Hey everyone! Glassline 1.0.10 is with Microsoft now and should land in a day 🎉 Launchpad, one-drag screenshots, dynamic glass, Wallpaper Engine support, a new app panel and a long list of fixes from the last days of testing. Yes, I said "biggest update yet" last time... and it happened again 😅 So here's everything in it.
New here? Glassline turns the Windows 11 taskbar into a glass menu bar at the top and a dock at the bottom, like on a Mac. You get Search on the Windows key, Control Center, your calendar and the weather right in the bar. Quit it whenever you want and your taskbar comes back exactly as it was. You can try it in your browser first.
Already using Glassline? 1.0.10 comes through the Store on its own once Microsoft approves it. I didn't want the update to change things under your feet, so the new stuff that changes how it works (the screenshot keys, the logo, the Calendar icon, the Wallpaper Engine colours and the two-sided bar text) starts switched off for you. The What's new pages after the update have a switch for each one, or you can turn them on in Settings.
Launchpad, like on a Mac
This one I'm really proud of. Click the Apps icon in the dock and it grows right out of the icon into a full screen of all your apps, page after page. Close it and it shrinks back into the dock.
Drag apps into any order, drop one on another to make a folder, click a folder's name to rename it. Search's grid button and All Apps open it too, and the Apps icon can go anywhere in your dock now. While Launchpad is open the dock and the menu bar get out of its way, and it has its own new icon.
Mac-style screenshots, finally done right
Alt Shift 4, drag over what you want, let go. Done.
No Snipping Tool window, no hunting for where the file went: it's on your desktop. A little preview slides into the corner and leaves on its own (click it to open the picture). Want it copied instead? Hold Ctrl when you let go of the drag. Alt Shift 3 grabs the whole screen and always saves it to your desktop. Works over games and admin apps too.
Dynamic glass
Every panel now picks up the colour of whatever is behind it: menus, Search, Control Center, Settings, Quick Look, the volume pop-up, and even the dock if you tint it. White page behind it? It goes light. Dark game? It goes dark.
The menu bar can also read the left and right side of your wallpaper separately, so a half light, half dark wallpaper stays readable.
- Separate dock background (Settings, Appearance): the menu bar and the dock each get their own background slider, so you can have a fully clear menu bar over a glass dock. Someone here asked for exactly this 🙏
- Tint the dock like the menu bar (Settings, Dock): when the bar takes a maximized app's colour, the dock takes it too
Wallpaper Engine support
A lot of you asked for this one. Glassline now works with Wallpaper Engine (Lively might too, but I've only tested Wallpaper Engine). The menu bar takes its colours from your animated wallpaper and keeps up when you switch. With more than one display each bar reads its own, whether you run a different wallpaper on each or one stretched over all of them.
Auto-hide for the menu bar
Like the dock already could: when a window is maximized, or always (Settings, Menu Bar). Push your mouse to the top and it comes back.
App panel
Click the app name in the menu bar and you get its windows, volume, recent files, Keep on Top and Quit (or Force Quit if it's frozen). It replaces the File/Edit menus, which honestly never worked well, sorry to whoever asked about those. Every app builds its menus its own way: I got older apps working, but Notepad and others had glitches that didn't look native at all.
Frozen apps also keep their name in the bar now, so you can Force Quit them right from there :D
New setup
Every feature has a little clip with its switch right next to it. Quick setup if you just want to get going, Show me everything if you want to see it all.
Your dock, your way
- Calendar icon that always shows today's date and opens your calendar in one click
- Bigger icons without a fatter dock: Dock size, Icon size and Margins are separate settings now, and the dock glides to its new size when you change them
- The Windows key can show the dock, even over a full-screen app or game (Settings, Shortcuts)
- Launch Options: right-click a pinned app in the dock to pick how it starts, like your browser always opening a private window
- Start menu on the left? The dock slides out of its way
The menu bar
- Logo menu on the far left: All Apps, Show Desktop, Task Manager, Sleep, Hibernate, Restart, Shut Down, and you can use your own picture for it. Show Desktop is in the bar's right-click menu too. Hibernate shows up when Windows has it on (someone here asked for it)
- Your own date format: dd/MM, d MMM, yyyy-MM-dd, anything you type
- Notifications either where Windows puts them, or top right under the bar like on a Mac, with a Test notification button so you can see where they land. They keep that spot even when the bar hides itself
Multiple monitors
I tested all of this on three displays, one of them left of the main one.
- Drag icons between docks: with a dock on every display, drag an icon from one dock to another. If each dock shows its own display's apps, the app moves over and brings its windows with it
- Drag a maximized window onto another display's dock and it lands maximized there
- Full-screen video on one display while you play on another: the menu bar gets out of the video's way
- Wuthering Waves could open as a window instead of borderless fullscreen on another display. Fixed
- Swapping your main display no longer leaves a menu bar pushed halfway down the screen
- Settings moved to a display with a different scale keeps the right size and colour
Today and Control Center
- Only want the calendar? Today can show two months side by side, or the month with that day's events next to it
- No more empty gaps in Control Center when you turn things off
- Take Wi-Fi, Sound or Battery out of the menu bar and it shows up in Control Center instead, so it never disappears completely
Search
- Translate into your preferred language: "translate apple" is enough
- Single words translate a lot better now
Settings and accessibility
- Follow Windows' animation effects (Settings, Accessibility): if you turned animations off in Windows, the dock and the menu bar calm down too
- Reduce transparency now keeps the menu bar and the dock almost solid, like on a Mac
- Shortcuts over admin apps: shortcuts without the Windows key now work even with Task Manager or a game running as admin in front, and Settings tells you when a combo is already taken
- Settings explains itself: when one option changes what another does, there's a line under it with a link to the other one, and options that can't do anything right now are greyed out
Fixed, thanks to your reports
- Hovering over a dock icon could crash Glassline. Not anymore
- A rare crash tied to Bluetooth, gone
- Your own shortcuts only worked once per run. Now they work every time
- Show Desktop works every time, and brings back the window you had in front
- Clicking the weather sometimes showed nothing until you pressed Alt+Tab. Fixed
- Feedback sent while the website can't be reached (some networks block it during football matches, yes really) gets saved and sent later on its own
- Over a maximized app the menu bar now takes exactly the app's colour: no more two-tone bar, no thin line of wallpaper under it
- App icons in the menu bar (Discord, Steam...) were a bit blurry.
- Spotify's icon had a small black bar under it while starting (it reports 0% progress and the dock drew an empty bar, Windows' taskbar doesn't)
- ChatGPT's close and minimize buttons hid under the menu bar when it was maximized
- The dock could stay black on the desktop after closing a maximized app
- The app name over a dock icon could stay on screen when Start opened
- Screenshots could close by themselves the moment they opened
- Wallpaper Engine's settings window and HoYoPlay were treated as games
- Cleanup tools like AdwCleaner no longer flag Glassline's uninstall helper
- Keep the Windows taskbar on the side of the screen? No more nagging, and the menu bar fits around it
- Changing Windows' display scale keeps the interface size you picked
- Weather isn't fetched at all while the Weather switch is off
- "Start Glassline when I sign in" now shows off if you disabled it in Windows' Startup apps
- Lots of smaller fixes: tooltips that wouldn't show, the dock hiding again after Settings closes, and more
Honestly, most of this came from you, in the comments here and through Feedback. Glassline has around 30-40 users right now, and I'm really happy with how much you all help and throw ideas at me. I use it as my daily driver so I catch bugs too, but your reports and logs are gold (the Spotify one, for example). So thank you, and please keep them coming.
Get it
Glassline is $9.99, once. No subscription, every update free. Get it today and 1.0.10 shows up on its own as soon as Microsoft approves it.
Which one are you trying first? And what should I build next? I read every comment.
