Mirrored from CHANGELOG.md

Changelog

All notable changes to this project are documented here.

The format is based on Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning.

Unreleased

[1.8.0] — 2026-09-10

Added

Simplified Chinese. The interface is now available in 简体中文 — every string in the app and the widget, not a partial pass. Choose Settings → General → Language. Chinese readers were already the largest group arriving at the project, and until now the app they arrived at could not speak to them.

[1.7.0] — 2026-08-31

Added

Network can now show a graph in the menu bar, next to its stacked ↓/↑ rates — the same value-plus-trend pairing CPU, Memory, and GPU already offer. Pick Activity + Graph for Network in Settings → Menu Bar; the plain Activity item is unchanged, so no existing menu bar widens on update.

Changed

Network charts are scaled against a 1 MB/s floor instead of purely against the highest value on screen. A chart that re-fits itself to the quietest minute turns a few KB/s of background chatter into a full-height wave, which in the menu bar — where there is no axis to read — looks like heavy traffic. An idle Mac now draws a flat line, and a real transfer still scales to its own peak. This applies to the network popover too.

1.6.1 — 2026-08-04

Fixed

The optional switches in onboarding now have a step of their own. Launch at login and the update question sat under the module list, and on a Mac that reports more hardware they fell below the fold — so the one question the app asks about using the network could be missed entirely by scrolling past it.

1.6.0 — 2026-08-04

Added

Mectrics can now check for updates on its own, if you let it. It asks once, in onboarding or on a later launch where it has nothing else to say, and the answer is changeable in Settings → General → Updates. Consent changes when the appcast is fetched, never what the request carries: system profiling stays off, so nothing about you or the Mac is attached, and an update is still never downloaded or installed without you. Until it is answered, and whenever the answer is no, nothing reaches the network unless you press Check for Updates….

1.5.0 — 2026-08-04

Added

mectrics alerts watch --json --heartbeat <seconds> now provides a tagged NDJSON stream with immediate readiness, periodic liveness and freshness information, alert events, and sampling-coverage transitions.
mectrics doctor validates saved rules, hardware coverage, the executable and optional command link, and emits the same diagnosis as versioned JSON with --json.
End-to-end CLI contract tests now execute the real binary with isolated preferences and lock down exit codes, stream separation, sampling failures, and version 1 JSON fixtures.
A local performance harness now records Release CPU, phys_footprint, open connections, long-run memory growth, and embedded CLI latency with machine-local JSON/CSV reports. It runs declared workloads from scripts/performance/profiles/, can open a Settings pane so that window is measured too, and logs the power source alongside every sample.
mectrics://menu-bar opens the Menu Bar pane of Settings, completing a route table that already covered the overview and alerts.
Points-of-interest signposts and XCTest microbenchmarks cover launch-to-first-sample, popover presentation, menu bar formatting, Energy Guard decisions, and the ring-buffer hot path.
A private release-candidate workflow now signs, notarizes, and staples a versioned DMG without changing the appcast or publishing a tag or GitHub release.
Public performance guidance now explains the Release-only measurement method, the Activity Monitor CPU and memory scales, and the difference between a smoke gate and a long-run stability result.
Explicit app test and optimized performance schemes now run the app-layer suite instead of relying on an implicit build-only scheme; the embedded CLI also uses a distinct Swift module name while preserving its lowercase executable.

Changed

CLI commands use typed subcommand parsing with command-specific help and conventional usage (64), software (70), and configuration (78) exit codes while preserving the published check health codes 0, 1, and 2.
Alert checks construct only the providers their enabled rules require. Thermal-pressure rules use the native system state directly, and watch sampling adapts to AC or battery.
Temperatures are sampled only where one is actually on screen — a temperature item, an open popover or detail window, the menu bar builder, or a rule that watches the CPU temperature. A module simply having a menu bar item no longer keeps the SMC busy.
Battery and disk are read every second base cycle rather than every cycle. Both move on the scale of minutes and each costs an IOKit round trip, and the new cadence stays well inside the staleness budget that decides when a reading is shown as out of date.

Fixed

A watch session no longer evaluates a cached metric after that provider fails. Repeated failures and stale readings now degrade explicit coverage instead of leaving a stream silently healthy or allowing an old violation to become an alert.
Release performance launches no longer leave test or framework bookkeeping in the user's real preferences domain or restore a previously open Settings window. A preferences domain that did not exist before a run is now removed reliably after it.
Leaving Settings open no longer costs a large and growing amount of CPU and memory. The Menu Bar and Alerts panes rebuilt themselves on every sample, which rebuilt every tooltip and hover region with them; live values now live in small fixed-width leaf views, so a new reading repaints a caption instead of re-laying out the window. On the reference Mac a 31-minute run with Settings open went from a 74.9% CPU median to 4.3%, from 1422 seconds spent above 10% to 5, and from a 122 MB memory p95 growing at 21 MB/hour to 62 MB growing at 2.9 MB/hour.
A temperature sensor that reads out of range for a moment no longer adds and removes a menu bar item, which rebuilt every status item each time it flickered. What a module can show is now settled once it has been seen.
The menu bar previews in Settings reserve the same fixed width as the real items, so chips no longer resize as values change.
The Dock icon now goes away when you close the last Mectrics window. It was decided by scanning every window the app owned, which always found the window behind a status item, so once the icon appeared it stayed for the rest of the session.
Closing Settings now releases the window instead of holding it for the session, returning roughly 35 MB — more than half of what a menu bar agent is budgeted in total.
What's New shows the release you just installed. It listed the same three features regardless of version, so an upgrade was announced with news from an older release.
A partially unavailable watch reports the missing conditions in machine-readable status and heartbeat records rather than exposing the loss only as a standard-error warning.

1.4.0 — 2026-08-01

Added

A bundled, read-only mectrics CLI for headless Macs. It reuses the alert rules enabled in the app, streams activation and recovery events as text or newline-delimited JSON, lists configured rules, provides a cron-friendly check with meaningful exit codes, and captures every available module through a one-shot snapshot.
A one-click CLI installer in Alert settings. It creates /usr/local/bin/mectrics as a link to the signed executable inside the app, with no second download or background service.
Two alert rules for what macOS itself reports, alongside the existing number thresholds. CPU and GPU slowed to cool down fires when the system holds the chip back — a hot sensor and a machine that is actually being slowed are not the same thing, and only the second one costs you time. On Apple silicon the state covers the whole chip, so a throttled GPU is included. Memory pressure fires on the kernel's own verdict rather than on how full memory looks; a Mac can sit at 95% with nothing wrong. Both wait for the condition to persist before they say anything, both appear on the Compact Health item, and both are recorded in the Attention Log — so after a long job you can go back and see the hours your Mac spent held back.

Changed

Fan detection now falls back to the read-only per-fan speed keys when a Mac exposes fan data but does not return the usual SMC fan-count key.
Temperatures are no longer sampled for a module that is only being watched by an alert rule. Reading the SMC is the most expensive thing Mectrics does, and a rule on CPU usage never needed it.

Fixed

What's New now appears after an update actually installs. It was only ever shown when the app was reopened from the Finder, and an update does not do that — it quits Mectrics and starts it again. A menu bar app has no Dock icon to click either, so in practice the release notes never appeared for anyone who upgraded.
Disk read and write throughput no longer reports an impossible figure after a volume is ejected. Throughput is the difference between two lifetime byte counters summed across every disk, so unplugging an external drive made the total go backwards and the subtraction wrapped around into roughly ten quintillion bytes per second. A shrinking total now reads as no traffic, the same way the network module already handled an interface disappearing.
The Used and Free menu bar items no longer draw outside their reserved slot. Digits are monospaced but unit letters are not, and MB is wider than the GB the slot had been sized for — so a disk with a few hundred megabytes left could nudge its neighbours.
Fan speeds that no fan could reach are ignored instead of shown. An SMC key decoded under the wrong type returns a number rather than an error, and that number used to reach the menu bar as a fan reading.

1.3.0 — 2026-07-30

Changed

Mectrics uses noticeably less CPU while it sits in the menu bar. A status item is only redrawn when its reading actually changed, disk space is read through a cheap system call instead of one that wakes a background service every second, and the graphics and sensor readings copy only the values they need.
Launching is roughly three times cheaper in CPU terms, so the menu bar fills in sooner after login.
Monitoring now steps down while nobody can see it — a sleeping display, a locked screen, or another user's session — and returns to full speed with a fresh reading the moment you come back.
Battery and disk readings follow their own pace, which slows down further on battery and under thermal pressure while everything on screen stays current.

1.2.0 — 2026-07-30

Added

Independent temperature menu bar components for CPU, Memory, and GPU, plus Memory temperature in its detail popover when the Mac exposes a recognized sensor.

1.1.0 — 2026-07-30

Added

Complete English, Turkish, Russian, Spanish, French, and Brazilian Portuguese localizations for the app and widgets, with an in-app language picker under General Settings.
A built-in clean uninstall flow that removes Mectrics, its preferences, alert rules, local history, and caches without requiring administrator access.

Changed

Diagnostics and system-summary exports now follow the selected app language.
Technical translations use the terminology found in each language's macOS interface, including Activity Monitor, System Settings, battery, memory, disk, and network labels.
Translation contributor guidance now covers both String Catalogs and the language picker.

Fixed

The manual uninstall script now removes the Sparkle cache.
Failed login-item changes are reported to the uninstall flow instead of being ignored.

1.0.0 — 2026-07-30

The first release. Distributed as a signed and notarized DMG.

Measured on the reference Mac, a Release build holds steady at 25 MB of memory with roughly one idle wake per second.

Added

Menu bar modules — CPU, Memory, Battery, Network, Disk, GPU, Temperature (SMC), and Fans (SMC), each drawn as a readable value, with live sparklines for CPU, Memory, and GPU. Unavailable hardware hides its module; a missing reading renders as a dash rather than a fabricated zero.
Fixed-width status items — every component reserves a worst-case width and right-aligns monospaced digits, so values change without the menu bar shifting.
Detail popovers with per-module breakdowns, top processes, and contextual actions.
Compact Health — an optional single status item that summarizes the machine and surfaces only what needs attention.
Alert rules — sustained-threshold notifications with live previews and test delivery.
Attention Log — a local, exportable record of what tripped and when.
Energy Guard — normal / reduced / protected sampling driven by power source, Low Power Mode, and thermal pressure.
Menu bar builder — a visual layout editor with presets and live preview chips.
WidgetKit widgets in small, medium, and large sizes, fed through an App Group snapshot.
Diagnostics — a local-only system summary that can be copied or exported as plain text.
Three-step onboarding, accent themes, and launch-at-login via SMAppService.
MetricsKit — a UI-independent SwiftPM engine (providers, adaptive scheduler, pre-allocated ring buffer store) with a mectrics-cli terminal readout.
Internationalization — English base strings extracted into a String Catalog; adding a language requires no code change.

Security

Release builds use Hardened Runtime, a Developer ID signature, and notarization.
Automatic update checks are disabled; the Sparkle appcast is fetched only on an explicit Check for Updates… and verified against a pinned EdDSA public key.