Workbench 2.5.0

Workbench 2.5.0

A Home worth opening, your phone on a clean stage, and a way to tell us when something goes wrong.

• Home shows what's yours. Your latest meetings with the follow-up you prepared, your Snap & Talk decks (a sample deck shows until you build one), what this Mac lets Workbench use, and the keys worth learning next. Set up a permission from the same card, or change one in System Settings; Workbench asks only when you choose to. On a work Mac it says when an administrator has to switch something on, and Copy permission details gives your IT team what to allow.
• Automatic paste, explained and on your layout. If automatic paste is off, the first copy says it needs Accessibility. Dictated words now paste with your keyboard layout's own ⌘V key, so Dvorak and Turkish F paste instead of sending another shortcut.
• Learn your keys. Your keys shows your shortcuts on a keyboard and rings the next ones worth learning. Practice one, change it, or put Snap on ⌥G in one click. A key counts as learned once you've practised it or used it for real.
• Present with your phone. Plug in your iPhone with a cable and it appears in the preview before you press Present. One line says what is happening and the one next step. If the phone doesn't appear, Can't see your phone? walks through the checks.
• Report a problem. Choose Help › Report a Problem…, say what happened, and add a screenshot or a short voice note if it helps. The report goes privately to the Workbench team, and its receipt says when it was received. The same button sits beside a Dictate or Snap problem.
• Every page, one way. Dictate, Meetings, Snap, Snap & Talk, Draw, History, Library, Persona and Settings share one set of cards, notes and a single primary action. A problem looks the same on every page, with its fix beside it.
• The Mac's own menus. Hide Others, Show All, Zoom, Bring All to Front and Redo are where you expect them, and ⌘M minimises the window. Workbench reopens where you left it, and opening at login keeps it in the menu bar.

Also in this release:

• History you can use again. Search saved work, review a transcript, and reuse it from the same place.
• Meetings keep their words. Copy a finished transcript directly, and a recovered meeting keeps the text it had.
• Dictation that fits. Words land with the spacing and capitals the insertion point needs, and names keep their capitals mid-sentence. Cancelling a paste leaves your transcript on the clipboard.
• First speech setup you control. The model download is explicit and cancellable, and files already on this Mac are kept.
• Library and Packs. Resources are easier to find, reuse and recover. Installed Packs work without setup.
• Hand off without an assistant connected. Copy instructions carries the whole request, the selected text and the attachments to name, ready to paste into any assistant. Snap & Talk names the app it actually opened.
• Updates in one click from the sidebar, with a line about what's new.
• Persona: your camera and your photo, one click apart. Choose Persona leads with My Profile and Live Camera, and switching fades one into the other in place. React to my voice rings both. Live Camera offers Centre Stage where the camera supports it and opens Video Effects…, with gesture reactions off, so a thumbs-up mid-demo fires nothing. Connecting headphones while the ring listens can no longer stop Workbench.

What's gone or paused since 2.4.1:

• Read is retired: its page, its voices and its Services menu item. Text you saved in Read is kept, word for word, in Library.
• Switch to Browser Tab is paused. Saved links and browser settings are kept.
• Present's gentle motion is retired, and a scene can no longer be set as your desktop picture. Restore desktop still puts back a picture Workbench applied earlier.
• Library's From iPhone section and the photo handoff settings are gone; they never worked in the public app. Photos already saved on this Mac are untouched.

When you're ready, update from Settings: Workbench updates in 2.4.1, or General › Updates from 2.5.0 on. Your saved work stays in this edition's library.

First download: unzip Workbench, move it to Applications in your home folder, then open it there. When replacing an existing copy, quit it and use the same Applications folder.

Verification

• Production 2.5.0, build 20261008222126, Apple Silicon (arm64), source af19bda. It carries everything merged since 2.4.1 and the 7–8 October work: #317 (the release train: Present, Report a Problem, the desktop window and Home, Settings, menus and every page), #318 (release gate), #319 (Persona Live Camera and My Profile), #320 (permissions on work Macs, automatic paste, ⌘V by layout), #321 (microphone restart), #322/#325 (notes) and #326 (a test that needed the foreground).
• Exact-source main CI passed. The signed release run passed 343 Swift package tests (two intentional screen-control skips), 325 StageKit tests / 6,458 assertions with no failures, all configured harnesses and the packaged self-checks.
• Developer ID signing, Apple notarization, stapled ticket and Gatekeeper passed on the final extracted ZIP. Apple submission: 22c607ff-4bff-4e30-b897-febd4cd46c9b.
• Native, on the exact package: it replaced an installed production 2.4.1 in place, opened, and kept every saved record (133 transcripts, 5 meetings, Library, Packs, Snaps, scenes), adding only Read's saved text to Library, byte for byte; Microphone, Accessibility, Screen Recording and Camera stayed allowed; dictation into TextEdit pasted automatically with no paste problem recorded. Report a Problem's Sentry keys are present in Stable.
• Archive: Workbench.zip, 75,756,934 bytes. SHA-256: 32b1eb2b15c570d745c81b6d0e021a25ceb318b16b647db5cf281cf8a9dcbc42.

Verification limits

This release attests the smoke, D1 dictation and the signed 2.4.1 → 2.5.0 upgrade on the package (a bounded slice by the maintainer's decision, #7); he is testing the other foundation journeys in production and reporting through Report a Problem. Present with an iPhone was checked on the 2.5.0 Preview (picture drawn on the stage, seen by eye), not on this package. Not newly certified: Present in a call's shared screen, report attachments sent live, VoiceOver across the redesigned pages, external displays, and the Permissions panel on a standard account, an MDM-managed Mac or macOS 27.