3rd July 2024
Stemverter 3 has been updated with improved macOS Sonoma support, including some new refinements, bug fixes — and a plan for what comes next.
While we’re mostly fixing some things in this release to ensure full compatibility with macOS Sonoma and Apple Music, we’ve also taken the opportunity to refine a few things across Sleeve, and add some small quality of life improvements that we often get requests for.
You’ll notice the new Sonoma theme throughout the app if you’re running Apple’s latest OS, but we’ve also taken the opportunity to move some things around a little. Everything to do with the behavior of the album widget can be found in the new ‘Window’ settings, and ‘Position’ now only contains the positioning settings.
In the new ‘Window’ settings you can now choose whether Sleeve should display on all desktops or just your current one, and you can also disable the new ‘Ignore Mission Control’ toggle if you’d rather the album widget hide when you ‘Show Desktop’, and be displayed when you ‘Show All Windows’.
By default you can adjust the spacing for the album widget on all edges, but in 2.2 there is now an additional option to set the horizontal and vertical spacing separately, so you can now move Sleeve horizontally without it also moving vertically. This setting remains in the ‘Position’ settings.
When you like a track in your music app (or using Sleeve!), if you’re scrobbling your music to Last.fm using Sleeve, we’ll also mark the track as ‘Loved’ in your Last.fm library. This setting is on by default and can be found in Sleeve’s ‘Last.fm’ settings.
Double-clicking behavior
Not everyone knows this, but double-clicking the album widget brings whichever music app you’re using to the front. In Sleeve’s new ‘Window’ settings you can now choose whether this double-click should take you directly to the track instead.
As mentioned, there’s a few bugs we’ve seen in Sleeve that are now fixed in this release and other small improvements.
Something we’ve been asked before is why Sleeve isn’t available as a native macOS widget so that it can work in the Notification Centre. If you’ve updated to macOS Sonoma you’ll probably know you can also now have those native widgets appear on the Desktop, similar to how Sleeve does.
Our take with Sleeve has always been to allow for maximum customization. We’re evaluating options for supporting the native widget system in the future, but for now Sleeve continues do be it’s own thing that sits alongside Apple’s widgets system. We have some new options in 2.2 that give you some more control over positioning which we hope will make it easier to use Sleeve and Apple’s widgets on your desktop at the same time.
If you’ve purchased from us directly, and haven’t already been prompted, you can manually check for updates in the ‘System’ tab of Sleeve to install the update. For App Store users, you should see the update available in your ‘Updates’ tab in the Mac App Store.
We’re still incredibly grateful for how much love Sleeve receives every day and we’ve got plenty more plans for the future, as well as lots of ideas from our community. If you’ve purchased Sleeve, recommended it to others, or given us feedback at any point during the last couple of years — thank you!
Al & Hector