• Fix: Float no longer burns CPU in the background when other software constantly writes housekeeping files inside a watched folder. Development tools, sync clients, and databases churn hidden index and lock files all day — a hidden panel could get stuck re-scanning every watched folder several times a minute, for hours, pinning a CPU core. That churn is now filtered out entirely, and the quick-access panel updates its list directly from file events instead of re-scanning your folders.
• New: files appear as they are found. Scanning a large folder used to show loading placeholders until the entire scan finished — results now stream in live, so the first files are visible within a moment even in folders with tens of thousands of items.
• New: watching a very large folder (10,000+ files) now shows a one-time suggestion to watch specific subfolders instead — smaller folders keep Float fast and quiet.
• New: Float now watches its own scanning behavior. If folders are being re-scanned far more often than user activity can explain — the signature of the bug fixed above — it says so with a warning instead of silently working in the background.
• Fix: folder watching now starts even if you never open the panel after launch. Previously, macOS could pause the hidden panel mid-startup, leaving new files undetected until the first time you clicked the tray icon.
• Performance: recursive scans skip dependency and build folders (node_modules, Pods, DerivedData) — faster scans and less noise from folders that were never meant to be watched.
• Fix: thumbnails no longer get permanently stuck as gray loading tiles. Thumbnails that finished while folders were still loading were silently discarded, and several internal drop paths left tiles pulsing forever with the 'Preparing thumbnails' counter stuck — every path now resolves, and a thumbnail that genuinely fails shows a Retry button instead of pretending to load.
• Fix: one slow or unreachable folder (like a disconnected network drive) can no longer freeze loading forever. It is skipped with a notice after a timeout and the rest of your folders load normally.
• Fix: adding a folder now shows a 'Scanning folder…' indicator and switches to the new folder when it finishes. Previously the first folder added after onboarding said 'No files in this folder' until you clicked its tab manually.
• Fix: files created during heavy disk activity (when macOS drops file events) now trigger an automatic resync instead of never appearing, and files with '.tmp' inside their name (like report.tmpl.png) are no longer ignored by the folder watcher.
• Fix: editing a selected or staged file outside Float no longer silently clears its selection, and new files in nested watched folders now appear under the most specific folder's tab instead of the parent's.
• Fix: a refresh starting while another was still running could hide the loading indicator early, making files pop in unannounced later.
• Performance: the quick-access panel no longer re-scans every watched folder each time it opens — only when something actually changed. Files with unreadable thumbnails are remembered across launches instead of being retried (and delaying other thumbnails) at every start, and large thumbnail caches stop needlessly regenerating their oldest previews.
• Improved: updating Float no longer clears your thumbnails. Files appear instantly after an upgrade; anything that does need regenerating happens quietly in the background with a subtle progress counter in the status bar.
• Fix: files deleted, renamed, or trashed outside Float now leave the panel right away instead of lingering, and a file edited on disk refreshes its thumbnail and size instead of showing a stale preview.
• Fix: changes made in the main window — watched folders, pinned files, theme — are no longer overwritten by the quick-access panel, and the quick panel now reflects folders you add or remove without a restart.
• Fix: the panel opens in the correct spot when shown on a monitor with a different resolution or scale than the last one — for both the main panel and the quick-access panel.
• Fix: raising 'Max files shown' in Settings now rescans immediately and shows the additional files.
• Fix: very large file sizes (terabytes) now display correctly — they were previously shown about 1000x too small.
• Fix: sorting by name in Advanced view now matches the Ascending/Descending toggle instead of being reversed.
• Fix: clicking a thumbnail's Retry button or a file's pin button no longer accidentally selects the file, changes staging, or starts a stray drag.
• Fix: pressing Escape while the staging-history window is open no longer wipes your staged files — it just closes the window. During text extraction, Escape now cancels the extraction first instead of closing the preview.
• Fix: text extraction (OCR) can no longer get permanently stuck on a corrupted image or PDF; a wedged run now times out so OCR keeps working for the next file.
• Fix: two files with the same name in different folders no longer show each other's thumbnail.
• Fix: pinned files on an unplugged drive, or that scroll out of the recent list, are no longer silently unpinned — a pin is only removed once the file is confirmed deleted.
• New: the tray icon's right-click menu now includes 'Check for Updates' and 'Reset Settings' recovery options.
• Fix: a corrupted license file now recovers automatically instead of getting stuck, and the --reset recovery command no longer deletes your license.
• Fix: a rare crash when opening the right-click menu with no files selected.
• Performance: Float starts up noticeably faster and uses less memory and battery while idle. The hidden quick-access panel no longer re-scans and re-watches your folders at launch, the initial load is lighter, and background file-watching no longer wakes the CPU on a constant timer.
• Fix: automatic update checks run on their normal daily schedule again. A bug treated every successful 'you're up to date' check as a failure, which gradually stretched the gap between checks out to several days.
• Fix: with updates set to Manual, the update panel showed a stuck 'Downloading...' spinner and no way to install. It now offers a Download button — both in the status bar panel and in Settings → About — and the download starts when you click it.
• Fix: the update panel header said 'Update Ready' before the update was downloaded. It now says 'Update Available' until the download finishes.
• Fix: the panel now remembers its position separately for each display, keyed to the physical screen. Positions survive docking, unplugging, and rearranging monitors, and the panel always reappears fully on-screen.
• Fix: only dragging the panel saves its position. Previously every tray click silently memorized wherever the panel appeared, so it stopped following the tray and kept showing up at stale spots.
• Fix: Re-center now sticks — cleared positions no longer come back after a relaunch, and switching between Tray and Center position modes resets saved positions.
• Fix: the panel no longer briefly appears at the wrong spot and visibly jumps into place when opening.
• Fix: window sizes clamped to fit a small screen (e.g. a laptop) are no longer saved as your custom size and carried over to larger displays.
• Note: saved panel positions reset once on this upgrade — the old storage format couldn't be migrated reliably. Drag the panel once per display to re-save.
• Cancel long-running text extraction (OCR) from the preview pane. A Cancel button appears next to the spinner, or press Escape — the toast confirms the cancellation and frees Float for the next file.
• Cancel an in-flight update install from Settings → About. Useful if the download is taking too long or you changed your mind about a downgrade.
• Fix: pending thumbnail work for a folder you just removed no longer runs to completion. Workers drop those jobs on the next iteration instead of using CPU and battery on files the UI has already forgotten.
• Fix: watching two folders whose paths share a prefix (e.g. Photos and PhotosBackup) no longer leaks files between them when you unwatch, stage, or apply filter rules.
• Fix: hitting the free-tier folder limit now routes to the upgrade prompt with a working purchase link, not a generic 'failed to watch' toast.
• Fix: many error toasts that used to dead-end with no useful information now show a real reason and (where applicable) a recovery path — Quick Look failures, install failures, file-open failures, cache-clear failures, context-menu errors.
• Fix: the Install & Relaunch button in the panel no longer silently does nothing when something goes wrong. Failures surface in the About section so you can retry or download manually.
• Fix: Spacebar Quick Look on a file that's been deleted between selection and press no longer leaves the panel stuck open. The panel now hides normally and shows what went wrong.
• Fix: the downgrade confirmation modal now triggers correctly for tagged or partial version strings (e.g. 1.13.5-rc1). Previously, a tagged version compared as NaN and silently skipped the modal.
• Fix: critical-update kill-switch correctly handles manifest entries like 'min_required_version: 1.14' (no patch component). Previously it silently fell through to non-forced.
• Fix: folder filter rules continue to apply even if the rules cache hits a rare poisoned-mutex state. Previously the cache could silently disable itself and let filtered files leak back into the panel.
• Fix: license recovery after a partial-deactivation state no longer overwrites your tier — a concurrent tier upgrade in flight is preserved.
• Fix: when a thumbnail-rendering helper times out, Float now verifies the process is still the helper before sending SIGKILL. Closes a rare PID-reuse race that could signal an unrelated process.
• Fix: zip creation now streams files into the archive instead of buffering each whole file in memory. Multi-GB batches no longer spike RAM.
• Fix: dotfiles (.bashrc, .env, .gitignore) and files inside dotted parent folders (My.Old.Docs/report) are now classified consistently. 'Extract Text' no longer appears for non-document dotfiles.
• Fix: language detection now handles both en-US and en_US tag forms. Users on systems that report underscored locales no longer fall back to English.
• Fix: rapid folder-add-then-refresh no longer produces ghost or duplicate rows in the file grid.
• Internal: cross-codebase audit landed 14 data-integrity, paywall, and silent-failure fixes plus a smaller error-quality sweep. Audit, solution plan, and team review documented under docs/post-mortems/2026-05-15-cross-codebase-*.
• Fix: clearer message when license activation fails — including the case where all 3 activation slots are in use. Previously surfaced a bare HTTP error.
• Fix: re-activating a license on a machine that's already registered no longer shows a misleading 'activation limit reached' error. Float now detects the existing activation and syncs state instead.
• Fix: the menubar panel opens reliably on click again. A late dependency change in v1.13.13 briefly reintroduced the 1.13.x rendering regression; this release restores the fix from v1.13.9.
• Brand refresh: new Float wordmark — a bold F over a teal→cyan→indigo→purple→pink gradient arc — now consistent across the app icon, in-app logo, website favicon, Apple touch icon, social-preview card, and menu-bar tray icon.
• License activation hardened to validate keys against the live Float product on Lemon Squeezy. Existing activated licenses keep working — they re-validate seamlessly on the next periodic check.
• Fix: full-resolution preview now works for every watched folder. Previously, watching a folder outside a small hardcoded list (Documents, Downloads, Desktop, Pictures, etc.) showed thumbnails in the panel but a broken-image placeholder when you opened the preview — even though Float happily watched and listed those files. Any folder under your home directory now works.
• Fix: Settings → Cache Management → Clear Cache now also resets the failed-thumbnail blacklist. Files whose thumbnails failed three times during a transient hiccup used to stay broken until the next app restart, even after clicking Clear Cache.
• Panel size simplified to two presets: Regular and Large. Regular is now meaningfully bigger so first-startup feels right out of the box; if you preferred the old Small or Medium, you can still drag the panel to any size you want (down to 480×500).
• Right-click the tray icon for new recovery options: Check for Updates and Reset Settings — useful if the panel ever stops responding
• New Terminal flags for emergencies: --check-update, --reset, --safe-mode, --help (run /Applications/Float.app/Contents/MacOS/float --help for details)
• Critical updates can now auto-install without waiting for you to click — used only when an existing version has a serious bug
• Fix: --reset now also disables Launch at Login, so macOS can't auto-respawn the app while you're recovering
• Fix: launching Float a second time no longer force-shows the panel at potentially off-screen coordinates