Release notes

Current version: 1.1.3. MacGaze checks for updates automatically every four hours while it is running, and always asks before installing one. Nothing here happens silently. You can also choose Check for Updates… from the menu bar any time.

1.1.3, 1 September 2026

• Fixed: when the Mac locked while a full-screen app was active, the face-unlock animation could appear shifted down on screen. It now displays in the correct position.

1.1.2, 31 August 2026

• Changed: password recovery now offers Touch ID or your Mac's login password first, so a licence key is no longer required to recover access.

1.1.1, 29 August 2026

• Fixed: licence information is now kept in two places, so reinstalling or losing Keychain data no longer loses the licence or spends a second activation on a Mac you already own.

1.1.0, 29 August 2026

• Changed: the 14-day trial is now recorded against a one-way fingerprint of your Mac, so reinstalling no longer restarts it. Unlocking still works entirely offline.

1.0.9, 29 August 2026

• Fixed: the unlock panel is smaller again, so it no longer clips the lock-screen date while keeping the face clear of the camera housing.

1.0.8, 29 August 2026

• Changed: the notch panel now curves outward into the bezel like the real notch and is sized from the Mac's camera housing so the face is never hidden behind it.

1.0.7, 28 August 2026

• Fixed: the notch's expand animation overlapping the lock-screen date on some displays.

1.0.6, 27 August 2026

• Changed: replaced the success animation. It was a frame-for-frame copy of Apple's own Face ID resolve animation (the ring, the wireframe sphere, the flip), reference-matched from Apple's own video rather than drawn from scratch, which was never MacGaze's to distribute. It is now a plainly original checkmark, drawn directly by the app, in the same bracket frame the rest of the animation already uses.
• Fixed: a single bad frame, a blink or a half turn of the head, used to reset unlock progress to zero. It now costs one frame's worth of progress instead of all of it, on top of the reliability work already shipped in 1.0.5.

1.0.5, 27 August 2026

• Fixed: face unlock had become slow and unreliable. Three things were wrong at once. The app ran two neural networks on every single camera frame, when the second one (the check that you are a real face and not a photo) could not change the answer on most frames, so it now runs only on frames that are otherwise about to unlock. Frames where you are looking away are now skipped before any model runs at all, since they can never unlock regardless. And a single bad frame, one blink or half-turn of the head, used to wipe out all the agreement built up so far and start counting again from nothing; it now costs one frame's worth of progress instead of all of it.
• Changed: the liveness threshold, which is the anti-photo check, was lowered because it was rejecting real faces often enough to make unlocking feel like a gamble. A printed photo still will not get in. The face matching threshold itself is unchanged, so how certain MacGaze has to be that it is you before it unlocks is exactly what it was.

1.0.4, 26 August 2026

• Fixed: the "Show MacGaze in the Dock" switch closed the whole panel instead of just flipping. Changing whether the app has a Dock icon makes macOS take focus away from whatever panel is open as a side effect, which used to mean the switch's new position only became visible once you opened the panel again from scratch. It now reopens itself immediately, so the switch looks like it flips in place.
• Fixed: the panel was slow to open. A single settings check the panel ran every time it opened was a synchronous round trip to a system service, and that one is genuinely slow. It routinely takes tens of milliseconds. It is now read once at launch and kept in sync from the one place that actually changes it, so opening the panel no longer waits on it.

1.0.3, 26 August 2026

• Fixed: the menu bar panel would not open at all while another app was full screen. Full screen puts that app in its own Space, and a custom panel needs to explicitly ask permission to appear there. The system menu bar gets this for free, but a panel built on top of it does not. It now asks.
• Changed: automatic update checks moved from once a day to every four hours, so a fix does not sit unnoticed on the server for most of a day on a Mac that is rarely quit. This only affects how often MacGaze checks. It still always shows the normal "an update is available" prompt and waits for you to say yes, exactly as before.

1.0.2, 24 August 2026

• Fixed: the menu bar panel now drops down cleanly from the icon, instead of popping up from the middle of the screen.
• Fixed: opening the panel no longer asks for your MacGaze password. That password is meant to protect changing your face or saved password, not simply looking at the menu.
• Fixed: clicking anywhere outside the panel now closes it, rather than needing a second click on the icon.
• Fixed: the panel could briefly refuse to reopen for a couple of seconds right after being closed. It opens and closes normally now, including under fast repeated clicking.
• Fixed: the success animation could occasionally be cut off mid-flourish instead of retracting smoothly. It now starts closing the instant your Mac actually unlocks, rather than guessing on a fixed timer that could already be too late.
• Changed: a corrected bug in the update feed itself meant some installs could report "you're already up to date" when a newer version genuinely existed. Fixed for every release from here on.

1.0.1, 23 August 2026

• Added: automatic background updates, built on Sparkle. MacGaze can now update itself in place instead of asking you to come back to this site and download again by hand.

1.0, 23 August 2026

• First release: face unlock for macOS.

MacGaze is not notarised yet, so installing an update still needs the same one-time-per-version trip through System Settings → Privacy & Security → Open Anyway that a first install does. Sparkle removes "go back to the site and download it again", not that step. See the install guide if you have not seen it before.