• 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