Xenon v4.9.0: announcements you control, widgets that can hear your audio, and a much calmer screen
Xenon can now tell you when something happens without ever counting you, widgets can hear how loud your apps actually are and move your sound to other speakers, and a lot of graphics work that was happening around the clock for nobody has been stopped.
New
Announcements, and the switches that control them. Two toggles in Settings, Updates. Announcements and news is a short note when a version ships or something lands in the Store, at most once a day. The other is the existing card for limited editions and supporter packs, and it can finally be switched back on: before, dismissing it lived only in the browser you pressed it in. Some announcements only apply to some people, and that filtering happens on your PC, because your dashboard downloads the same list everyone gets and decides for itself. Nothing about what you have installed is sent anywhere to work that out.
Announcements can ask you a question. Two to five answers, one tap. What gets sent is the option you chose and nothing else, not even a time, so there is no way to ask what any particular PC answered. Closing the card sends nothing.
Install counts for community creations, without anyone being counted. Opt-in in Settings, Updates. Installing from the Store adds 1 to that creation's counter and nothing else is sent. Your own dashboard remembers what it already counted, which is exactly why nothing identifying has to be sent to avoid double counting. Off for existing installs.
Widgets can hear your audio. Xenon Helper now measures how loud each app actually is, the same reading the Windows volume mixer draws, about twelve times a second. A widget can finally show a meter that follows the music instead of an animation that looks like one. The permission you approve is what starts the measurement, and it stops when no widget wants it.
Widgets can move your sound to another output. A separate permission from volume control on purpose, because approving one is not approving the other. Outputs only, chosen from what Windows already shows you. There is no way for a widget to change which microphone is listening.
Fixed
The switches that pause animations now pause everything they promise. The Deck key glow, the clock colon, the Xenon button shimmer, the Claude dot and the System graphs all escaped all four quiet states, which is why turning the power options on could show no improvement at all.
The System graphs were costing more than the rest of the dashboard combined. Eight graphs, each with a glow drawn as a real blur recomputed every frame, moving most of the time because a new reading arrives every second. The glow is now a wider, fainter copy of the line and looks the same.
A widget you cannot see stops working as if you were watching it, and widgets are now told when they go off screen so they can stop their own timers.
An animated background no longer draws more pixels than any screen needs.
A tab group holding a Store widget no longer disappears after a restart. Every startup briefly stripped it, and when the dashboard happened to save itself in that moment the loss became permanent.
The Agenda tabs no longer stop responding. They were acting on a different Agenda tile than the one you were looking at.
A question from Claude no longer asks your permission to be asked. Questions go straight to the terminal where they can actually be answered, and the tile shows them as a notice. Permission requests for things that really run on your PC are unchanged, and a long one no longer gets clipped at the bottom where the buttons are.
The greeting waits until you are actually there instead of playing to an empty room at five in the morning and marking itself done for the day.
Plus: the Claude Code widget's two on-screen surfaces are now switchable, the Store button in Settings is readable on a pale accent, widgets can keep an API key out of the package when a service wants it in the address, and adding a custom widget to a tab asks you which one.
Full details for every change are in CHANGELOG.md.
Installing
New install: download Xenon-Setup-x64.exe below. Existing install: Xenon updates itself, or use Settings, Updates.
Some antivirus software flags the setup script because it downloads files and sets Xenon to start with Windows, and the installer is not code signed yet. The hashes above are signed, so you can verify your download against SHA256SUMS.