Xenon v4.11.4: the top bar is yours to arrange, and the weather stops going blank
Two things in this release. The top bar stops being fixed furniture — every button in it can be hidden, reordered, or moved to the other side, and your dashboard pages can carry names instead of identical dots. And the weather tile stops going blank on you.
Everything below works the same in the full top bar and in the Dynamic Island, so none of it depends on which of the two you use.
Added
The buttons in the top bar are yours to arrange. Lock, Ambient, Xenon, Search, Layout, Apps and your favourite apps can each be hidden, dragged into the order you want, and moved to the left or the right side. The list is in Settings, under Dynamic Island, below the island elements.
Until now the only way to get rid of a button you never press was to close a whole rail, which took the others with it, or to switch the bar off entirely — which did not remove the buttons at all, it just moved them.
Two buttons always stay: Settings and Layout. They are the way back in rather than features — one undoes anything, the other lets you rearrange the dashboard again — and on a touchscreen with no keyboard, hiding either would leave no way to open it. In exchange they now sit back visually: no plate, no outline, dimmed until you touch them, so the buttons you actually chose to keep are the ones that stand out.
Your dashboard pages can have names, and the dots at the top can show them. The pages used to be a row of identical dots: nothing told you which one held your music and which one held your PC stats, and you found out by swiping. In Layout mode there is now a pencil button next to the page controls that names the page you are on, and a switch in Settings turns those dots into buttons carrying the names. It is off to begin with, so nothing changes for a dashboard you have already arranged.
The space you free can hold something. A widget can now draw a small readout among the buttons — a temperature, a count, a meter, with one button you can press — in the position you put it. It is drawn by Xenon rather than by the widget, like the island and the badges, so nothing about how widgets are sandboxed changes. Badges next to the clock can now be tapped too, and that is a permission you grant separately from the badge itself: a widget that could only show you a number cannot quietly become one you can press after an update.
Everything a widget puts in the bar is listed in one place, with a switch each. Island line, chip next to the clock, mini widget among the buttons — each extension shows up in Settings with what it adds and a switch to turn it off, without uninstalling it. That list existed but only ever said "island".
One button puts the whole bar back. Style, island elements, button layout, side rails, clock format, and every extension switched back on. It asks first: it undoes an arrangement you may have spent time on.
An empty side rail no longer leaves its arrow behind, and the clock is centred again when you strip the bar down — with the date, weather and music hidden it sat 5.5px above the middle and read as crooked.
Fixed
The weather tile no longer empties for good until you reload the dashboard. After a while it went blank and stayed blank, however long you left it, while the weather itself was perfectly available — opening the same address in a browser at that exact moment returned the forecast.
A request to fetch the weather had no time limit. Almost always it answers in a moment, but if one ever hangs — a sleep and resume, a hiccup in the network stack — it never finishes and never fails either, and Xenon skips a refresh while the previous one is still going. So one stuck request means every later refresh is skipped too, for as long as the page stays open. On a dashboard left running for days, it only has to happen once. Requests now have a deadline. The same gap existed in the readings for system, network and audio and is closed there too, and a failed refresh now keeps the last forecast and marks it as not current instead of throwing it away. Reported on Discord.
The weather no longer depends on one single service being reachable. To ask for a forecast Xenon first has to know where you are, and in automatic mode it got that from one address on the internet. A DNS blocker, a router filter, an antivirus web filter or a company network is enough to make that address unreachable — and then the two good forecast services, which need coordinates, were skipped without a word and the feature quietly fell back to the third and least reliable one. It kept working, with coarser data, until the day that last service was busy too and the tile went blank. Xenon now asks a second and a third source when the first does not answer.
A weather tile that cannot show anything now says why. "Weather unavailable" was the same sentence for three different problems — your position could not be determined, the city you typed does not exist, or the services did not answer — and only one of them is fixable by you. The tile now names the cause and suggests what to do about it, in all eleven languages.
The YouTube and Twitch widgets now tell you they need an account, instead of sitting there empty. With no account connected, both tiles took all their contents off screen and left the logo on an empty background — identical to a tile that had broken. Each now shows one line saying the account has to be connected, and tapping it opens the page where you connect it. They also stop saying "Loading…" over an answer they already have: a definite "no account" used to sit on the loading line indefinitely. Five languages showed one of these messages in English; all of the new text is available in all 11.
Xenon no longer opens in the shape of a screen you may not own. On a PC with no CORSAIR Xeneon Edge attached, the app opened with that 14.5" panel's own 3.556:1 proportions — a wide slot across the middle of your monitor with desktop showing above and below it, and it was the first thing you saw after installing. The window now opens at the size of the screen hosting it, at 88% of it, centred. Where an Edge is attached nothing changes: that panel is still taken over whole. It is also no longer created full-screen and then immediately shrunk, so opening Xenon does not cover your desktop for a moment first.
The first question Xenon asks now has your screens in it. On first run it asks whether the dashboard should live on this PC or on your phone or tablet, and the "on this PC" side lists your monitors — except that list arrived only with the first update sent after the dashboard had loaded, so the question could open with no screens on it, and stay that way.
And a screen can now be picked whatever your system calls it. On Linux an output the system has no model string for had no identity to save, so it was left out of the tray's "Show on" entirely and the picker drew it as a button that refused to be pressed. On macOS the opposite: every screen is named, but the name is the display's model number, so two identical monitors — the ordinary way to own two — were the same screen as far as Xenon was concerned. Both showed as the primary one, and choosing the second moved the window to the first, quietly and for good. A screen is now identified by where it is when its name cannot tell it apart from another.
One limit worth knowing on Linux: under Wayland a window is not allowed to place itself, so which screen it opens on is the compositor's decision. The choice is saved either way and is honoured on Windows, macOS and X11.
The full changelog is in CHANGELOG.md.