McAwake 2.0.0

Changed

• The app is now called McAwake (previously NightOwl). The old name
  collided with a long-established, unrelated macOS app, which made the
  project effectively unfindable by name. Everything the app does is
  unchanged; this release is major only because upgrading is not
  automatic — see below. The 🦉 icon stays.
• Renamed with it: the bundle (McAwake.app), the bundle identifier
  (com.mcawake.app), the LaunchDaemon (com.mcawake.auto), the daemon
  script (/usr/local/bin/mcawake-auto.sh), the log
  (/var/log/mcawake.log), the Homebrew cask
  (brew install --cask taufiqxr/tap/mcawake), and the repository
  (github.com/taufiqxr/McAwake).

Upgrading from NightOwl — read this

• Uninstall NightOwl first, using its uninstall.sh (from the 1.x
  source or the v1.12.0 release). McAwake cannot see or remove the
  com.nightowl.auto daemon: the label no longer matches anything it
  looks for. Left installed, that root daemon keeps enforcing its old
  mode every 20 seconds and will silently fight every choice you make in
  McAwake.
• Because the bundle identifier changed, macOS treats McAwake as a new
  app: your watched services are not carried over (they lived in the
  old identifier's preferences domain), Start at Login re-registers, and
  the notification permission is requested again. Re-add watches from the
  Servers menu.
• The old /var/log/nightowl.log is left in place; delete it if you want
  it gone.

Fixed

• Homebrew install docs told users to pass --no-quarantine, which
  Homebrew removed in 6.0 (deprecated in 5.0, no replacement) — the
  command now fails outright with invalid option. README, the landing
  page, and the tap's cask caveats now use
  xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine as a post-install step instead.
  Note for whoever picks this up: Homebrew intends to
  drop support for casks that fail Gatekeeper
  on 2026-09-01, so the tap's usefulness is time-limited unless the app
  gets notarized.

NightOwl 1.12.0

Added

• .pkg installer for non-developers (also attached retroactively to
  the v1.11.1 release, install-verified on a real Mac): double-click →
  standard macOS wizard → app in /Applications, auto-launched by a
  postinstall running as the console user. Installer-placed files carry
  no quarantine flag, so only the pkg needs the one right-click → Open —
  the app itself launches clean. Built by build.sh --release; the
  release script attaches both zip and pkg.

Fixed

• The Claude submenu listed only some open sessions. Detection matched
  ps -o comm against the exact string claude, but comm holds whatever
  the process was invoked as — an absolute path (~/.local/bin/claude)
  for most sessions, bare claude only for those resolved via PATH. Both
  forms occur on one machine, so sessions were dropped seemingly at
  random (3 of 4 on the maintainer's Mac). Now matched on comm's
  basename, which also tolerates install paths containing spaces.
  Deliberately not switched to ps -o ucomm: Claude Code rewrites its
  process title, so ucomm reports the version string.
• build.sh --install could not replace a pkg-installed copy. The
  installer places the app as root:wheel, so the unprivileged rm -rf
  failed — but only after pkill had already quit the running app,
  leaving the stale binary in /Applications and an empty menu bar. The
  file operations now escalate with sudo when the existing install
  isn't writable; open stays unprivileged so the app never runs as root.
• Builds inside iCloud Drive/Dropbox folders stamped
  com.apple.fileprovider.* xattrs onto the bundle — carried into
  /Applications and release zips, and Spotlight can silently skip bundles
  carrying them. build.sh now strips all xattrs before signing; the
  v1.11.1 zip was re-uploaded clean.

NightOwl 1.11.1

Fixed

• Detection froze (Claude section vanished) when ps output crossed
  64KB. shell() waited for the child to exit before reading its
  output — a classic pipe-buffer deadlock, latent since 1.0.0, triggered
  the day the machine's process list grew big enough. Output is now read
  before waiting. Found live: the user's Claude submenu disappeared and
  --print-claude-sessions hung, and this machine's ps output
  measured 66,655 bytes against a 65,536-byte buffer.
• A refresh already in flight silently dropped the open menu's update
  callback — completions are now queued and all run when the refresh
  lands.
• The admin dialog now says "NightOwl wants to make changes" instead
  of "osascript wants to make changes" — the privileged command runs
  in-process via NSAppleScript rather than an osascript subprocess.
  Functionally identical, far less alarming (a real user asked "what is
  osascript" mid-password-prompt).

NightOwl 1.11.0

Changed

• Mode-aware menu bar icon (user feedback: switching to Smart Auto
  didn't change the icon): 🦉 Always Awake · 🔌 Smart Auto while plugged
  in (awake because of power) · 💤 can sleep (Normal mode, or Smart Auto
  on battery) · 🪫 guard tripped · ⚠️ still appended on trouble. The
  tooltip names the mode and state.
• Mode rows got their emoji back (🦉/🔌/💤) — compact labels, but
  self-explaining and matching the menu bar icon language.

NightOwl 1.10.0

Changed

• Compact menu: labels are now terse — one status line ("🦉 Awake ·
  plugged in"), bare mode names, short actions ("Open :8899", "Copy
  URL", "Jump to terminal", "Watch :8899" with a checkmark) — and every
  explanation moved to hover tooltips. Same information, far less
  reading. Mode descriptions, guard details, watch behavior, and full
  URLs all live in the tooltips now.

NightOwl 1.9.0

Added

• Claude sessions show their given names: each session in the Claude
  submenu is now labeled by its Claude Code session name (the one set
  with /rename, or the auto-generated one) with the project folder in
  parentheses — so multiple terminals in the same folder are finally
  distinguishable. A ⚡ prefix marks sessions that are actively working
  right now; the submenu detail line adds tty and busy/idle. Source:
  Claude Code's own ~/.claude/sessions/<pid>.json files — a direct
  pid→name mapping, read locally, nothing leaves the machine.

NightOwl 1.8.1

Fixed

• Menu stutter on open (reported live minutes after 1.8.0): the
  background refresh rebuilt the open menu unconditionally when it
  landed. The menu is now only rebuilt when the detected data actually
  changed — and Claude sessions compare by pid/tty/cwd, deliberately
  ignoring the running-time clock, which ticks every second and would
  otherwise count as a "change" on every single open.

NightOwl 1.8.0

Added

• Jump to this terminal: each Claude session's submenu can now bring
  its terminal window/tab to the front — Terminal.app and iTerm2 both
  expose per-tab ttys to AppleScript, so NightOwl finds the tab owning
  the session's tty and focuses it. Only already-running terminal apps
  are scripted (a tell application to a quit app would launch it).
  First use triggers macOS's one-time "NightOwl wants to control
  Terminal" automation prompt. Sessions hosted in other apps (VS Code
  integrated terminals) get an honest "can't bring it forward" message.

Changed

• The Claude sessions item is now titled Claude (N).

Fixed

• 1–2 second menu-open lag (reported live, introduced in 1.7.0): the
  menu was running a full lsof port scan plus one lsof per Claude
  session synchronously before it could draw. The menu now opens
  instantly from cached data and refreshes itself in place moments later;
  detection runs off the main thread everywhere (including the 60s watch
  cycle), and the per-session lsof calls collapsed into one.

NightOwl 1.7.0

Added

• Claude terminals submenu: lists every open Claude Code terminal
  session, labeled by the project folder it's working in (plus its tty),
  with a submenu showing the full path, PID, and running time, and
  Reveal folder in Finder / Copy folder path actions. Detection:
  interactive claude CLI processes (real tty; background helpers
  filtered), working directory via lsof. The section hides entirely
  when no sessions are running. --print-claude-sessions CLI flag for
  verification.

NightOwl 1.6.0

Changed

• Services collapsed into one "Servers (N)" item — hover to expand.
  The first click on the owl now shows a clean menu: status, modes,
  Servers, settings. The top-level "Servers" title carries a ⚠️ badge
  whenever a watched service or tunnel is down, so trouble is still
  visible without expanding; everything inside (per-service submenus,
  Open/Copy URL, watch toggles, DOWN entries) is unchanged.