Beta 3 was the first public build of the v15 line, and this one answers it. A new droplet arrived, Droppy Cloud learned a second home, and a lot of work went into the times Droppy was not there at all.
A slider per app
Audio Control is the new droplet. Every app making sound gets its own row and its own level, so a call, a video and a playlist no longer share one master volume. It remembers where you left each one.
Searching, and fetching
Thunderstorm now reaches inside the droplets. One query turns up clipboard entries, recognised text, voice transcripts, quick notes, Obsidian pages, tasks, calendar events and files sitting on the shelf, and opens the one you pick.
Droppy Cloud picked up Google Drive, so your Drive sits beside Droppy's own storage to browse, search and pull from. The media player learned to like a Spotify song too, with the heart filled while it sits in your library.
Around those sit smaller additions: a recording chip in the notch with a live timer, screenshots named after the words in them, your own names for apps in Thunderstorm, Apple TV playback, and widgets you can drag wider on the shelf.
When Droppy was not there
The worst ones shared a shape. Waking the Mac could leave Droppy running but deaf, with the notch, drops and shortcuts all ignoring you, and a single feature failing at startup could take everything after it down with it.
Two more were the kind you remember. Shaking a drag to call the basket switcher and then letting go left an invisible sheet over the whole screen, and pressing space in any app could pause the music if the pointer was high up.
Behind them sits a long tail: calendars that only half synced, LocalSend transfers that stalled without saying why, Google Drive shares that were never really shared, rotated PDFs converted sideways, and a run of crashes on the macOS 27 beta.
Quicker, and lighter
The menu bar menu is now a real macOS menu rather than a drawn one, which is the difference between highlighting a row instantly and watching it catch up. Idle memory is handed back to the system instead of held.
Where things sit now
The floating bar is the shelf's only navigation now, and it drops the File Tray and Media buttons when those widgets are already in front of you. The Settings sidebar pulls wider by its edge, and its hide button moved up into the header.
The rest is the usual grind of detail: widgets on one padding grid, the Calendar popover rebuilt around a tape scrubber, dynamic glass that holds up on floating panels, resumable Drive uploads, and Mechey saying why it is quiet.