Menu bar panel no longer draws faded; Composition now updates itself hourly
Composition is the Mac app behind this site's updates; its menu bar panel holds an Open Composition button and a Publishing toggle. Both looked faded, and the cause was found: "The menu bar panel never became the active window, so macOS drew all its controls in their dimmed, inactive style." The panel now takes focus when it opens, without pulling Composition in front of other apps, so its controls draw active. The fixes are merged and were checked against a screenshot of the real panel.
A second problem sat on the same button: "The \"Open Composition\" label was drawn in a pale orange on the orange button. It's white now." The panel background is now Liquid Glass. The note under Publishing was reworded, because it said Paused while publishing was on.
Settings lost its Engine tab, leaving five, since that tab is a developer screen. Old Composition builds, including a July canvas app left in Xcode's build folder, were moved to the Trash rather than deleted outright, so they can be recovered until the Trash is emptied.
The copy in the Applications folder now holds the latest version of the main line of code and updates itself every hour. The work was done with Claude in Claude Code.
- Why the Open Composition button and Publishing toggle looked faded
- Margins between buttons, text and the Settings tab bar
- Finding the old Composition app reported in Applications
- Remove the Engine tab from Settings because it is a developer screen
- Move old builds to the Trash rather than deleting them permanently