting on its
profile picker where that menu is greyed out, or the music playing in a site you
installed from the browser's own Install button, which runs in a window that
refuses regardless. That last one is the one nobody works out alone.
Also
Shuffle and repeat now re-seat themselves on what your player reports, so
changing them inside Music or Spotify no longer leaves the widget's buttons a
step out for the rest of the session.
Small print in both settings panels was too faint to read on a light panel.
Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
On Intel Macs: this build contains the Intel architecture and it is
verified present, but it has only been run on Apple silicon so far. If you
are on an Intel Mac and something misbehaves, please open an issue.
Installing over an earlier version
Drag the new copy over the old one. Your settings, position and permissions are
kept, because the app is signed the same way and macOS records those against the
signature rather than the copy.
GlassDeck 1.1.0
GlassDeck 1.1.0
The full panel shows the artwork and the spectrum at once
Seeing the visualiser used to cost you the album art: the wide layout handed its
artwork slot over to the spectrum, and you picked one or the other.
There is room for both. The cover stays where it is, and the spectrum now runs
as a band across the panel beside it — behind the title and artist, and along
the whole length of the progress bar.
A waveform button sits next to the settings button. Each click steps to the next
style, and the last step turns it off, so it is the on/off switch as well. Six
styles: Bars, Mirror, Line, Ribbon, Wave and Dots.
The narrow layouts are unchanged. Compact and Vinyl still trade the artwork for
the spectrum, because they have nowhere else to put it.
Shuffle and repeat stay in step with your player
If you changed repeat or shuffle inside Music or Spotify rather than on the
widget, the widget's button did not notice, and every press after that landed a
step out — permanently. It now takes its cue from what the player actually
reports.
Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
On Intel Macs: this build contains the Intel architecture and it is
verified present, but it has only been run on Apple silicon so far. If you
are on an Intel Mac and something misbehaves, please open an issue.
Installing over an earlier version
Drag the new copy over the old one. Your settings, position and permissions are
kept, because the app is signed the same way and macOS records those against the
signature rather than the copy.
GlassDeck 1.0.3
GlassDeck 1.0.3
The application is unchanged from 1.0.2. Only the installer is different. If
GlassDeck is already running, there is nothing here for you.
The install window now says what to do
It used to be two icons side by side with nothing explaining that they were
meant to meet. The easy mistake is to double-click GlassDeck where it sits,
which runs it from the disk image rather than installing it: the image then
refuses to eject, and the app disappears when it finally does.
The window now says to drag GlassDeck to Applications, and then says the part
most installers leave out — open it from your Applications folder afterwards,
not from the disk image window, and what goes wrong if you do.
Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
On Intel Macs: this build contains the Intel architecture and it is
verified present, but it has only been run on Apple silicon so far. If you
are on an Intel Mac and something misbehaves, please open an issue.
Installing over an earlier version
Drag the new copy over the old one. Your settings, position and permissions are
kept, because the app is signed the same way and macOS records those against the
signature rather than the copy.
GlassDeck 1.0.2
GlassDeck 1.0.2
Three fixes to the update check, all found by watching someone use it for the
first time.
Updates are now on the widget's menu too
They used to live only behind the menu bar icon. If your menu bar is full, macOS
drops that icon silently, so a new version could be published and never
mentioned anywhere you would look. Right-click the widget and Updates is there,
with the offer above it.
Clicking the offer no longer makes it disappear
Opening the download page used to mark that version as seen, so if you clicked
to find out what the update was, the offer was gone afterwards. It now stays
until you actually install the update, at which point it goes by itself. If you
want rid of it sooner there is an explicit Skip This Version under Updates.
Check Now tells you what it found
Clicking it closed the menu and said nothing, so the only way to learn the
result was to open the menu again and know where to look. It now answers with a
dialog: the new version and what changed, or that you are on the latest, or why
the check could not be made. The automatic daily check stays silent.
Requires macOS 14 or later. Universal: Apple silicon and Intel.
On Intel Macs: this build contains the Intel architecture and it is
verified present, but it has only been run on Apple silicon so far. If you
are on an Intel Mac and something misbehaves, please open an issue.
Installing over an earlier version
Drag the new copy over the old one. Your settings, position and permissions are
kept, because the app is signed the same way and macOS records those against the
signature rather than the copy.