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What’s new in BetterMacWidgets

A clear record of new features, improvements, and fixes. Updates are signed, notarized, and free for everyone.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.16

CURRENT

October 5, 2026

Custom Widgets, front and center

  • Custom Widgets has a new page: watch a widget being written while the real tile builds beside it, and start from templates shown as the tiles they make.
  • “Can’t find yours?” at the end of the widget list leads straight to Custom Widgets.
  • The first time you open the Lock Screen, a short introduction explains what it does and what stays private.
  • The energy settings are bigger, explain what each mode does and now sit above the wallpapers.
  • The Countdown widget no longer shows its unit twice or cuts off its title at 1×1, and the Timer at 3×3 fits its tile.
  • The sale window is redesigned, and About names Notchmate and MenuBarMonitor again.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.15

October 1, 2026

Settings & Design

  • Settings is now called Settings & Design.
  • Every widget opens in its 2×2 preview, Weather in its largest size.
  • The welcome guide ends with your style and takes you straight to it.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.14

September 30, 2026

More widgets, one right-click away

  • Discover more widgets straight from any widget's right-click menu.
  • The Currencies widget at 2×1 fits its tile again, and the Battery widget at 1×2 no longer draws its rings on top of each other.
  • Small improvements and fixes.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.13

September 28, 2026

Structural changes

  • Structural changes

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.12

September 27, 2026

Save and load your layout

  • Save your whole setup to a file and load it back later: every widget with its settings and position, the theme and your preferences.
  • A new look for the Pro page, and every unlock button shows the current price.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.11

September 24, 2026

Tidier settings, fuller previews

  • No more empty previews: Apps, Web Page, Photos, Folder and Drop Zone show an example until you set them up. Photos shows my cat.
  • Now Playing is now called Music, and its preview plays an example track instead of saying nothing is playing.
  • The Photos widget starts at 3×2, the size a photo looks like a photo at.
  • The energy settings sit right under the wallpapers, next to the look they change.
  • The sidebar sections stand out: Extra features, Widgets, Free and Pro widgets each have their own colour and symbol.
  • Smart Layouts has a new look, with a preview of every saved layout and three ready-made ideas for rules.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.10

September 22, 2026

One stale line

  • A line on the Pro page still advertised the monthly plan in English, minutes after 2.3.9 said it was gone. German was already correct.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.9

September 21, 2026

19,99 €, and that is where it stays

  • The price is now 19,99 € for one Mac, 23,99 € for two, 27,99 € for three. It was 29,99 €, and 39,99 € for three days before that, which was too much and showed.
  • Enough of you said so that it was worth listening to, and worth saying out loud: this is the final price. It will not go up again.
  • The monthly plan is gone. One payment, the app is yours, every future update included. Subscriptions taken out earlier keep running on the terms they were sold on.
  • The 15% launch offer is retired, since it no longer makes sense at this price.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.8

September 21, 2026

Updates that actually arrive

  • The welcome guide offers to start the app with your Mac, with a box you can untick. Updates can only arrive while the app is running.
  • Update notices were losing their urgency: only the newest release is ever offered, so publishing a non-critical version on top of a critical one quietly downgraded it for everyone still behind.
  • An old restriction in the update feed excluded the very oldest installations from installing updates silently. Removed.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.7

September 21, 2026

15% off the one-time purchase

  • Code MAC15 brings the one-time purchase to 25,49 € instead of 29,99 €.
  • The app shows the offer once after updating, and the button opens the checkout with the code already applied.
  • It applies to the one-time purchase only, not to the monthly plan.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.6

September 21, 2026

A full pass over every widget, every size, and the code behind them

  • Security: a licence key was compiled into every previous build in plain text and unlocked Pro on any Mac. It is gone. Purchased keys are unaffected.
  • Six widgets were broken in one of their sizes: Battery at 3×1 and Unit Converter at 3×1 drew the wrong layout, Stopwatch at 3×2 dropped its lap list, and Folder, Temperature and Reminders were unreadable at 1×2.
  • Numbers on a German Mac: twelve places wrote a decimal point instead of a comma. The Unit Converter showed “3.281 ft”, which reads as three thousand. The calculator’s comma key typed a full stop.
  • Your data: a damaged settings file is now moved aside instead of overwritten, and one damaged widget no longer costs the whole desktop.
  • Live data: Stocks, Crypto and currency rates now say when they cannot reach their source instead of showing a dash forever.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.5

September 20, 2026

Telling copies of a widget apart

  • The copy switcher shows what each copy is set to, so three Folder widgets are no longer three identical numbers.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.4

September 19, 2026

Both prices, everywhere

  • The monthly plan is named wherever a price is shown: 4,99 € a month, or 29,99 € once.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.3

September 19, 2026

New price

  • The one-time purchase is 29,99 €. It was briefly 39,99 €, and that was too much.
  • Keys already bought keep everything they opened.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.2

September 18, 2026

Free desktop widgets, quick-place buttons, and click behavior fixes

  • Free desktop widgets: A wide selection of widgets is now available completely free without a Pro license.
  • Place Button: Added a direct 'Place' button in the widget catalog for instant 1-click placement.
  • Fixes: Resolved window focus and sizing behavior when clicking Weather and System widgets.
  • Performance: Optimized background rendering and updated preferences.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.1

September 17, 2026

Unified Pro access, subscription support, and polished preferences

  • Unified Pro access: All premium features and widgets (including Lock Screen) are now unified under one simple Pro license.
  • Subscription & Lifetime options: Choose between flexible monthly billing (cancel anytime) or a single lifetime purchase.
  • Streamlined preferences: Cleaned up Lock Screen and Pro configuration panes with direct license key activation.
  • Reliability improvements and polished localization across all widgets.

BetterMacWidgets 2.3.0

September 16, 2026

Every copy of a widget is editable, and weather you can watch

  • Widgets you can place more than once now have a copy selector in their settings. Until now only the first copy could be configured and every one after it stayed on its defaults. Affects Shortcuts, Sticky Notes, Clocks, Timers, Photos, Reminders, Crypto, Currency, Drop Zones, App Folders, World Clocks and your own widgets.
  • Rain lands. Every drop now throws up its own splash where it hits, with an uneven ring and a few droplets, and the ground is a soft wet wash instead of a line.
  • Snow settles. Flakes fall onto a real drift and sink into it rather than dropping off the bottom edge.
  • Rain and snow are drawn in two depths, so there is a near sheet and a far one instead of one flat layer.
  • Widgets line up more willingly when you drag them, and can now be centred on each other instead of only aligned by their edges.
  • The World Clock fills the 3x3 and 4x3 tiles instead of leaving most of them bare, and no city name is cut short.
  • The Timer's controls grow with the tile, so the large sizes no longer show small buttons in a lot of empty space.
  • Now Playing shows the album on the 2x2 tile when the player reports one.

BetterMacWidgets 2.2.5

September 10, 2026

Structural changes

  • A few structural changes.

BetterMacWidgets 2.2.4

September 6, 2026

Corrections to the purchase pages

  • Small corrections to how the Pro and Lock Screen pages are laid out. Everything from 2.2.3 is included.

BetterMacWidgets 2.2.3

September 6, 2026

Finding the licence box, and another cause of the external-monitor shuffle

  • Fixed: the box for entering a licence key was unreachable for the people who needed it most. Anyone who owned neither product saw the Bundle offer instead, and the only way to the key field was to click “Prefer Pro alone” — which reads like cancelling a purchase. The field now belongs to the page rather than to whichever offer is on screen, on the Pro page and the Lock Screen page alike.
  • Found another reason widgets moved when a display was connected. Two separate systems were re-arranging the layout on the same event and overwriting each other, so the part built specifically to remember your arrangement per display setup never actually decided anything. It does now. Whether this closes the problem completely we cannot promise yet — it is a real cause, found with the previous fix in place, and it is fixed.
  • A snapshot that carries no widget positions can no longer be applied over a real arrangement, and stored positions anchored to a display that never existed are ignored instead of being matched by name.
  • Hardened licence handling: the offline grace record moved from user-writable preferences into the Keychain, and a developer shortcut is no longer compiled into release builds.

BetterMacWidgets 2.2.2

September 4, 2026

Memory usage hotfix and background stability

  • Fixed a critical memory leak in kernel metrics sampling: Mach port send rights for CPU and RAM statistics are now properly deallocated immediately after each reading.
  • Optimized the core tick coordinator: timer callbacks now run synchronously on the main actor without allocating unstructured heap tasks every second.
  • Prevented micro-jitter saves in desktop overlap resolution with proper sub-pixel tolerance.

BetterMacWidgets 2.2.1

September 4, 2026

Night weather, a lock screen that copies your desktop, and an end to the external-monitor shuffle

  • Fixed: connecting an external display scrambled the widgets. Positions were stored as global screen points, and plugging in a monitor moves that coordinate system underneath them — the widgets never moved, the grid they were measured against did. The app now remembers your arrangement per display setup and carries it across: a 32-inch, an ultrawide or a second laptop panel all get the same relative placement, and a widget whose screen is gone is parked somewhere visible instead of off-screen.
  • Weather knows it is night: the sun becomes a moon, the clouds cool down and the sky darkens — automatically, from your location's own sunset, so a city you picked abroad flips at its dusk and not at yours.
  • New Backdrop setting for Weather: Full, Soft or None. The sun and clouds used to be drawn at almost full white, which made them the brightest thing on a dark wallpaper with no way to turn them down.
  • Lock screen widgets start where they already are on your desktop — same spot, same size, same theme — with a “Copy desktop 1:1” button to put them back after you have moved one. Personal widgets still stay hidden there by default.
  • New “Uniform colours” switch: System's rings and Weather's range bar can follow your theme instead of keeping their own colours.
  • The lock-screen preview no longer decodes your desktop picture at full resolution. A 6016×3900 wallpaper was being resampled on every redraw of that pane.

BetterMacWidgets 2.1.2

September 3, 2026

Small changes

  • A few small changes and fixes.

BetterMacWidgets 2.1.1

September 4, 2026

Small changes

  • A few small changes and fixes.

BetterMacWidgets 2.1.0

September 2, 2026

Widgets on the lock screen

  • New: your widgets can appear over the macOS lock screen — a beta feature, and its own separate purchase. Your clock, your wallpaper and the password field stay exactly as macOS draws them, and the widgets take no input at all: a click always reaches the password field.
  • You decide what a stranger may read. Every widget can be shown or hidden there, and the ones carrying something personal — your notes, your calendar, your clipboard — start hidden.
  • Place them freely on a grid, at whatever size you pick, on every display you have.
  • Its own power setting, separate from the desktop’s: from a still picture up to 60 fps. Still by default, because a locked Mac is usually one nobody is watching.
  • Tap a widget to open the app behind it — on the desktop too, and third-party apps like Google Calendar work through the same route.
  • The weather widget asks its service about four times less often.
  • Custom Widgets and the lock screen are now part of the welcome tour.
  • The colour palettes are easier to tell apart, and the whole Appearance page has been redrawn.
  • Fixed: widgets could move after waking from sleep on Macs whose display disconnects — a Mac mini with an external monitor, for instance.
  • Fixed: the Timer and Photos widgets drew outside their own tile in some sizes, over whatever was next to them.

BetterMacWidgets 2.0.1

August 27, 2026

Small changes

  • A few small changes and fixes.

BetterMacWidgets 2.0.0

August 26, 2026

Four looks, a ring, and a lot less idle work

  • The Apps widget has four looks instead of one. Grid keeps the icons and names you know and holds the most. Dock puts large icons on a shelf that grow under the pointer. List gives every app its own line — the easiest to hit, and it reads long names. Tiles puts each app on a card washed in the colour of its own icon.
  • Every size, and room for 35 apps. The 3×3 and 4×3 layouts were written long ago but never offered; they hold 25 and 35 icons. The old limit was 15, which meant the biggest tile could never be filled.
  • Drag apps onto the widget straight from the Finder, reorder them, and see which ones are open — a running app gets a small dot.
  • The Timer grew up. The large sizes draw a countdown ring you can read across a room instead of a longer bar. It plays a sound when it ends (seven to choose from, or none), takes a label like “Tea” or “Laundry”, and you can keep up to three at once.
  • A running timer survives quitting the app. What is stored is the moment it ends, not the time left — so a Mac that slept for ten minutes comes back to a timer that is ten minutes further along, exactly like a kitchen timer would have been.
  • The Network widget finally has settings: watch one connection instead of all of them added together (which counts VPN traffic twice), switch between MB/s and the Mbit/s your internet plan is sold in, and hide your local address on a desktop that ends up in screenshots. It also gained five sizes and a full minute of history.
  • Clocks stopped costing anything. A clock showing 14:32 was being rebuilt sixty times a minute to display the same two numbers. Six of them measured 1.3% of a processor core before and 0.0% after.
  • The pictures got honest. Numbers that roll when they change were showing the value they were rolling away from in every generated preview, the Apps widget rendered as a yellow warning sign in the gallery, and a snowy forecast was captioned 21°C.

BetterMacWidgets 1.9.2

August 25, 2026

Freeze fix

  • Fixed a bug that could freeze the app while placing widgets.

BetterMacWidgets 1.9.1

August 25, 2026

Fixes you asked for

  • Sticky Notes can be typed into on the desktop. Until now the note took the caret and then dropped every keystroke: desktop widgets live in a window that never makes the app active, and keyboard input only ever reaches the active app. The first click now asks for the keyboard, a soft ring shows the note has it, and Escape hands it straight back.
  • A new Sticky Note starts blank. Adding a second one copied the first one's text, because the settings pane edits the note already on the desktop. Paper colour and typeface still carry over — what you wrote does not. The same line now separates settings from content for the Drop Zone, the photo frame and the countdown.
  • The World Clock can show 12-hour time, with AM/PM per city — it is not the same half of the day in Tokyo as it is in New York.
  • App icons fill their tile. They were a fixed size no matter how big the widget was, which left them floating in the middle of a mostly empty 2×1. On that size they are now two thirds larger.
  • Less work while the app sits idle: photos are scaled down as they are decoded, the settings window releases its contents when you close it, and widgets that only change by the minute are no longer woken every second.

BetterMacWidgets 1.9.0

August 12, 2026

Build Your Own

  • Custom Widgets (Beta): a widget you write yourself, as one small JSON file. Say what it should show — a reading from your Mac, the time, or a number from any JSON address — and it appears on your desktop like every other widget. Five templates to start from, a live preview while you type, and export so you can hand the file to somebody else.
  • A custom widget can only read the one address it names. It cannot run commands or open files, including one that arrived from a stranger — and an exported file never carries the request headers you typed, so your API token stays on your Mac.
  • Custom Widgets is part of Pro. Building and previewing is free; putting one on the desktop is not.
  • Now Playing, Photos and Battery are Pro from now on. Copies placed before 1.8 were exempt until now; that exemption ends with this release, so without Pro they leave the desktop. Everything you set up comes back the moment you unlock.
  • The free Pro trial has been withdrawn. Every Pro feature previews live inside the app instead, and a trial already running keeps going until it ends by itself.
  • Pro is now €12.99 for one Mac, €15.99 for two and €17.99 for three. Still a one-time purchase, still every future update included. Keys bought at the old price are unaffected.
  • Fixed: choosing a language saved the choice but showed no sign that a restart was needed, which looked exactly like a picker that does nothing.

BetterMacWidgets 1.8.0

August 11, 2026

Bug fixes

  • Fixes and refinements throughout.
  • Pro-only sizes now carry the crown in the size picker, so it is clear at a glance which sizes need Pro.

BetterMacWidgets 1.7.0

August 9, 2026

The Widgets Got Bigger

  • Two sizes above the previous largest: 3×3 and 4×3. Weather gains a twelve-hour temperature curve and the full week beside it, and System becomes a proper dashboard — every reading, its history, and how many gigabytes are actually free rather than just a percentage.
  • Devices shows ten connections instead of six, the Calendar gets a month grid you can read across the room, and World Clock, Photos, Apps, Network and the Sticky Note all grew as well.
  • The Sticky Note now holds several notes. Switch between them with the chips on the tile, or manage them in the settings — your existing note becomes the first of the stack.
  • World Clock finds cities the time-zone database doesn’t name. Frankfurt, Munich, Barcelona, Boston, Osaka and about ninety more now resolve to the right zone — and the tile shows the name you searched for, not the zone’s capital.
  • Fixed: widgets could shudder while you dragged them, most noticeably near a screen edge. Two parts of the app were writing the window position at the same time, about ninety times a second, and disagreeing.
  • Fixed: the Devices widget offered a Connect button for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. macOS cannot connect to those over Bluetooth at all, so the button could only ever fail; it now explains that instead. Their battery still appears as before.

BetterMacWidgets 1.6.0

August 7, 2026

Your Cities, Your Grid, Your Glass

  • World Clock lets you pick your own cities. Search any city in the world, add up to six, and drag them into the order you want — the smaller sizes show the first ones in your list.
  • The Unit Converter now converts money too, with live European Central Bank rates. Handy when a video quotes dollars and you think in pounds.
  • Weather shows air quality in its larger sizes: the European air quality index with its official colour scale, plus the particulate reading behind it.
  • The grid is adjustable. If you also use Apple’s own desktop widgets, you can now match our cell size and spacing to theirs so the two sets stop landing on top of each other.
  • New Tint setting for the glass: keep it light or dark whatever macOS is doing. The tile background no longer has to follow your system appearance.
  • Fixed: the license key field on the Pro page was too easy to miss after buying — it is now open and labelled instead of hidden behind a link.
  • Fixed: widgets could shudder while you dragged them, most noticeably near a screen edge. Two parts of the app were writing the window position at the same time and disagreeing about ninety times a second.

BetterMacWidgets 1.5.0

August 4, 2026

Try Pro Free for 3 Days

  • You can now try Pro free for three days, started from inside the app under Settings → Premium. No account, no email address, no payment details — and one trial per Mac.
  • It ends by itself. There is nothing to cancel, it can never charge you, and it does not turn into a subscription. When the three days are up, the Pro widgets and themes switch off and the free version carries on exactly as before.
  • Everything you set up during the trial stays put. Unlock later and your widgets, themes and layouts are right back where you left them.
  • New after unlocking: a short hint explaining why desktop widgets only animate while you hover them — the Balanced energy setting — with a button that switches to High right there.
  • The click-through slideshow that ran after every update is gone. What changed now lives in Software Update, where you can read it when you want to instead of clicking past it on launch.

BetterMacWidgets 1.4.1

August 2, 2026

Two More Widgets Are Now Free

  • Currencies and Starfield have moved from Pro to the free set. Live exchange rates from the European Central Bank and the drifting star field are now available to everyone, in every size, with all their settings.
  • Nothing changes if you already own Pro — everything stays unlocked, and the free set simply grew from 14 widgets to 16.

BetterMacWidgets 1.4.0

August 1, 2026

German, Finished Properly

  • German is now complete to the last corner: license messages, error states, every switch and every menu. Previously a handful of places still answered in English — including, awkwardly, the messages you see when a license key does not work.
  • Dates, weekdays and numbers now follow the language you picked in the app. Before, they kept using your macOS system language, so an English interface could still print „Mittwoch, 29. Juli“. Your region is still respected — pick English in Austria and you keep Austrian date order.
  • Fixed: the Sticky Note showed two font pickers that wrote to the same setting and disagreed with each other. There is one now, and older notes keep their font.
  • Fixed: “Restart Now” after changing the language quit the app without bringing it back.
  • Fixed: hiding the Dock icon did not always survive a restart. The setting was applied once, very early in launch, where macOS does not reliably honour it — it is now re-applied and verified after launch, so a login-item start behaves like any other.

BetterMacWidgets 1.3.0

July 29, 2026

Three New Widgets, and German

  • New Pro widget — Clipboard history: the last things you copied, one click to put any of them back. Kept in memory only, never written to disk, and anything your password manager marks as confidential is skipped.
  • New Pro widget — Drop Zone: park files on a tile and drag them back out later. Nothing is copied or moved; the widget only remembers where they live.
  • New Pro widget — Currencies: live exchange rates from the European Central Bank. No account, no API key.
  • The whole app is now available in German — every label, menu, settings pane and widget. Dates, units and system dialogs follow the chosen language too.
  • New setting under General → Language: System, English or Deutsch. “System” follows macOS.

BetterMacWidgets 1.2.0

July 27, 2026

Pro for More Than One Mac

  • Pro now comes for 1, 2 or 3 Macs — €9.99, €12.99 or €14.99, still a one-time purchase with lifetime updates.
  • It is always the same key: enter it on each Mac you bought it for.
  • Removing the license on a Mac frees that spot immediately, so you can move it to a new machine yourself.
  • The Premium page shows which spot the Mac you are on is using.

BetterMacWidgets 1.1.3

July 26, 2026

Widgets Stay Put Through Sleep

  • Fixed: widgets no longer move, overlap or scatter after your Mac wakes from sleep or you open the lid.
  • Widgets on a second display now return to their exact spot when you plug the monitor back in.

BetterMacWidgets 1.1.2

July 25, 2026

Hide the Dock Icon

  • New setting under General → Dock: hide the Dock icon and run BetterMacWidgets from the menu bar only.
  • The menu bar icon stays put — click it any time to reopen the settings window. Your widgets are unaffected.
  • The What's New tour no longer reappears after small bug-fix updates.

BetterMacWidgets 1.1.1

July 22, 2026

Your Layout Stays Put

  • Fixed: widgets you moved, added or removed shortly before quitting could reappear in their old spot after a restart.
  • A license check that is still in flight can no longer remove Pro widgets from your desktop.

BetterMacWidgets 1.1.0

July 21, 2026

Widget Stacks, Clear Glass & a Guided Tour

  • Widget Stacks — drop a widget onto another of the same size and flick through them with the ‹ › arrows (Pro).
  • Widgets never overlap: drop a tile on a neighbour it can't stack with and it slides to the nearest free spot.
  • New Clear glass look — the tile disappears entirely, leaving only the widget's content on your wallpaper (Pro).
  • Frosted stays free and fully adjustable with its own 0–100% opacity slider.
  • A short What's New tour on first launch and after every update.
  • Every widget now opens at its largest size in the settings window.

BetterMacWidgets 1.0.4

July 20, 2026

Appearance Menu Crash Fix

  • Fixed an app crash when selecting 'Appearance' (Darstellung) in the menu bar.

BetterMacWidgets 1.0.3

July 20, 2026

Light Mode Glass Fix & Sharper Opacity Slider

  • Widgets are no longer washed out in macOS Light mode — glass tiles now use dark tints on bright desktops for clear visual separation.
  • The Opacity slider in Frosted mode now has a clearly perceptible effect across its full range in both Light and Dark appearance.

BetterMacWidgets 0.4.0

July 16, 2026

Live Calendar, Pro Polish & Smart Layouts

  • Live Calendar integration with actual upcoming events (Pro).
  • The largest Weather widget (wide-tall) is now a Pro feature.
  • Pro Showcase animations in settings now always play for a better preview.
  • Create and switch named widget profiles for work, focus, evening, or any setup you choose.
  • Profiles remember their widgets and map placement sensibly across changing display configurations.
  • Pro adds automatic switching by time, foreground application, or connected display.
  • Configuration-window rendering is leaner and smoother while the app is in the foreground.
  • General stability improvements and localized weekday symbols.
  • Bug fixes.

BetterMacWidgets 0.2.8

July 13, 2026

Reliable automatic updates

  • New versions can be found and installed through the built-in updater.
  • Refund and withdrawal wording was clarified.
  • Stability improvements across the app.

BetterMacWidgets 0.2.6

July 13, 2026

Pro activation and polish

  • Buy Pro and activate your licence directly inside the app.
  • Improved desktop performance and smoother window movement.
  • Removing a licence no longer locks the app; the key can simply be entered again.
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