Release notes
Changelog
Why this starts at 1.0.1. The Mac build has its own longer history and is further along in its
numbering. Windows starts its own version line rather than pretending to a past it doesn't have. It just happens
to start at 1.0.1 instead of 1.0.0. The two builds share an engine design, not a version number.
Mac changelog →
1.0.1
Beta
First Windows release. Same app, told in Windows: the reveal and the guarantees carry over from the Mac build; the tray, the process model, and a couple of the details underneath do not.
The tray & popover
- Live vitals in the notification area. CPU, memory, network, disk and battery, sampled every couple of seconds. The tray glyph shows the metric you put first (as two big digits over a level bar, or a sparkline), and the tooltip carries the rest. Windows gives an app one small square rather than a strip, so the layout is different from the Mac's; the information is not.
- A popover that behaves like one. Click the tray icon to open it, click anywhere else (or press Esc) to put it away. It tucks into the corner of the work area nearest the notification area, whichever edge your taskbar is on.
- "What's using your PC," in plain English. The biggest memory or CPU hog is called out in a
sentence, with a ranked list underneath. Bring an app forward, or ask it to close, right from its row.
Pulsr posts
WM_CLOSE, so the app runs its own shutdown and gets to ask you about unsaved work. Nothing is ever killed.
Under the hood
- Readable process names. Chrome's thirty processes collapse onto one row labelled "Google Chrome", read from the executable's own version resource (the same string Task Manager shows), using the file's own codepage, so non-English builds are named properly too.
- Battery health where Windows exposes it. Cycle count and capacity come from WMI. Plenty of OEMs leave those fields empty, so a laptop that reports nothing says so rather than showing a made-up number. On a desktop PC with no battery, the card doesn't appear at all.
- Private by design. Everything is measured locally with psutil. Nothing ever leaves your PC.
Windows fit & finish
- Per-user install into
%LOCALAPPDATA%\Programs\Pulsr: no UAC prompt, no admin rights. - Light, Dark, or follow Windows, including the popover's own window chrome, and a tray glyph that follows the taskbar's theme, which Windows treats as a separate setting.
- Start with Windows, as a per-user setting: no admin, no service, and the installer checkbox and the in-app switch write the same registry value rather than two that can disagree.
- Self-update in place. Pulsr downloads the new installer, verifies its Authenticode signature and that its version matches what was advertised, installs over itself and reopens.
Language & accessibility
- 13 languages: English, Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese (Brazil), Dutch, Polish, Russian, Turkish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Korean. The language follows your Windows display-language order and can be pinned in Settings.
- Accessible. Everything reachable by keyboard with a visible focus ring, every dialog managing its own focus, live status changes announced (the numbers deliberately are not, since a screen reader would read them aloud twice a second), Windows High Contrast honoured, and reduced motion respected. Contrast is measured in the test suite rather than eyeballed.
Known in this beta
- SmartScreen may still warn on first download despite the signature; reputation builds per file. See the install notes.
- No screen-reader pass with Narrator or NVDA has been done by a human yet. The accessibility work is tested structurally and measured for contrast, but assistive technology hasn't driven the app end to end. If you use one, that feedback is the most valuable thing you could send.
Free for personal use forever, including updates.