Stay 1.2.1 released

July 25, 2012

Version 1.2.1 of Stay is now available.

Bug Fixes:

• Added support for Moutain Lion. Please note that due to major changes to the Spaces system in Mac OS X 10.8, Stay’s support for Spaces works differently than it did with previous versions of Mac OS X. The most important change is that floating palette/panel-style windows can only be stored and restored in the active application, on the active Space. For more detailed information, please refer to the Stay FAQ.
• Added high resolution artwork for Retina display Macs.
• Other minor bug fixes.

This version is primarily a bug fix release, adding support for Mountain Lion and high resolution artwork for Macs with Retina displays.

Despite the short change list, this was a huge release development-wise. The original feature list for 1.2.1 was significantly longer, but as the months went by, adding support for Spaces on Mountain Lion went from being an inconvenience, to an annoyance, to a nightmare, and one potential feature after another was dropped in the interest of ensuring 1.2.1 was available in time for Mountain Lion’s release.

It seemed as though every approach we took to reimplementing Spaces support looked promising right up until the last minute when it was revealed that some critical component of the Spaces system had been modified, removed or disabled. Such are the perils of relying on undocumented parts of the OS; Apple can and does break things at any time, without any prior notice.

Suffice it to say, it simply wasn’t possible to support Spaces in the same way on Mountain Lion as we had on Lion and Snow Leopard. Compromise was inevitable, and the palette/panel-style window limitation, while not ideal, was the best of the available compromises.