Changelog

Site update, August 31, 2026 · One name for the $5 license

• The $5 license is called a Business License everywhere now. Eleven app pages called it a “Commercial License” and fourteen called it a “Business License”, for the identical thing at the identical price. Anchr’s pricing section, its checkout window, and its terms and privacy pages now all say Business License.
• Nothing about the license itself changed. Same $5, same one-time payment, same cover for one computer. A key you already hold still works, and there is nothing you need to do.

Site update, August 30, 2026 · Buy several apps in one order

• One payment, as many apps as you need. The commercial license window on this page could sell exactly one thing: Anchr. A team that also wanted two other twoplus11 apps paid three separate times, on three separate pages, and filed three separate receipts. That window now carries an Add another app control: search the catalog, set how many computers each app goes on, and pay once. Every app still gets its own license key, and they all arrive in the same email.
• Nothing changes if Anchr is all you want. The window opens exactly as it did, at the same price, with the same count of computers, and an order for a single app takes the route through checkout it always has. The extra controls appear only once the app list has loaded, so a slow or unreachable connection leaves the page as it was.

1.2.0 — August 22, 2026 · Undo, an icon that stops overstating itself, and three lines that were English everywhere

• Undo, for everything Anchr stores. Every rule in this app is one click to change and a long evening to reconstruct — never use this, make this my first choice, anchor what I’m using now, and the two headline switches. Press ⌘Z and the last one goes back, twenty steps deep. The command names what it will reverse before you press it — “Undo Never use Studio Display Speakers for output” — rather than making you press it to find out.
• Reset Everything and Import Settings are recoverable now. Both replace your whole setup in one press, and both were a dialog away from a configuration nobody could rebuild. An undo brings back the priority lists, the blocked devices, both switches and the notification settings a reset threw away. They still ask first: a confirmation and an undo are not the same promise.
• Three ways in, because an undo you cannot find is not an undo. The menu-bar menu carries it, where “Make this my first choice” is pressed; the Devices pane has visible Undo and Redo buttons at the top; and ⌘Z / ⇧⌘Z work anywhere in the Settings and welcome windows, including the Advanced tab where Reset and Import live. Every undo is announced and written to the activity log, like every other change Anchr makes. One press of “Anchor These” is one undo step, not three.
• Fixed: the menu-bar icon claimed to be holding your devices when it was holding nothing. Switched on with no rules set — which is exactly what a fresh install looks like — Anchr drew the same anchor it draws when it is holding all three roles. The struck-through anchor has always meant “nothing is being held”; that is the glyph for this state now, which is the one state where the icon told a new user the opposite of the truth.
• Fixed: the icon said “Anchr” and nothing else to VoiceOver. Three distinct glyphs — holding, not holding, in trouble — and one unchanging word for anyone who does not look at them, in an app that announces everything else it does. It says which state it is in now, and names what took the device when Anchr has stood down.
• Fixed: one device taking two roles left only one way back. AirPods take your output and your microphone in the same instant; an HDMI display takes output and system sounds. Anchr moves both back and offers to keep the device for each role — but the two offers were told apart by the device alone, so the menu drew one of them and the other role’s offer silently disappeared. For anyone with notifications off, that was the whole gesture gone for that role.
• Fixed: three lines were English in all thirteen languages. The device summary in Advanced, the reorder announcement, and the spoken label on every priority row — the one label whose entire meaning is the ordering — each interpolate a number, and a number is looked up under a different key spelling than a word. The tables carried the word spelling, so Anchr asked for a key nobody had translated and fell back to English while every coverage count read 100%. The translations were always there; nothing ever asked for them.

1.1.0 — August 20, 2026 · Thirteen languages, failures said out loud, and a way back from a hidden icon

• Thirteen languages, with a picker in Settings. English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Turkish and Simplified Chinese — chosen in Anchr rather than inherited from your Mac, and taking effect on the next redraw rather than the next launch. Almost every sentence Anchr says is built while it runs, out of a device name and a role, so this is the whole menu, the whole activity log and every announcement, not just the labels in Settings.
• Anchr says so when something goes wrong, not only when it goes right. Every success was announced — a device put back, a pin, a reorder, a pause — and no failure was. A write the audio system refused, a write macOS accepted and then quietly undid, and Anchr giving up after something kept dragging a device away all reached the activity log, the menu-bar glyph and a notification banner that needs a permission granted and a setting left on. Someone who glances at the menu bar sees a warning triangle; there was no equivalent for anyone who does not. Each is spoken now, once per problem rather than once per event. Failing to start watching your audio never reached the activity log at all — the single worst state Anchr can be in, because the app looks present and is holding nothing.
• The mute Anchr performs for you was silent when it worked and silent when it failed. “Mute the built-in speakers when sound falls back to them” exists for one moment: your headphones die mid-track, Anchr moves the sound to the Mac’s own speakers, and the room finds out what you were listening to. The success reached the activity log and nothing else. The failure branch did not exist at all — a device that refuses a volume write produced no announcement, no activity row, and not even a line in the system log. A safety feature whose failure looks exactly like its success is worse than not having it. Both branches report now, and the failure says what it means: the speakers may be playing at the volume you last used them at.
• Hiding the menu-bar icon was a one-way door. Anchr has no Dock icon and no window of its own, the setting persists across restarts, and the Settings window that holds the switch is opened from the menu that had just been removed — so turning the icon off left Anchr running, still holding your devices, and completely unreachable. Opening Anchr again from Applications or Spotlight brings the icon back now, which is what the switch’s own description had always claimed. Turning it off asks first, and says how to undo it before you need to know.
• Importing settings asks first, and names what it would replace. It is the most destructive control in the app — it discards every priority list, every blocked device and every switch in one click — and it was the only one that asked nothing, while “Reset everything”, which throws away strictly less, has asked since it was written. The confirmation counts the devices you would lose across all three roles. It does not appear on a fresh install, because a confirmation for a no-op teaches people to dismiss confirmations without reading them. Export now writes atomically, so a full disk or a drive pulled mid-save cannot leave a truncated file where a complete export used to be.
• Land quietly when the sound falls back. Anchr can mute the Mac’s built-in speakers on the way in when your headphones die and the sound falls through to them. Only the built-in speakers: anything with its own volume knob is left alone, because a change you can only undo in hardware is a worse surprise than the one being prevented. Off by default, in Settings › General.
• Anchr notices when macOS accepts a change and then undoes it. There is a macOS bug where, after AirPods have been passed to an iPhone and back, setting the default output device reports success and the device immediately reverts. System Settings still works, so from where you are sitting Anchr is the thing that is broken. It reads the device back after every change and says when it did not take.
• Fixed: Settings opens. It was a SwiftUI Settings scene, which a menu-bar agent can only open through a private action that frequently does nothing at all — no error, nothing in the log, just a menu item that appears to be broken. For an app whose entire configuration lives behind that one item, that is an app that cannot be set up. Anchr owns the window outright now, and ⌘W and Escape both close it — and the onboarding window too.
• Fixed: “Launch Anchr at login” was read once and never checked again. Turning Anchr off in System Settings › General › Login Items left the switch on for the rest of the session, and macOS can accept the registration and then park it at “requires approval”, where nothing launches at login — which the old code read as success. The switch is re-read whenever Settings opens, every write is read back, and a change macOS holds or refuses snaps the switch back and says why. A VoiceOver user got none of that before: the toggle reverted in silence. The state and the reason are announced together now.
• Corrected: the Devices pane, and this website, said Anchr “never routes to something you haven’t chosen”. There is one deliberate exception, and it is the moment you most rely on it: when the device you are on is one you marked never-use and nothing on your list is available, Anchr moves you to the best device that is, listed or not. A never-use switch that gave up whenever your list was empty would be decoration. The behavior is right; denying the exception was not.
• Corrected: the export said it carried “every switch”. Three of them stay on the Mac — opening at login and the language are held by macOS, and automatic updates belong to the install — so none of the three could travel in a settings file, and none of them did. The copy names what goes in the file and what does not.
• Changed: removing a device from a priority list is ⌘- rather than ⌘⌫. Other twoplus11 apps use ⌘⌫ to move a file to the Trash and to delete a record, and taking a device off a preference list destroys nothing — a chord learned as destructive should not also mean something harmless.
• Changed: Anchr’s accent moves two degrees of hue, as part of rebalancing the twoplus11 color wheel so every released app has a slot of its own. The difference is invisible side by side; what it fixes is that the design system and the shipped app now agree on what Anchr’s color is. The icon, the social card, the installer background, this website and the in-app theme are all regenerated from that one source. The legal and changelog pages had been carrying another app’s green outright, from the template they were built from.
• Anchr sold business licenses and had nowhere to type one. The key button in the footer opened the checkout page and did nothing else, so anyone who had already paid was shown the shop again. The purchase email has always said “open Anchr, choose License…, paste the key, click Activate” — none of those three things existed. The footer’s key now opens a License panel: paste the key, name the computer so it is recognizable in your seat list, and click Activate. Nothing about Anchr is locked behind it — personal use is free, forever, and every feature works without a key; entering one registers this Mac against the license you bought.
• Removing a license hands the seat back. “Remove License…” tells the server to release this computer’s activation before it forgets the key locally, so the seat is immediately free for another Mac — which is what the purchase email means by “move a seat between machines any time”. The name you gave this computer is kept, so re-entering a key later does not add a second entry for the same machine to your seat list.
• The License panel keeps working offline: an activation is re-checked once a day, and if the license server cannot be reached the license stands for 72 hours before Anchr quietly falls back to the free tier and says the server is unreachable. It never calls a key invalid on evidence it does not have. A key that was rejected is always re-checked rather than cached, so freeing a seat or renewing takes effect the moment you look, instead of up to a day later.
• The panel reads in all thirteen languages Anchr ships, and is keyboard- and VoiceOver-operable: Escape closes it, Return activates, and the reason a key was refused is announced rather than only drawn.
• The footer has its Updates button back. The shared twoplus11 footer is meant to read License → Updates → Help → Review → Tip in every app in the fleet, and Anchr’s was missing Updates entirely — so the only way to check for a new version by hand was the menu bar.
• The footer’s Shortcuts button, and something for it to open. The shared twoplus11 footer is meant to end License → Updates → Help → Review → Tip → Shortcuts in every app, and Anchr had neither the button nor a panel — so its keyboard shortcuts were discoverable only by hunting through the menu bar, and the ones bound to invisible buttons were not discoverable at all. Every chord in the new panel is one Anchr actually answers, it reads in all thirteen languages, and VoiceOver speaks “Command Q” rather than the glyphs.

Site update — August 19, 2026 · A checksum for the download

Website only; no change to the app.

• The download page now publishes the SHA-256 of the Anchr.dmg it serves, so you can confirm the file you got is the file we put there. macOS already runs the check that matters — Anchr is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, and a copy altered after we signed it will not open — but there was no way to check a download by hand, which is what anyone installing it on more than their own Mac tends to want. The checksum is on the download section under SHA-256 checksum, next to the one command that compares it with your copy. It is published as a plain file too, at Anchr.dmg.sha256, in the format shasum -c reads.

Site update — August 17, 2026 · The other apps, after the sign-up

Website only; no change to the app.

• The list of the other twoplus11 Mac apps has moved to the bottom of the page, below the email sign-up rather than above it. It used to arrive while the page was still making its case for Anchr, so the last thing you read before being asked for your email was a wall of other apps. It sits at the end now — the page finishes on Anchr, and the list is there if you want to see what else there is.

Site update — August 14, 2026 · Headlines in one color

Website only; no change to the app.

• The headline no longer fades from one color into another across the letters. A gradient poured through text is the house style of every generated landing page on the web, and it was on the hero here, on the small uppercase label above each section, and on the license label in the purchase panel. The words are one solid color now — the accent this page already used everywhere else — so the headline finally matches the page under it.
• Gradients are kept where they belong — the buttons, the app tile and the rule above the support panel are untouched. It is only text that stopped fading.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 12, 2026 · Readable buttons and small print

• The buttons in the header say what they say. The Tip and Download pills were drawing their label at 55% opacity over a colored fill, which measured as low as 1.6:1 against it — well under the 4.5:1 the accessibility guidelines ask for. Their labels are now solid, and the fill behind them is set a shade deeper so the text genuinely clears that bar.
• The Subscribe and Support buttons too. Their labels were colored for one end of a two-color gradient and disappeared into the other end. Both now use a single fill that the label is legible on all the way across.
• The newsletter note, the “More apps” caption and the version line under the download button were all set too faint to read comfortably; each is now above the AA threshold.
• Keyboard shortcut chips are legible against their own background.
• The screenshot viewer no longer makes every visit quietly re-download this page as if it were an image — a wasted request on each load.
• No change to the app.

Site update — August 11, 2026 · Clearer search results

• The description under this site in Google is no longer cut off. It ran past the length Google shows and broke mid-word; it now reads as a complete sentence.
• Sharing a link to the privacy, terms or changelog page now shows a proper preview card instead of a bare URL.
• The sitemap now reports when each page actually changed, so search engines re-check pages that have been updated instead of assuming they are stale.
• No change to the app.

1.0.0 — August 11, 2026 · Initial public release

First release — an ordered preference for each audio role, enforced independently, so a monitor can't take your sound and a headset can't take your microphone.

• An ordered list per role — output, microphone and system sounds each get their own. Anchr uses the first device on the list that's connected, and falls through automatically when one is unplugged.
• Roles are enforced independently — the thing the Sound settings pane cannot express. Listen through AirPods while your microphone stays on a USB interface, so nothing ever opens an input stream on the headset and it never drops into hands-free mode.
• Never use a display's speakers — one switch covering HDMI and DisplayPort. It is a rule about the kind of connection, so it covers monitors bought after you flipped it.
• Never use a Bluetooth headset as the microphone — the same, for every headset you own and every one you will own.
• It never argues with you — CoreAudio reports a person changing a device and a program stealing one identically, so when Anchr puts something back it says so and offers the way out: choose that device a second time and it keeps it for the session. There is a one-click button in the menu, so the gesture works with notifications switched off.
• And it says when it's losing — something changing the same role faster than a person could, several times in a few seconds, makes Anchr stop rather than loop against it. It reports that once, in the menu and in a notification.
• Waits for hardware to settle — a dock brings three devices in half a second and a wake republishes the whole list. Anchr routes once instead of five times, and still routes eventually if the hardware never goes quiet.
• Menu bar only — the current device for each role at a glance, one-click switching, pause, re-apply, and a shortcut to macOS's own Sound settings. No Dock icon, and the menu-bar icon itself can be hidden.
• Needs no permissions at all — no microphone access, no Accessibility, no prompt of any kind. Anchr chooses which microphone your apps record from and never opens one itself; the build refuses to ship if a microphone usage string ever appears in the bundle.
• Priority lists reorder from the keyboard — ⌘↑, ⌘↓ and ⌘⌫ — never drag-only. Every control VoiceOver-labelled, every accent color generated to clear its contrast target in light, dark and Increase Contrast; full WCAG 2.1 AA.
• Settings import and export, to carry a setup to another Mac.
• Signed and notarized by Apple — macOS 13+, Apple Silicon & Intel, one universal build.
• Free for personal use forever, including updates; optional one-time $5-per-device commercial license for commercial use.

Known scope for 1.0: holding the microphone off a Bluetooth headset covers apps that record from your default input, which is nearly all of them. An app that selects the headset by name will still do so, and no app of this kind can prevent that.