Release notes / June 2026

What's new in AppTela 1.2.0

AppTela has always launched apps. Now it can also launch web pages, files, folders, and Apple Shortcuts - from the same Screens, Categories, Groups, and Stacks. There is a new Library catalogue behind it all, a refreshed menu bar, hover snapshots with Live Preview, and Notes you can pin to anything.

4 new item types alongside apps A new menu bar with 4 available styles Available now on the Mac App Store
02 - Library

A catalogue, separate from your layout.

Items can live in the Library without being placed on a Screen. Search reaches every item from any Screen and from the menu bar. Add to Library (Cmd-N) or Manage Library (Cmd-L) via the File menu to add or manage items in your Library; place it on a Screen later, or never but always searchable. Manage and validate the whole catalogue separately from the Screen edit flow.

  • Add Library for importing or adding links to the Library but not a Screen
  • Manage Library for finding, deleting, and validating links
  • Add and Edit Items for placing into Categories, Groups, Stacks
  • Check Links to ensure files and web links are still valid. Delete if not
  • Safari import preserves or flattens the bookmark tree into multiple groups or stacks. You decide how they are split
  • Keep on remove items removed from Screens can stay in the Library
The Manage Library sheet listing every Library entry with filter chips for Apps, Web Pages, Files, Folders, and Apple Shortcuts.

Manage Library · Cmd-L. Find, delete, validate the whole catalogue.

The Add and Edit Items sheet with the Library on the left and the current Screen layout on the right, allowing items to be moved into Categories, Groups, and Stacks.

Add and Edit Items. Place Library items into Categories, Groups, and Stacks on your Screens.

03 - Menu Bar

Four styles of menu bar. Pick one.

The menu bar launcher has four styles. Choose from Menu (default), Mini, Micro or Search. Menu, Mini and Micro display a hierarchical representation of the Categories present on each Screen. All menus have an optional search which provides a fuzzy search over your whole Library.

  • Menu standard menu and Search with optional Top and Recent Apps
  • Mini icon-based hierarchical layout with search
  • Micro compact icon-based hierarchical layout and floating label with search
  • Search search only with optional Top and Recent Apps
  • Exclude exclude any Category, Group, Stack or Item from the menu bar. Manage exclusions in menu bar preferences
The Menu (default) style of the AppTela menu bar launcher - a hierarchical NSMenu dropdown listing Top Apps, Recent Apps, Apple Stack, Web, News, and the user's other categories.

Menu (default). Hierarchical NSMenu dropdown of your layout.

04 - Notes

Notes on anything. Labels for the ones you keep coming back to.

Attach a plain-text note to any tile - app, Web Link, file, folder, Stack, Group, or Category. Hover the tile and the note appears in a floating popup. Build a Label once (a name, a colour, a styling preset) and apply it to as many notes as you want. Labels work as searchable tags too - call one "Urgent" or "Todo", pin it to a handful of items, and filter by it later.

  • Per-note styling colour, font, size, anchor
  • Seven backgrounds Glass, Solid, Depth, Textured 1-4
  • Labels reusable styling presets, also searchable as tags
  • Export/Import backup your valuable notes to a text file. View or edit in a text editor and re-import back into AppTela
The Label creation sheet with a name field, colour picker, font and size controls, and a live preview of how the styled label will appear.

Labels. Save a styling and a name - "Urgent", "Todo" - apply it to any note. Filter by it in search.

05 - Live Preview

Hover for a snapshot. Click to open the page inside AppTela.

Hover snapshots show a small preview (configurable) of a Web Link, a PDF, or an image file. Click the snapshot and Live Preview opens the page in a panel beside the launcher - back, forward, reload, and an Open in Browser footer. Both are opt-in. The master toggle lives in Preferences and ships off by default.

  • Hover snapshot for Web Links, PDFs, image files
  • Live Preview window a browser-style panel beside the launcher
  • Per-link click action none, browser, or Live Preview
  • Cache TTL never, minutes, hours, up to 90 days
Live Preview opening a Wikipedia article inside AppTela with browser-style chrome - back, forward, reload, URL display, and snapshot capture button.

Live Preview. Read the page inside AppTela. Open in Browser when you want to.

A hover snapshot of a Wikipedia article, plus the AppTela Preferences pane configuring snapshot defaults, hover delay, file types, default browser, and snapshot click action.

Snapshot, configured per link. Or set defaults in Preferences. Opt-in, off by default.

New themes

New static and animated themes: Chroma, Claret, and Vapor.

Three new themes ship with v1.2.0, each available as a static panel theme and an animated background. The default Flow 1 Ember has been re-encoded at 4K HEVC for sharper rendering on Retina displays, and the Flux theme has an updated animation.

Ember · 4K
Flow 12 · Chroma
Flow 13 · Claret
Flow 14 · Vapor

And also in 1.2.0

06 / The rest
New

Top and Recent

Dynamic Groups and Stacks. Create Top or Recent lists based on Apps, Web Links, Files, Folders, or Shortcuts. Disabled by default until enabled in Data Usage preferences. Choose how many items each Top and Recent list keeps in the same pane.

New

Unstack and Ungroup

Release a Stack or Group's members back into the parent Group or Category. Switch any Stack between Normal and Launch Stack.

New

Launch actions per type

Each item type - Apps, Web Links, Files, Folders, and Apple Shortcuts - has its own after-launch action so links can be handled differently from apps. Apple Shortcuts default to "Do Nothing" so that invoking shortcuts is directly actionable within AppTela.

New

Data Usage preferences

A new pane with per-item-type tracking buckets plus snapshot capture and cache controls. All off by default. Opt in per type at any time.

New

Sub-folder app discovery

AppTela finds apps nested inside vendor folders under /Applications - Setapp, Adobe, Microsoft, and friends.

New

Check for Updates

A menu item that checks the Mac App Store for a newer version of AppTela.

New

Message Center

Actionable nudges inside Preferences when something can be improved - shadow performance, snapshot opt-in, an available update.

Fix

Cold start, noticeably faster

Direct plist reads, recursive sub-folder discovery, and lazy menu bar setup. Most visible on large libraries.

Fix

Stability and polish

Hundreds of UI, scroll, drag-and-drop, snapshot reliability, and app-exit fixes across every surface touched.

Previous release / What's new in AppTela 1.1.0 →