Droppy Droppy

Early Beta · Invite Only

Droppy v14 is coming.

v14.0.0-beta.2 · Build 14000002

A very early look at Droppy v14. Things will break, flows are half-finished, and the next build might change everything you just learned. Install it, test it, send feedback.

Download v14.0.0-beta.2
79 MB Signed + Notarized by Apple SHA-256 7db02afb…42f5c620
Beta 2 · what's new since beta 1

A smoother shelf, identical lock/unlock, and a real Widget Settings popover.

Mostly motion polish + a new place to tweak active widgets without leaving the shelf. Full list below; the highlights:

New Widget Settings popover

The Shelf preview gets a centered "Widget Settings" pill at the top. Tap it for inline settings of every widget you currently have active — Weather location/appearance/refresh, Media HUD, Reminders, and the rest.

Weather location moved out of Lock Screen settings into here, so there's a single place to set it for both surfaces.

Dynamic Island floating nav

The expanded Dynamic Island now has a floating capsule below it with three segments — Droppy, Tray, Widgets — and a sliding active highlight. Coexists with the TermiNotch action circles when terminal is open.

The window reserves room for it, so opening a taller view (like the widget grid) never clips the bar off the bottom.

Lock + unlock animation

Both directions now run the exact same spring: critically damped, no bounce, constant opacity. The only thing that flips is direction. Cached silhouette path on the lock HUD removes a per-frame compositing hop.

Open / close motion

All open / close / show / hide motion routes through one unified spring system. Shelf opens use a directional "alive" spring, closes are critically damped — no overshoot, no rebound past the compact target.

The shell silhouette finally springs along with the rest instead of snap-jumping to its target frame.

Now playing

When two media apps are playing at once (Spotify + a YouTube tab, say), the now-playing display follows whichever app you're focused on instead of interleaving fields from both. Cover, title, and timestamps stay coherent.

Media updates are also deferred while the shelf is opening or closing so they can't fight the spring.

Battery HUD

Redesigned battery icon: gradient fill, proportional terminal nub, geometry that scales cleanly to whatever size the surrounding HUD picks. Compact charging indicator + expanded low-battery alert.

Coding Companion

Renamed from "AI Coding HUD" everywhere. The per-session Stop button is gone — dismiss from the UI, cancel via the assistant itself. Manager is leaner overall.

Element Capture (scroll capture)

More patient about animations and lazy loads — direction probes wait longer and require multiple consecutive negative-offset frames before flipping. Capture failure backoff ends sessions cleanly instead of hammering permission checks every frame.

Clipboard rename

Save a clipboard entry under a custom name with a native sheet. The custom name shows in result rows and preview headers; leaving it blank reverts to the auto-detected title.

The standalone clipboard window's Edit toggle now actually drives the inner detail view's text editor.

Onboarding

All onboarding cards are now a constant size across every step — the surface no longer reflows or jumps when you advance or go back. Welcome step has a bigger hero so it has visual mass on par with the longer pages.

Smaller fixes

Quick actions on external-display notch mode pick up the right layout. The Droppy Cloud compact HUD no longer overlaps the media HUD. The reminders / agenda widget stops shifting items during shelf open / close. Mission Control no longer hides the notch when something active is showing.

Idle notch

The default for physical-notch MacBooks flipped to on. The virtual notch now renders at the hardware silhouette when idle, so opens and closes morph from a real baseline instead of fading in and out of nothing.

Before You Install

This is an early beta, not a release candidate.

  • Things will break. Some flows are half-finished.
  • The next build might change everything you just learned.
  • Please don't share the DMG outside our tester thread.
  • Auto-update is on as usual, but new beta builds won't arrive through it. Fresh DMGs land in the tester thread. The updater only kicks in when stable v14 ships publicly.

If you're on a notchless external display, read this first. The external-display island doesn't show the Droppy / Tray tab switcher or the widget buttons you see on notched MacBooks. Instead:

Swipe down on the island with two fingers to reveal the widget stack. The file tray is the first widget in that stack, so swipe down once, then scroll sideways between widgets. This is intentional for this beta, it's not a missing feature.

Feedback

How to file issues.

Post in the tester thread using the shape below. Even one-liners help, the shape is just so I can move through them fast. Screenshots and short screen recordings beat paragraphs every time.

What's New in v14

The biggest Droppy update yet.

Rebuilt surfaces, redesigned widgets, a brand-new launcher brain, live voice transcription, animated AirPods, and a fresh icon across the whole app.

Clipboard

Rebuilt from the ground up.

New look, new animations, new interaction model. The whole window was redone.

  • Liquid Glass action bar that morphs between a full pill (collapsed) and a 32pt rounded card (expanded) in lockstep with the surface.
  • Circular glass icon buttons. 34pt controls with state-driven fills: blue for Paste and Copy, yellow for Favorite, red for Pin and Delete, green for a successful copy. Spinner-into-checkmark for OCR and saves.
  • Spring-and-bounce checkmark on every favorite, pin, and success. Full "Reduce motion" support.
  • Redesigned tag popover with Liquid Glass, 14pt corners, per-tag color swatches, and a checkmark on the applied tag.
  • Paste and Copy pills. Full-width capsule buttons with a tinted wash and a green success state.
  • Multi-select. Cmd+click to toggle, Shift+click for a range (up to 5), Enter to paste all into the frontmost app.
  • Content-aware drag preview. Real thumbnails for images, swatches for colors, compact cards for text, URLs, and files.

Voice Transcribe

Live transcription, in the notch.

Text streams into the notch as you speak, instead of appearing only after you stop. A new live surface with a pulsing red indicator, a transcript that grows up to 6 lines, and a stop button. Finalized segments in full weight, interim text in dimmed italics alongside them.

AirPods HUD

Per-model animations, with an expanded Dynamic Island view.

Every supported device plays its own looping iOS-style pop-up animation when connecting. AirPods 2, AirPods 3, AirPods 4, AirPods Pro, AirPods Pro 3, AirPods Max, Beats Solo, and Beats Studio each have their own video. Unknown devices fall back to a clean SF Symbol.

Hover the compact HUD and it expands into a full iPhone Dynamic Island-style surface: larger device animation, device name, and battery, matching the expanded Dynamic Island you get on iOS when AirPods are active.

Basket Switcher

A centered, Cmd+Tab-style switcher.

A horizontal row of basket cards appears in the middle of the screen on a dimmed backdrop. Each card shows a Dropover-style stack of the top 3 files with organic rotation, soft shadows, and a subtle spread-on-hover. A capsule file-count pill sits below each card. Accent-color tinting kicks in when you have two or more baskets. Drop files on a card to add them to that basket.

Shelf

Split mode and widget quick-access.

Settings → Shelf → Split Shelf turns the expanded shelf into a two-pane layout with independent leading and trailing widget slots. Pin Media on one side and Pomodoro, ToDo, or Weather on the other. A new grid button in the top-right of the expanded shelf pops up a home-screen-style grid of every installed widget droplet for one-click switching.

App Icon

New "Droppy V3" glass-morphism icon.

A translucent notched shell with soft arc reflections, an extended blue gradient, and tinted-icon support. Replaces the old "Droppy V2 waves" icon across the Dock, Launchpad, Finder, and App Switcher.

Droppy Cloud

Upload up to 1 GB, share instantly, auto-expire in 24 hours.

Quickshare now uploads to Droppy's own storage and returns a private getdroppy.app/cloud/<slug> link the recipient can open in any browser, no account needed. Files are saved for one day, then deleted server-side automatically.

  • Full iCloud Drive-inspired share page. Clean dark interface, SF system font, compact sidebar, minimal toolbar, and native-feeling file tiles. Inline previews for images, video, audio, and PDFs, with per-file and "download all" actions.
  • 1 GB per share, 25 files per share, 100 MB per file. 1 GB of active shared data per installation at any time. Delete-from-history purges files server-side immediately.
  • Dynamic Island-style upload HUD in the notch. A compact circular progress ring rides in the notch during upload. Hover and it expands into a full iPhone Dynamic Island-style surface with a file preview and stop button. When the upload finishes the HUD expands again with the share URL plus Copy, Open, and Manage buttons, just like the expanded Dynamic Island treatment you get on iOS for AirDrop and file transfers.
  • Real per-byte progress, not an indeterminate shimmer bar. Completed uploads retry up to 3 times with exponential backoff so a network blip after the bytes land doesn't strand the reservation.

Onboarding

Completely redone.

  • New Permissions page with live grant status for Accessibility, Screen and System Audio Recording, and Input Monitoring. Tap Grant and a Droppy-styled floating helper arcs over to System Settings so you can drag Droppy straight into the permission list.
  • Second page for feature-specific permissions (Automation, Microphone, Camera, Bluetooth, Reminders, Calendar) with one-tap actions.
  • Auto-resume: macOS's "Quit and Reopen" dialog brings you back to the exact step, with the newly-granted permission already reflected.
  • Roomier padding, bigger titles, bolder buttons. Progress dots spring between steps.

Thaw

Replaces the old Menu Bar Manager.

Droppy's in-app Menu Bar Manager is gone. In its place, the Extension Store offers Thaw (Toni Förster's upstream project) with a proper install flow, live GitHub release checks, and one-tap updates.

Widgets

High Alert and Pomodoro, redesigned.

  • High Alert. Circular progress ring, urgency-aware color transitions (orange to amber to red), SF Symbol animations, milestone haptics at 75 / 50 / 25 / final thresholds. Mini progress ring in the compact HUD.
  • Pomodoro. Circular progress ring, single-tap start, tappable duration chips, section pills, session counter. Pause and resume for countdown mode. Full section customization. Floating button shows the live timer with chosen unit.
  • Pomodoro ambient sounds. Rain, Ocean, Fireplace, and 13 more calming sounds with fade in/out, pause/resume sync, and a sound toggle in the widget.

Media & Lyrics

Side-by-side lyrics and smoother playback.

  • Lyrics now appear to the right of the media player instead of stacking below. The player narrows to Previous / Pause / Next when lyrics are active.
  • Two-finger horizontal swipes in the expanded Media controls now skip tracks with haptics. Settings to disable or reverse direction.
  • Artwork fetching is significantly faster for Spotify, iTunes, and browser sources.
  • Crossfade plus directional slide replaces the 3D flip when skipping tracks.

Lock Screen

Smoother lock, smoother unlock, Frosted glass.

  • Lock and unlock transitions are visibly smoother. Status widgets and the media panel fade gracefully instead of popping, and the lock HUD window eases out cleanly before removal.
  • Post-unlock cooldowns were tightened so the media HUD comes back noticeably faster, and several flash-on-unlock regressions (media, Pomodoro, High Alert, DND, Update, AirPods) were fixed.
  • New "Frosted" material option alongside Auto, Regular, and Liquid: a translucent frosted glass look that shows the wallpaper through a soft blur.
  • Shuffle and star buttons now only appear when the source supports them (Spotify shuffle, Apple Music shuffle and love).

HUDs

Tighter, more proportional, adaptive.

  • The compact media HUD width was tightened so the idle pill sits more proportional on both notch and island surfaces.
  • The lock HUD wings were slimmed from 65pt to 40pt, so the unlock icon no longer occupies battery-sized real estate.
  • Compact High Alert and Pomodoro hover HUDs no longer inherit the wider media-only shoulder curve, so their left and right edges stay clean.
  • Every HUD foreground (volume, brightness, battery, caps lock, AirPods, terminal, lock, caffeine, Pomodoro) now routes through a single layout calculator and adapts cleanly to external-display appearance.

Notch & Updates

Droppy / Tray tab switcher and in-notch update HUD.

On notched MacBooks, the expanded notch has a new "Droppy / Tray" tab switcher in the top-left for flipping between your widget stacks and the file tray. Updates no longer pop a separate window; they render inside the notch with formatted markdown release notes.

Meeting Controls

Broader browser support, better state detection.

Google Meet screen sharing toggle now works across Chrome, Arc, Brave, Edge, Opera, Vivaldi, and Orion. Improved mic, camera, and share-state detection in Teams, Meet, and Zoom. End Call targets the right window.

External Displays

iPhone Dynamic Island, on your second screen.

External displays now carry a clean, solid dark island-style pill that looks identical to the iPhone's Dynamic Island. Simple, compact, and readable on any wallpaper. Liquid Glass on external displays isn't here in this beta, it'll return in a later build.

Notify Me!

Quieter, smarter, no more spam.

  • No more reminder replay every unlock.
  • Notifications stay quiet while the screen is locked.
  • Content-based deduplication catches re-delivered items with identical text but different internal timestamps.
  • Burst collapsing works across rapid poll cycles so apps that trickle reminders don't flood the queue.

License & Checkout

Cleaner activation, inline checkout.

Redesigned activation card with the licensed email, seat count, and a hardware-accurate Mac preview. A single Deactivate action always requires a server roundtrip, so deactivation can't silently waste a seat. The purchase flow stays on getdroppy.app with a dark inline card form, discount codes, instant price updates, and inline license delivery.

Thunderstorm · Password-Gated Preview

A real launcher brain, hidden behind a password.

Thunderstorm used to be a clipboard plus app launcher. It now answers questions, does math, converts units and currencies, and previews Google results inline. For this beta it's gated behind a password so only testers hit it.

How to unlock Thunderstorm. When prompted, enter Th4nderst0rm. That's it, you're in.

  • Inline knowledge answers. Type "who is the prime minister of Canada" or "what is a photon" and get an instant card pulled live from Wikipedia, DuckDuckGo, and SearXNG.
  • Web shortcuts. yt taylor swift for YouTube, gh oauth library for GitHub, wiki swift concurrency for Wikipedia, map coffee near me for Maps. Plain queries fall through to Google.
  • Inline calculator. 2^16 + 512, sqrt(144) * 2. One tap to copy.
  • Unit conversion. 100 km to miles, 5 oz to grams, 98 fahrenheit to celsius. Length, mass, temperature, volume, area, speed, duration, data sizes.
  • Currency conversion. 100 USD to EUR, $50 to €. Live European Central Bank rates across 16 currencies.
  • Google previews. Selecting a Google result expands a preview card with the knowledge panel or the top result's headline and snippet.

Housekeeping

What's gone, and what got quieter.

Removed

  • Droppy Bird arcade extension.
  • Standalone Notes extension (meeting-integrated notes via Meeting Controls still work).
  • Menu Bar Manager droplet (replaced by Thaw).
  • Teleprompty teleprompter extension.
  • Donate window.
  • Two Stacks shelf mode.
  • Shelf size preset (Small / Medium / Large). The shelf now uses a single compact size.
  • Separate Update and Quickshare success windows, replaced by in-notch HUDs.

Under the hood

  • Roughly 4,100 lines of dead code removed (retired extensions, orphaned effects, unused shelf host views).
  • Battery: Flappy Bird widget drops to 30fps when not playing, marquee scrolling down from 120fps to 30fps, MusicManager stops polling when nothing plays, long-interval housekeeping timers coalesce with system wake-ups.
  • Efficiency work across Settings, Element Capture, permission polling, file compression, browser media bridge, and the animation system.
  • Memory hygiene: Lock Screen Media Panel and Shelf Weather managers tear down Notification and Combine subscriptions defensively.