v0.1.0 — first release

Wallpaper, system accent and mail notifications for Windows, as one thing rather than
four utilities that ignore each other. Pick a wallpaper, and Lucent derives an eight-shade
palette from it and applies it as the whole Windows accent — title bars, Start, the
notification centre, menus and its own interface, all from the same source.

First public release.

Downloads

Lucent-windows-x64.zip — this is the one you want.
Unzip and run .\install.ps1. Installs per-user to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Lucent, no
administrator rights, no services.

Lucent-TaskbarGlass-windows-x64.zip — optional.
Makes the taskbar translucent and tints it with your accent. Lucent is fully functional
without it. See Antivirus below before installing.

What's in it

Theme — derives a palette from your wallpaper and applies the full Windows accent
ramp, then hands the colour to DWM so surfaces recolour immediately instead of at next
sign-in. lucent theme --check reports whether every accent surface agrees.

Wallpaper — search, apply, favourites, timed rotation, and a never-repeat history.

Mail — desktop notifications for important mail plus a lightweight inbox. Any IMAP
account, with presets for Gmail, Proton Mail (via Bridge), Outlook, Fastmail and iCloud.
Gmail additionally supports OAuth 2.0 with PKCE. Credentials are DPAPI-encrypted and bound
to your Windows account. Background checks run through Task Scheduler, so notifications
keep arriving with Lucent closed.

Notifications — Lucent draws its own panel rather than using the Windows toast: a
rounded layered window that slides up above the taskbar in the current accent colour, with
a dismiss button and a click target that opens the message. The sound is synthesised, not
sampled — two sine notes a perfect fifth apart, peaking below full scale so it sits under
whatever you're already listening to.

Requires

Windows 11. The theming works on Windows 10; the glass taskbar does not.

Antivirus, and why there are two downloads

The core package does nothing unusual — it writes its own registry values, draws its own
window, and polls IMAP.

TaskbarGlass does one thing that is: it gets a DLL loaded into explorer.exe. That is the
only way to restyle the taskbar, and it uses InitializeXamlDiagnosticsEx — a Microsoft
API, the same one Visual Studio's Live Visual Tree uses. Windows performs the load, no
process memory is written, nothing is patched.

It is still a third-party DLL inside a system process, and that is what antivirus
software reacts to, regardless of how it got there. So it ships separately: the download
almost everyone wants raises nothing, and the one that does is chosen deliberately. Its
installer explains what it does and waits for you to agree, and the whole mechanism is
about forty lines in lucent_taskbar/inject.cpp.

There is no trick that makes the warning go away, and the ones that exist — obfuscating
the injection, packing the binary, having the installer add antivirus exclusions — would
each make it less trustworthy rather than more.

The binaries are unsigned, so SmartScreen will warn on first run for both packages
until the project has enough downloads to build a reputation. Click More info → Run
anyway, or check the hashes below first.

Known limitations

• The Proton preset is untested. The implementation is complete, but verifying it
  needs Proton Mail Bridge, which requires a paid Proton plan. Everything else is exercised
  against a live account. Reports welcome.
• Gmail OAuth needs your own Google Cloud client. Every Gmail read scope is classified
  restricted by Google, so a shared one would require an annual third-party security
  assessment. The app-password path needs none of that and is the default.
• It depends on undocumented Windows internals. DwmSetColorizationParameters is
  exported by ordinal, and the XAML tap relies on diagnostics interfaces Microsoft doesn't
  promise to keep. A Windows feature update can break either.
• Applying a theme restarts StartMenuExperienceHost and ShellExperienceHost so they
  pick up the colour without a sign-out. An open Start menu closes; nothing else is
  affected.

Verify your download

Lucent-windows-x64.zip
3ea30add7dad56bca782b7400734a1f6feb2497b9a2a34dff15e79af2278f4d5

Lucent-TaskbarGlass-windows-x64.zip
56107b29861900a44c0a39942c97885646136aeca12dacf96473063c02439877

Get-FileHash .\Lucent-windows-x64.zip -Algorithm SHA256

Building it yourself

Needs the Flutter SDK and Visual Studio 2022 with the Desktop development with C++
workload.

git clone https://github.com/novaxertz/lucent.git
cd lucent
.\build-all.ps1 -Zip

MIT licensed.