2.0.0-rc.2

This RC is a large reliability and platform update: menu bar identity/ordering, layout persistence, notch overflow, settings UI, Swift 6.2 / concurrency, and Sparkle update hosting.

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Highlights

• Menu bar reliability overhaul — safer saved-layout apply/persist, stronger item identity matching, and fewer false “reorder storms,” especially with Control Center items, dynamic titles, and multi-display setups.
• Settings & onboarding refresh — redesigned settings UI, glass tour onboarding, stronger AX identity / click paths.
• Swift 6.2 + approachable concurrency — MainActor default isolation on the app target, AXSwift6, EventTap synchronization, and cleanup of pre–Swift 6 GCD/Timer patterns.
• Update distribution — Sparkle ZIP/deltas/appcast publish to thaw-app/updates, with a mirror for legacy stonerl Pages installs.

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Menu bar & layout

Identity, ordering, and clicks

• Deterministic visual ordering with stable identifier tie-breaks (no more shuffle when minX ties).
• Volatile metric titles (e.g. CPU 12% → CPU 43%) canonicalized so saved layouts and failure ledgers keep matching; prune stale title-variant saved entries that fueled reorder storms (#842, thanks @danielhopkins).
• Stop provisional identities from scrambling saved layout (#863).
• Failure ledger stamped with build version so marks clear on update; avoid exclusivity violation when persisting the ledger (thanks @VailElla).
• Click reaction verification: success only if the owner shows a real UI reaction, not just event delivery.
• AX identity catalog + ControlItemPair frame fallback (fixes silent hidden-section death when control items could not be identified, #754).
• Optional AX click delivery (useAXClickDelivery, default off) with synthetic-click fallback.
• Report control items the menu bar accepts but does not render (notch occlusion), with consecutive-sample confirmation (#570).
• Unresponsive owner / window-mismatch error types for clearer click failure handling.

Saved layout & persistence

• Do not move items on untrustworthy observations (#849).
• Block saveSectionOrder while layout divergence is still pending.
• Do not persist collapsed hidden sections (#795).
• Do not persist layouts with an unresolved always-hidden divider (#849).
• Do not persist notch-overflow ejections as user intent (#790 / #796, thanks @lathe-agent-oa).
• Skip bulk apply while source PIDs are unresolved (#784 / #785, thanks @lathe-agent-oa).
• Refuse saved-layout bulk apply while the hidden-section dividers are collapsed / zero-width — same hiddenSectionHasRoom gate the save path already uses — so a collapsed reading cannot drag the whole hidden section and then get persisted (#868 / #876, thanks @TheBenMeadows).
• Revalidate hidden-section geometry before the move batch runs so apply does not proceed on a stale collapsed reading (#876).
• Prefer exact saved identifiers; avoid ambiguous multi-instance divergence matches (#714 / #716, thanks @t4sh).
• Defer apply/persist on unsettled or cross-display geometry; clear stuck profile flags (#702, #717, #743).
• Restore unresolved-sourcePID gate in applySavedLayout.
• Ignore unresolved Control Center placeholders (#810, thanks @VailElla).
• Resolve parked items titled with their bundle ID (e.g. Little Snitch) (#709, #795 / #797, thanks @lathe-agent-oa).
• Restore legacy profile layout snapshots (#778 / #779, thanks @ShiroKSH).
• Delete profile manifest entries even when the file is already missing.
• Negative-cache TTL for source PID lookups uses per-window backoff instead of a flat 60s (#856, thanks @lathe-agent-oa).

Notch overflow

• Only run overflow on the main display; fail closed if active menu bar display is unknown (#808 / #809, thanks @lathe-agent-oa).
• Keep the visible control item in place during overflow (#742).
• Keep overflow running outside profile applies.
• Avoid redundant full-sort replays (#822, thanks @alvst).

Moves, rehide, and multi-instance

• Defer item moves while a menu bar item menu is tracking.
• Require stable divergence; suppress bulk cursor warps (#705, #723, #736, #750).
• Stop bulk-apply pointer hijack; release on user input.
• Keep menu bar move events out of screen corners — stops Hot Corner / Show Desktop false triggers (#625, #766 / #774, thanks @ZeterMordio).
• Recover blocked items before alerting on hidden-section drags (#744).
• Recover control items after lookup failure.
• Bail instead of trapping on inverted control-item order.
• Keep timed rehide armable after deferred rehide; anchor rehide to a neighbor in the item’s own section so temporarily shown items are not rehidden into Visible (#859 / #860, thanks @andredlng).
• Prevent duplicate Thaw instances from competing (#821, thanks @alvst).
• Avoid repeated source PID cache scans (#820, thanks @alvst).
• Each layout-reset waiter gets its own cache continuation.
• Configurable pre-move input-pause threshold (#756, thanks @subway-jack).
• Fall back to Thaw Bar when hiding app menus under fullscreen (#740 / #741, thanks @auspic7).
• Defer/stabilize moves that previously relocated system modules mid-interaction (e.g. AudioVideoModule / WeType, #746) and reduced cursor teleport / dance storms (#718, #723, #750).

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Settings, profiles & onboarding

• Settings UI redesign (native grouped forms, relocated options, refreshed Ice UI primitives, sidebar search).
• Glass tour onboarding in first-launch and settings.
• Unconfigured displays fall back to global configuration instead of hardcoded defaults (fixes spacing resets on Space/display changes).
• Ice V1 appearance data converted at import time.
• Cleared hotkey bindings removed instead of persisting JSON null.
• Authorization retry allowed after denial (#780 / #781, thanks @VailElla).
• Full onboarding button hit targets (#724, thanks @eli-yip).
• IceBar naming leftover on an Advanced setting corrected (#829).
• Settings About/repository URL updated (thanks @cbguder).
• Hidden debug flags moved into the Defaults registry.
• Unreachable Ice-era migrations removed.
• Layout reset target picker with legacy section moves.

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Appearance, capture & IceBar

• Tint no longer covers menu bar items; tint renders above the menu bar under Reduce Transparency (#844, #700).
• Capture bounds validated before WindowServer handoff (#759 / #813).
• Individual captures use the captured scale (layout icon sizing, #703).
• SCStream pinned to 32BGRA; shareable-content fetches coalesced.
• Image cache: LRU/concurrency overhaul, lossless disk keys, rate-limited on-screen capture, stale display ID fallback (#749, thanks @hxu).
• Memory: detach cropped glyphs, lower icon refresh, stop background captures (#680).
• Tooltips stay above Thaw Bar / IceBar grid (#760 / #782, thanks @VailElla) with watchdog placement (#734).
• Cursor restore after profile apply uses CoreGraphics space (fixes multi-monitor warp).
• Virtual display resolver removed (brief resolution / screen-shrink side effects, #708).

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Accessibility, hooks & events

• Bounded AX messaging timeouts in the item service and event path (#767).
• Consolidated item failure ledgers; quieter expected procNotFound.
• Hook timeouts bounded with process-group teardown; teardown restored after Subprocess 0.5 upgrade.
• Mouse-moved handling throttled by time, not event count.
• Shared/adaptive Mission Control detection (#777).
• EventTap shared runtime state synchronized.
• Clicking items in Thaw Bar no longer spikes CPU via runaway work (#757).

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Performance

• Rate-limited on-screen image capture path.
• Memoized per-row item search work.
• Shared Mission Control detection.
• Time-based mouse-moved throttle.

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Platform & engineering

• Swift 6.2 packaging alignment.
• MainActor default isolation on the app target.
• @Observable migration for ObservableObject surfaces.
• SourcePIDCache converted to an actor.
• Hooks/spacing via swift-subprocess (0.5).
• swift-algorithms adopted; package-underuse cleanup.
• Virtual display resolver removed.
• SettingsURIParser extracted; fuzz + contract tests.
• Broader unit coverage (settings, HID, replay, layout gates, URI, search, Swift Testing migration).
• Sonar excludes Icon Composer bundles (thanks @VailElla).

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Release, CI & docs

• Sparkle payloads published to thaw-app/updates (#840); DMGs remain on GitHub Releases.
• Appcast mirrored to legacy stonerl Pages (#843).
• Org CI / brand-assets adoption; Sparkle no longer auto-publishes on every tag push.
• OpenSSF / Scorecard / CodeQL / SLSA provenance / OSV SCA hardening; Sonar coverage path fix.
• README restyle/restructure; RELEASES.md, verifying releases, governance/security docs; contribution/install docs (thanks @t4sh); URI scheme docs (thanks @davidnichols-ops).
• Crowdin / localization syncs (#694, #804–#807).

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Contributors

Thanks to everyone who landed fixes in this RC:

@alvst · @andredlng · @auspic7 · @cbguder · @danielhopkins · @davidnichols-ops · @eli-yip · @hxu · @lathe-agent-oa · @ShiroKSH · @subway-jack · @t4sh · @TheBenMeadows · @VailElla · @ZeterMordio

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Notable issue closures

Area	Issues
Layout / identity / persist	#702, #705, #709, #714, #717, #718, #776, #778, #783, #784, #789, #790, #795, #826, #828, #849, #863, #868
Notch / overflow	#570, #808
Moves / cursor / Hot Corners	#625, #723, #736, #744, #746, #750, #766
Control items / hidden section	#740, #754, #859
Appearance / capture / memory	#680, #700, #703, #708, #734, #759, #760, #844
Search / AX / Mission Control	#767, #777, #757
Settings / permissions / UX	#701, #724, #780, #829
Releases	#840, #843
Closed as duplicate	#727
Closed without code change (stale / upstream / not planned / user-resolved)	#571, #610, #649, #664, #707, #720, #721, #722, #726, #851, #852

Related merged fix PRs called out above include #716, #741, #749, #756, #774, #779, #781, #782, #785, #796, #797, #809, #810, #813, #820, #821, #822, #838, #842, #856, #860, #862, #876. Reliability stack landed via #811 → revert #857 → re-land #858.

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Upgrade notes

1. From 2.0.0-rc.1: in-place Sparkle update; failure-ledger marks clear on build change.
2. Legacy Ice / V1 appearance: converted on import.
3. Update feed: new installs use thaw-app/updates; existing stonerl feed users keep updating via the mirrored appcast.
4. Experimental: Advanced → AX click delivery remains off by default.