Changelog

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

• There is no longer a Business License to buy. Using Wakr 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.
• No change to the app.

1.3.2 · September 28, 2026 · A Business License activates on any Mac

• Activating a Business License no longer fails with “Connection error”. Wakr 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. Wakr 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 WAKR- it starts with and then be refused. It now shows the full format, WAKR-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX-XXXX.

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 Wakr 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 Wakr goes on working either way.
• No change to the app.

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

• Ventura is supported again. Wakr 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.
• Fixed: a wake time on the spring-forward morning could fire an hour early. Asking Wakr to wake you at a time the clock skips that morning (2:30, in most US zones) landed on 1:30 instead of 3:30. The rule Wakr used to pick the right instant depended on a Python detail that changed underneath it; it now decides from the clock face it actually lands on, so it cannot drift again.

1.3.0 · September 8, 2026 · Wakr checks its own promise, and grows a Settings window

• New: a closed lid no longer ends your session, as long as you are plugged in. Wakr asked macOS to refuse the sleep a Mac drifts into on its own, and a lid coming down is not that, so closing a MacBook ended every session Wakr had promised to hold: the overnight render, the long download, the export you left running. Wakr now also holds the assertion macOS weighs against a closed lid, with no external display needed. On battery macOS ignores that assertion and sleeps on a lid close whatever any app asks for, so Wakr says which of the two happened rather than leaving you to guess.
• New: a Settings window, and a menu that is a menu again. Five preference checkmarks and a fourteen-row language list used to sit between “Turn Off” and “Quit”, so the list you open to start a session was mostly things you set once a year. They live in Settings now, opened with ⌘, like every other Mac app, together with a System / Light / Dark appearance picker that every window and message Wakr opens follows.
• New: twelve keyboard shortcuts, and a window that lists them. ⌘1 to ⌘5 start the presets, ⌘D takes a custom length, ⌘T runs until a time, and ⌘/ shows the whole list. Every shortcut is read back off the menu itself, so the list cannot promise a key that stopped working. Wakr claims no system-wide hotkey and registers none.
• New: the lengths you actually type, offered back. The last three custom lengths sit in the menu, and the custom prompt starts filled in with the most recent one. It remembers what you typed rather than the seconds it worked out, so a saved “23:30” still means half past eleven tonight.
• New: the menu says when the last session ended. That is the question you open Wakr with after the fact, and until now the menu had no answer. It appears once a session is over and steps aside while one is running.
• New: the menu says what time the session ends, not just how long is left. “2:47:31 remaining” is arithmetic you have to do yourself, and the question is never how many seconds: it is whether the session outlasts the meeting, the render, the flight. Wakr already said the answer in the notification when a session started, and then never again. It now sits in the menu for as long as the session runs, written the way your language writes times, and VoiceOver reads it off the menu bar icon with everything else.
• New: a heads-up before a timed session runs out. Five minutes before the end, Wakr says what time it turns off and points you at its menu. “Add Time” was only ever findable by opening the menu during the exact minutes you’d want it; the way you found out a session was nearly over was the screen going dark.
• New: ⌘. turns a session off and ⌘Q quits, both while Wakr’s menu is open. Ending a session is the one thing here you may be in a hurry to do, and it took finding the row with the pointer.
• Removed: “Allow the Display to Sleep” is gone. It held the system awake and let the screen turn off, which sounds like it costs you nothing but a dark screen. It does not: on a Mac with a password delay set, and a few seconds is the usual shape of that setting, a display that goes to sleep locks the Mac seconds later. The switch quietly traded a dark screen for being locked out of the session you were watching, while the menu still read “Awake”. Wakr now holds the display, the screen saver and the system awake together for as long as a session lasts. A session still running under the old setting when you upgrade is moved across without the assertion ever dropping.
• Fixed: Wakr tells you when your Mac slept anyway. Some sleeps Wakr still cannot refuse: a lid closed on battery, the Apple menu’s Sleep item, a battery that runs flat. Nothing said so, so your Mac woke hours later and the only evidence was a download that had died overnight. Wakr now notices, says how long the Mac was out, and names the likely reason. Once per session, so a laptop that gets closed every night doesn’t say it every morning.
• Fixed: a session set to end at a time on the clock now ends at that time on the days the clocks change. Wakr worked out how long to run by subtracting two clock faces, and on the two mornings a year the clocks move, clock faces and real time are not the same thing. Asking at 1 AM on the spring morning for a session “until 9:00” ran it to 10 AM; the autumn version ended it at 8 AM and let the Mac sleep an hour early.
• Fixed: times of day follow your Mac’s region, not just its language. Wakr wrote every clock in the conventions of the language alone, which for English means American ones. A Mac in the UK, or any Mac with 24-Hour Time switched on, was told its session ended at “6:30 PM” by an app whose own menu bar said 18:30.
• Fixed: a Mac that slept mid-session ran past the time Wakr promised. Sessions were timed on a stopwatch that stops while the Mac is asleep, so an hour of sleep bought an extra hour on the wall clock: ask for four hours at two o’clock, shut the lid for an hour, and Wakr was still holding your Mac awake at seven, with its own countdown at 0:00 saying nothing was left. A session now ends at the time Wakr named when it started, and Wakr lets go at that time itself rather than waiting to be told.
• Fixed: Wakr no longer refuses to start when two copies of one app are running. The “While an App Is Running” list carries one row per running process, so a second copy of anything, a download-folder copy opened beside the one in Applications or an app relaunching itself to update, put two rows with the same name into the menu, and macOS refuses that outright. Wakr stopped while it was still building its menu, before its icon reached the menu bar, so there was nothing on screen to say what had happened. The list now offers each name once.
• Fixed: a session that cannot start now says so. When macOS refuses to start the helper, which is what happens on a Mac out of processes or memory, clicking “For 1 Hour” did nothing at all: no session, no message, and the moon still in the menu bar. “Add Time” was the same click and the same silence. Both now say what happened, and whether anything changed.
• Fixed: “Wakr couldn’t turn on Launch at Login” now opens the setting it names. The message pointed at System Settings, General, Login Items and left you to find it. There is a button on it now that goes straight there.
• Fixed: two developer switches a signed build should never have honored. Wakr reads two environment variables so that a developer running it from source can point it at a local server, one for the license check and one for the update check. The signed app honored them too, so any process running as you could have pointed the license call at a host of its choosing, or answered the update check itself and had Wakr open a page of its choosing in your browser under its own name. The built app now talks only to our own server, and the page it opens after an update check has to be a twoplus11.com page whatever the server answers.
• Fixed: the menu bar icon was redrawn every second, forever. Wakr repainted the sun or moon and re-read the image off disk once a second whether or not anything had changed. It now draws when the state changes; the countdown still ticks every second, because that one really does.

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: Wakr. 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 Wakr 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.

1.2.1 · August 22, 2026 · Quitting Wakr now lets your Mac sleep

• Fixed: quitting Wakr left your Mac awake. Wakr holds your Mac awake by running a small system process alongside itself, and only the “Quit Wakr” menu item ever turned that process off. Quit any other way (the AppleScript quit command, a force quit, logging out) and it was left behind: your Mac stayed awake indefinitely with no Wakr on screen to turn it off, and the next launch picked the same session back up. Wakr now lets go of it however it is asked to stop. The one thing that still leaves a session running is Wakr actually crashing, which is deliberate: a crash should not silently drop a session you were relying on.
• Fixed: “Allow the Display to Sleep” could say one thing while Wakr did another. After Wakr recovered a session left over from a crash, it took the setting from that recovered session rather than from your choice, so the checkmark and the mode Wakr was really in could disagree, and turning the setting off appeared to do nothing at all. Your choice now wins, and it takes effect on a recovered session immediately, without the session dropping in the process.
• Fixed: Wakr no longer writes to its own copy on disk. To keep its Finder icon matching light and dark mode, Wakr used to write an icon into its own application bundle at launch. That edits the app after Apple has signed it, which can make macOS stop trusting the copy you have, and can stop Wakr installing its own updates. Wakr is a menu bar app with no Dock icon, so the write only ever changed how it looked in a Finder window; it ships both icon variants in one file instead.

1.2.0 · August 20, 2026 · One version number, and a login item that tells the truth

• New: any length you like. “Custom Duration…” takes a number of minutes, or a length like 1h30m. If Wakr can’t read what you typed it says so, rather than quietly doing nothing.
• New: “Until a Specific Time…”: stay awake until 23:30, or 7:30 AM, instead of working out how many hours away that is. A time that has already gone by today means tomorrow.
• New: “Allow the Display to Sleep.” Your Mac stays up so the download or the render keeps going, but the screen is free to turn off. Switch it on or off mid-session and the session carries straight on.
• New: stay awake while an app is running. Pick any open app and Wakr holds your Mac awake for exactly as long as it is open, then turns off by itself the moment it quits, and tells you which app it was waiting on.
• New: “Add Time.” Add 15 minutes, 30 minutes or an hour to the session you are already in. Until now the only way to make a session longer was to start a new one, which let your Mac go free for a moment in between.
• New: a battery guard. Turn it on and a session you forgot about ends itself once the charge drops below 20%, only on battery, never while you are plugged in.
• New: “Stay Awake When Wakr Starts,” for anyone who leaves Launch at Login on and wants to be awake from the moment they log in.
• Fixed: the version Wakr reported about itself was frozen at 1.1.4. The update check sent that stale number as your current version, so the server answered that a newer one existed: a fully up-to-date Wakr badged itself with an update to the build it was already running, and kept doing so. Wakr now reads its version from the app itself, and “About Wakr” names the release you actually have.
• Fixed: “Launch Wakr at Login” claimed to be on after macOS had turned it off. Wakr read that setting once, at launch, and never looked again, so turning Wakr off in System Settings left the checkmark exactly where it was, and clicking it then turned the setting back on instead of off. Wakr re-reads it while it runs now, and it notices the case where macOS switches an app off while leaving its startup file in place.
• Fixed: turning Launch at Login on or off no longer just assumes it worked. Wakr reads the setting back afterwards, and if macOS refused the change it says so and points you at the one place that can override it, instead of leaving a checkbox that quietly does nothing.
• Fixed: the “While an App Is Running” menu was sorted, but not alphabetically. It ordered names the way Unicode stores letters rather than the way anyone reads them, so Éditeur or Übertragung was filed after Zoom, past the end of the alphabet, in a menu whose only job is finding one app by name. Numbers inside names were compared as text too, so Display 10 came before Display 2. The menu now reads in order in all thirteen languages.
• Fixed: the battery guard’s first reading was skipped: switching it on during Wakr’s first half-minute was meant to check on the very next second, and actually waited out the full thirty.
• Changed: removing a business license key now asks first. It is the one irreversible thing in the menu: Wakr holds the only copy of that key on your Mac, and it used to be gone the moment you clicked, one row below a Close button.
• Changed: the menu now says which mode you are in, the app a session is tied to, and whether the display is free to sleep. VoiceOver reads the same line off the menu bar icon, which looks the same in every mode.
• Fixed: the Download button in this site’s mobile header was white on yellow: 1.5:1, effectively unreadable, where 4.5:1 is the bar. The same went for the keyboard “Skip to main content” link on the privacy, terms and changelog pages, and for the button that completes a business-license purchase. All four now use the darker fill the rest of the site’s buttons already used.
• Fixed: the headline gradient on this site ran from Wakr’s yellow into a brown that belongs to no part of the app, so it read as inverted. It now runs to the lighter yellow it was always meant to.
• The company name on an activated business license was always blank. Wakr 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 Wakr.dmg it serves, so you can confirm the file you got is the file we put there. macOS already runs the check that matters (Wakr 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 Wakr.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 Wakr, 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 Wakr, 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 Wakr 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 Wakr “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 now shows the twoplus11 artwork. Opening Wakr’s download gave you a plain white Finder window; every other app in the fleet opened onto a branded background with a drag-to-Applications arrow. Wakr’s now matches.
• And it opens at the right size. The window was one title bar too short, so it opened already scrolled with the bottom cut off. 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 Wakr 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. Wakr 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.
• 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.

1.1.4 · August 11, 2026 · A new look

• New: Wakr has a new app icon. The sun coming up over the horizon, replacing the eye: Wakr holds your Mac in daylight, it doesn't watch you. Every twoplus11 app also 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.
• New: the menu bar now shows a sun while a session is running, instead of an eye. The moon is unchanged, so the two states finally read as a pair.
• Fixed: Wakr reported itself as version 1.1.1 when checking for updates, so it could keep offering you an update you already had.
• Changed: refreshed the site to match, including the tab icon and the link preview image.
• Fixed: this site still described the menu bar icon as an eye in several places, months after it became a sun. The wording now matches what you actually see.

1.1.3 · August 9, 2026 · Automatic updates

• New: Wakr 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 app icon, regenerated from the shared twoplus11 gradient so it matches the rest of the family.

1.1.2 · July 17, 2026 · 13-language localization

• 13-language localization with a new Language submenu: Wakr auto-detects your Mac's language automatically, and you can override it any time.
• Fixed a bug where a crash or Force Quit could leave the Mac awake (orphaned sleep-prevention), with the menu bar icon wrongly showing "Asleep."

1.1.1 · July 15, 2026 · “Tip”

• Renamed the “Donate” link to “Tip.”

1.1.0 · July 13, 2026 · Portfolio-standard release

Brings Wakr up to the same standard as the rest of the twoplus11 app portfolio.

• Silent weekly Check for Updates (on by default, toggle in the menu), plus a manual “Check for Updates…” item and a prominent “Update Available…” item when one's found, never a modal.
• Help and Leave a Review menu items, deep-linking to twoplus11.com with app/version/OS prefilled.
• A low-pressure “Enjoying Wakr?” review prompt after 5 uses, and a support prompt after 25, each shown at most once.
• Business licensing: the free personal tier stays fully functional forever; “Manage License…” activates a one-time $5/computer business key, with a 72-hour offline grace period.

1.0.0 · July 13, 2026 · Initial public release

The first release. A menu bar utility that holds your Mac awake (no idle sleep, no display sleep, no screen saver) for exactly as long as you ask.

• Menu bar utility: click the icon, pick a duration, and Wakr holds the same power-management assertions caffeinate uses to keep your Mac from sleeping. No dock icon, no window
• Duration presets: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, 4 hours, or indefinitely until you turn it off or quit
• State at a glance: one glyph tells you the state (an open eye while a session is active, a crescent moon once your Mac is free to sleep again)
• Live countdown: timed sessions show a running countdown right next to the icon
• Launch at Login: a toggle to have Wakr ready in your menu bar every time you start your Mac
• Native NSMenu throughout: the whole app is VoiceOver-accessible with no extra work; the status item also carries an explicit accessibility label (e.g. "Wakr: Awake, 12:34 remaining"), since the eye/moon glyph itself has no text for a screen reader to read
• Private by design: no network code at all. Nothing is uploaded, no account, no usage analytics
• Signed and notarized by Apple. macOS 14+, Apple Silicon & Intel
• Free for personal use forever: every duration, no account, no trial, no watermarks; commercial use requires a one-time $5-per-computer business license