Changelog

1.2.7 · October 18, 2026

• Quitting from the menu bar icon works reliably on macOS 27 Golden Gate. On macOS 27, choosing Quit from the menu bar icon could leave the window stranded on screen with no way to close it except Force Quit. The same fix covers Cmd+Q and quitting from the Dock.

1.2.6 · October 18, 2026 · Live again

Fixed

• Readings no longer stop in the built app. A startup callback that applies the initial popover styling never fires in the release build. The tick timer now applies those classes itself on the first opportunity, so the webview receives data from the first tick onward.
• The popover points at its menu bar icon. A small arrow now extends from the top of the card toward the icon it opened from, so the connection between the two is clear. The arrow tracks the icon’s position when the popover moves to stay on screen.
• No more deadlocks on popover open. All JavaScript dispatch to the webview uses fire-and-forget evaluation instead of the blocking semaphore pattern that froze the main thread.

1.2.4 · October 16, 2026 · One ask, once you have actually come back

• The “Enjoying Pulsr?” question waits until you have come back to the app, and it only asks once. It used to appear on the 25th time you opened the popover, which for a menu-bar app can be a single afternoon, and it only ever asked for a review. It now waits for thirty opens spread over at least three separate days, which is the difference between using Pulsr and having tried it, and it asks once and then goes quiet. If you say you like it you are offered a review or a tip and nothing more is pushed; if you say you do not, it takes you to the support form with your version and your macOS version already filled in, which is the more useful thing to do with that answer.
• “Don’t ask again” survives an update, and updating does not restart the clock. If you have already answered, a new version will not ask you again, and a long-standing user is not treated as somebody who just installed Pulsr. The counters live outside the app bundle where an update cannot reach them, and the first launch after this one carries your old answer across.
• The other twoplus11 apps share the timer. If any one of them has asked you something in the last month, Pulsr stays quiet, so owning several of them no longer means being asked by each of them in turn.

1.2.3 · October 11, 2026 · One Pulsr in the menu bar, and no license to buy

• The Business License is gone from the app. Pulsr is free for commercial use now, so there is nothing to buy and no key to enter. The License button has left the footer, the License row has left Settings, and the sheet that asked for a key is gone with them. A key you entered before is simply ignored, and what you are left with is the same complete app it has always been. It also means Pulsr no longer talks to a licensing server at all: the update check, which you can still switch off, is the only request it makes on its own.
• Turning on “Open at login” no longer doubles the menu-bar glyph. Enabling the switch registered Pulsr to start at login and, because that registration also starts the app right away, macOS launched a second Pulsr on top of the one you were already using. Two copies meant two sets of graphs in the menu bar until you quit one. Pulsr now allows a single copy at a time: the extra one that login startup launches steps aside quietly, so you are always left with exactly one, whether it starts at login or you open it yourself.

Site update, October 11, 2026 · Pulsr is free for commercial use

• There is no longer a Business License to buy. Using Pulsr at work, on a work Mac, or for anything that earns money used to need a paid license. It does not any more: commercial use is free, on as many computers as you like, with no seat to count and no account to create. It is the same complete application either way, with no locked features, trial timers or watermarks.
• Section 3 of the terms grants that outright, under “Commercial Use (Free)”, and these pages have stopped quoting a price for it. Read the terms.
• The app changed with it: 1.2.3 above takes the Business License out of Pulsr altogether.

1.2.2 · September 30, 2026 · A Business License activates on any Mac

• Activating a Business License no longer fails with “Connection error”. Pulsr checks a license key with the twoplus11 license server over HTTPS, and it could only verify that server’s certificate on a Mac that had the python.org edition of Python installed, which most Macs do not. Everywhere else the check failed before it started, so activation said “Connection error” however many times you tried. Pulsr now verifies the server the way Safari does, with the certificates macOS itself trusts, including one your school or company has installed.
• The license key field shows the whole key. It showed only the last part of a key’s format, so a key could be typed without the PULSR- it starts with and then be refused. It now shows the full format, PULSR-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.
• The Business License window is the one the other twoplus11 apps use.

Site update, September 23, 2026 · The privacy page now says update checks are counted

• Update checks are counted, and the privacy page now says so. When Pulsr checks for a new version, that request reaches our server and we record it: which app it was, the version it reported, the date, the user-agent string of the request, and a one-way hash of your IP address that is re-salted every day. We keep it for one reason, to count how many installs are still in use. The privacy page said the opposite in its summary; it now says this there as well as in its “Update checks” section.
• The earlier “no telemetry” wording was inaccurate. The entry below of August 12, 2026 says the line about there being no account and no telemetry “was accurate and is unchanged”. It was not accurate: the checks were already being counted when it was written. That entry is left as it stands, because it is a record of what was published on the day; this one corrects it.
• Nothing about your files changed, and nothing about them is sent. There is still no account, the automatic check can still be turned off, and Pulsr goes on working either way.
• No change to the app.

1.2.1 · September 14, 2026 · Runs on macOS 13 Ventura again

• Ventura is supported again. Pulsr now runs on macOS 13 Ventura and later, where it previously required macOS 14 Sonoma. Nothing in the app ever needed Sonoma: the floor came from the Python runtime bundled in at build time, which has been rebuilt against one targeting macOS 10.13 on Intel and 11.0 on Apple Silicon. Intel and Apple Silicon Macs are both supported, as before.

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

• The update notice can only ever open a twoplus11.com page. When a new version exists, Pulsr offers a button that opens the download page, and which page that is was whatever the update server said it was. Nothing checked it, so a spoofed or compromised server could have pointed that button at any site it liked, wearing the credibility of a signed app. The address is now checked against the real host before anything opens, and a lookalike like twoplus11.com.example.net does not pass.
• One payment, as many apps as you need. The commercial license window on this page could sell exactly one thing: Pulsr. 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 Pulsr 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 · September 8, 2026 · Light and Dark, and a header that stopped hiding its own buttons

• New: Light, Dark, or follow your Mac. Settings has an Appearance row now. Pulsr has always repainted itself when macOS changed, and it could do nothing else: if you keep your Mac light and want this one window dark, or the other way round, there was no way to say so. Your choice is remembered, and the pop-up menus and scrollbars macOS draws inside the window follow it too.
• Fixed: the About and Settings buttons could be pushed clean off the edge of the window, with nothing to scroll to get them back. The status line sat between the app name and those two buttons, and the window is 350 points wide: “Almost out of disk space” was 52 points too long for it in English, the everyday “Under memory pressure” was too long in German, French, Polish and Russian, and “Readings have stopped” ran 126 points over in Russian. The buttons vanished exactly when a Mac that is out of space, short of memory, throttling or no longer being read is the reason you opened Pulsr. The status line has a row of its own now: never shortened, in any of the thirteen languages, and the buttons never move.
• Fixed: the heat warning was on screen even when there was nothing to warn about: an empty amber chip beside the status line, at all times, on every Mac. It was being hidden in a way the rest of its own styling overrode, and it was eating 25 points of the row that was already overflowing.
• Fixed: freeing memory made Pulsr report a memory emergency that Pulsr had caused. A clean works by asking for memory: it takes as much as it can, so macOS has to hand back the cache and squeeze the idle pages. For the second or two that lasts, all of it counted against your Mac: the Memory card climbed toward 100%, the graph kept a mountain that never happened for the next minute, the heading announced “Under memory pressure”, the menu-bar reading turned red (the one thing it promises to do only under real pressure), and “What’s using your Mac” named Pulsr as the biggest thing on the machine. None of that was true of your Mac. Pulsr no longer counts what it is holding on your behalf, and while a clean runs it says so rather than raising an alarm about itself.
• Fixed: Quit and Bring to front could not be reached without a mouse. The two buttons on each row of the process list did not exist until the pointer was over them, so they were not in the keyboard’s path and VoiceOver never knew they were there. The only part of the window you can act on was trackpad-only. They can be tabbed to now, and they appear on focus exactly as they do on hover.
• Fixed: a click on one of those buttons could do nothing at all. The list is rebuilt every couple of seconds, and a rebuild landing between pressing and releasing the mouse replaced the button under your finger, so the click was never delivered, silently, with no error. The list holds still now while the pointer or the keyboard is in it, and catches up the moment they leave.
• Fixed: an app whose name ends in a backslash had three dead buttons. Show in Finder, Bring to front and Quit are built with the app’s own name written into them, and a name ending in a backslash cut that off part way, so all three did nothing when pressed, again with no error and no message. The row works now, and the name is still shown exactly as the app spells it.
• Fixed: which of Memory / CPU you were looking at, and which menu-bar style was chosen, were shown in colour and nothing else. Both say which one is selected out loud now, so VoiceOver and a high-contrast setting can tell them apart. The licence dot in the footer had a tooltip and no name, so a screen reader read a dot; it says “Business license” or “Personal use: free”.

1.1.0 · August 20, 2026 · A broken reading says so, instead of drawing a healthy Mac

• Fixed: a Pulsr that had stopped reading your Mac still said “Running smooth.” When macOS refused a reading, Pulsr substituted a zero and carried on, and a zero draws as a completely healthy Mac: 0% CPU, 0% memory, “0 B free of 0 B”, a flat network line indistinguishable from an idle one. The verdict at the top of the popover is worked out purely from those numbers, so it then printed the most reassuring thing it knows how to say. A metric Pulsr cannot read now says so on its own card, and the verdict names the situation instead of passing judgement on numbers that never arrived.
• Fixed: readings that stop arriving are now visible. If the sampling timer dies, Pulsr sends nothing at all, so nothing could carry the bad news, and the popover went on showing whatever it last heard, with live-looking sparklines, indefinitely. The window watches for that silence itself now and says the readings have stopped, out loud for VoiceOver too.
• Fixed: one unreadable metric could blank the whole window. Every card reached straight into its own numbers, so a reading that arrived incomplete threw before anything was drawn, and took the rest of start-up with it: the verdict, the memory panel, the license line, and the watchdog whose only job is to tell you the readings have stopped. The watchdog now starts no matter how the first draw goes.
• New: Free Up Memory. One click makes macOS hand back the memory it is holding as cached files and idle pages. Deep Clean goes further, at the cost of a little speed afterwards while your Mac re-reads what it dropped. Pulsr reports what it actually recovered: a Mac with nothing to give back is told so, rather than shown an invented number.
• New: the full memory breakdown: App, Wired, Compressed, Cached files and Free, as one bar that adds up to your installed RAM. Compressed memory is usually the biggest slice on a busy Mac, and nothing in Pulsr showed it before.
• New: Pulsr can clean on its own when available memory drops below a limit you set, and tells you how much it got back.
• New: the menu-bar reading turns red when macOS itself reports critical memory pressure, not when a percentage crosses a number we picked. The overall verdict now trusts the kernel’s own pressure level too, rather than inferring pressure from used-percent and swap.
• New: idle apps are called out. An app sitting untouched for half an hour while holding a couple of gigabytes is the one reclaim that gives the memory back for good. Quit it right from the list, or tell Pulsr to stop mentioning it.
• New: right-click the menu-bar glyph for the current stats and both cleans, without opening anything.
• New: per-core CPU. A single “25%” reads the same whether the work is spread evenly across every core or one core is pinned while the rest idle, and those are very different situations. Each core gets its own bar, with the efficiency cores drawn as the quieter half. Uptime is on the same card.
• New: a heat warning. macOS reports when it is actively managing temperature, and Pulsr shows it once it reaches “serious”, the point at which your Mac may be slowing itself down to cool off. It stays out of the way the rest of the time.
• New: other disks. The disk card only ever showed your startup disk, so an external drive filling up was invisible, usually the one that actually fills up. Every volume you would see in the Finder sidebar now appears, with its own bar.
• New: the process list sorts on every column, both directions: by app name, memory, CPU, number of processes, or how long an app has been idle. It used to be memory-or-CPU, biggest first, which answers “what is heaviest” but never “where is the app I am looking for”.
• Fixed: the “Idle” column sorted by a number that was nowhere on screen. It had a heading, it sorted, it announced itself to VoiceOver as sorted, and it never drew a cell. Every app row now shows how long it has been idle, or says it is active.
• Fixed: the App column was sorted, but not alphabetically. It compared the order Unicode stores letters in rather than the order anyone reads them in, so Éditeur and Übertragung were filed after Zoom. It collates properly now in all thirteen languages, in both directions, and a number inside a name counts as a number. The volume list had the same fault.
• Fixed: the disk card’s list of other volumes was read once, at launch. Plug in or eject an external drive and the list stayed wrong until Pulsr was restarted. It refreshes each time the window opens.
• Fixed: the menu-bar readout was English in all thirteen languages. MEM, NET, DISK and BAT (the text you look at most in the whole app) were the only strings that never reached the translator. They are translated now, as deliberately short forms: the card says “Mémoire”, the menu bar says “MÉM”, because the full word does not belong in a menu bar.
• Fixed: every button in the footer named itself in English, in all thirteen languages: License, Updates, Help, Review, Tip, Shortcuts and the twoplus11 wordmark, in their tooltips and in the names VoiceOver reads out. So did the license messages, from “Business license active” to the offline notice, and the battery card’s “47 min remaining” kept its “min” in English inside an otherwise translated sentence.
• Fixed: sizes, speeds and the load average always used a decimal point. “8.4 GB”, “1.0 KB/s”, “load 1.20”: in the nine of thirteen languages that write a decimal comma, those read as typos. They follow the language you picked in Pulsr now, not the one macOS is set to, and a four-digit size groups its thousands the same way.
• Fixed: colors in the light theme are now legible. Four of the six metric colors (network, disk, battery and upload) were tuned for a dark background and drawn on a light one, as low as 1.83:1 where 3:1 is the minimum. The initials on the app icons in the process list had it worse: white on the yellow one measured 1.41:1, essentially invisible. Both sets change with the theme now and clear the bar in light and dark.
• Fixed: a failure reported over a dialog reported to nobody. The toast sat below the settings sheet, the license window and the confirm dialog, so anything that went wrong while one was open was painted behind it, and it could not be hovered or clicked even when visible. Failures now sit above everything, have their own announcement channel so a following success cannot wipe them before they are read out, and hold for six seconds.
• Fixed: completion notifications actually appear. They were sent through a mechanism Apple retired, and the failure was swallowed silently.
• Fixed: your sort direction for the process list was saved and then not sent back to the window, so Pulsr always reopened believing you had sorted the other way.
• Fixed: the Download button in this site’s mobile header is legible: 2.24:1 before, the worst of any twoplus11 app, now 4.69:1.
• The company name on an activated business license was always blank. Pulsr read it from a field the licensing server stopped sending. The name is there, and it now appears. Nothing about how licenses work changed; only what the window could see.

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 Pulsr.dmg it serves, so you can confirm the file you got is the file we put there. macOS already runs the check that matters (Pulsr 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 Pulsr.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 Pulsr, 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 Pulsr, 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.
• The figures on the download-stats page were faded the same way and are plain white now. The color belongs to the bars beside them, not to the digits.
• 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.

Download update, August 12, 2026 · Opens without an internet check

• The copy of Pulsr in the download now opens without needing the internet. macOS checks that an app has been approved by Apple before it runs for the first time. That approval can travel inside the app itself, and in the download it did not, so the first launch had to reach Apple to confirm it. Offline, behind a hotel or campus login page, or when Apple’s service was slow, that check could fail and macOS would report that Pulsr “cannot be opened because Apple cannot check it for malicious software.” The approval now travels with the app, so the first launch works with no connection at all.
• Automatic updates were never affected: the copy they install already carried its approval.
• The installer window opens at the right size. It was one title bar too short, so the artwork behind the drag-to-Applications arrow was cut off along the bottom and the window opened already scrolled. It now fits exactly.
• The app itself is unchanged: same version, same signature. Only the download was repackaged, so there is nothing to do if you already have Pulsr installed.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · How updating really works

• The update instructions were out of date. They described downloading a new copy and dragging it over the old one. Pulsr updates itself: it checks about once a week and offers to install the new version in place, refusing any download that isn't signed by us. You can still replace it by hand, and you can turn the automatic check off.
• Nothing else changed. What this page already said about your files (that they are never uploaded, and that there is no account and no telemetry) was accurate and is unchanged.
• 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.
• No change to the app.

Site update, August 12, 2026 · The twoplus11 logo, back to its own color

• The twoplus11 wordmark in the top-left corner is the studio’s blue again. It had been recolored to match Pulsr’s accent color, which made the same logo look like a different one on every app’s site. It now matches twoplus11.com and the rest of the apps.
• 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.

August 11, 2026 · A new look

• Changed: Pulsr has a new app icon. Every twoplus11 app moved to one generated palette, so the color in your Dock, on this site and on the download page is now the same color. They had drifted apart.
• Changed: refreshed the site to match, including the tab icon and the link preview image.

1.0.2 · August 9, 2026 · Automatic updates

• New: Pulsr updates itself. When a new version is out you get a prompt with the release notes and can install it in place: no more visiting the site and dragging a new copy over the old one. This is the last update you have to install by hand.
• New: refreshed appearance. Pulsr now uses the shared twoplus11 palette and a regenerated app icon, so it matches the rest of the family.
• Fixed: contrast and keyboard-navigation problems (WCAG 2.1 AA). Faint text is now readable, and every control can be reached and used from the keyboard.
• Fixed: the Check for Updates button spins while it checks, instead of flashing an empty window.

1.0.1 · July 27, 2026

A small readability fix in the process list.

• Long process names no longer collide with their numbers: in "What's using your Mac," a very long name (com.apple.Virtualization.VirtualMachine) ran past its column and overlapped the memory or CPU value beside it. Names now shorten with an ellipsis and show in full on hover, and the process count (· 44) always stays readable.
• Half the download: the build was quietly bundling numpy, which Pulsr never uses. Excluding it takes the download back down to about 20 MB.

1.0.0 · July 19, 2026 · Initial public release

The first release. Your Mac's vitals in the menu bar, and a plain-English read on what's actually eating it.

• Live menu-bar vitals: CPU, memory, network, disk, and battery as tiny live glyphs, redrawn every couple of seconds. Choose which ones show and pick a plain Text (CPU 14%  MEM 62%) or Graph (sparkline) style.
• A beautiful dropdown. Click the glyph for sparkline cards on every metric: CPU load, memory used/free with swap, up/down network with session totals, disk space, and battery level with health (cycle count, condition, capacity).
• "What's using your Mac," in plain English: the biggest memory or CPU hog is called out in a sentence ("Google Chrome is using the most memory right now: 2.3 GB across 31 processes"), with a ranked list. Bring an app forward or ask it to quit, right from the row.
• Private by design: everything is measured locally with psutil. Nothing ever leaves your Mac.
• Light + dark mode, a friendly overall-health read, refresh-interval and open-at-login settings, and a menu-bar-native popover that tucks under the glyph and dismisses when you click away.
• Available in 13 languages, auto-detecting your Mac's language on first launch.
• Signed and notarized by Apple. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel.
• Free for personal use forever, including updates; commercial use requires a one-time $5-per-computer business license.