THE LAB NOTEBOOK / Cortex Shelf
Little updates.
Big plot twists.
New tricks. Fewer hiccups. The occasional “how did we live without this?” Here’s what’s happening with Cortex Shelf.
23 releases91 improvements & fixesSTILL TINKERING. ALWAYS.
CORTEX LABSFIELD NOTES
LATEST CHAPTER
v0.3.20October 13, 2026Cortex Shelf
23 chapters in the story so far.
More life. Fewer steps.
5 things to get excited about
More life. Fewer steps.
- A smile with something to say. Eyes and mouth react together: a hello, a laugh when you tap, a dance on play, and a celebration when a focus session ends. Turn it off in Appearance if you'd rather it stayed quiet.
- Everything going, everything in reach. Music, focus, calls and the calendar can all be live at once — switch between them with the icons under the notch and resume whatever's paused without opening the panel.
- Mac locked, music on. Artwork, track and transport controls on the Lock Screen — pause, resume or skip without unlocking. Toggle it off in Appearance.
- Stay a little longer. Pin the island open while you work, start a focus session from Home with one click, and share a file or a whole stack through the native macOS share menu (AirDrop included).
- AI is taking a break. It's out of the menus, search and shortcuts for now — your previous conversations are still stored, untouched, in case it comes back.
The notice retracts on its own
3 things to get excited about
The notice retracts on its own
- Ted's notice no longer sits on the notch until you click it — it clears itself after a few seconds, and holds while your pointer is over it so it never vanishes mid-read.
- The card is considerably shorter: a one- or two-line message no longer opens a panel with empty space below it.
- The mascot is smaller too, sharing the space with the text instead of taking over the card.
What's New becomes a card the mascot presents
3 things to get excited about
What's New becomes a card the mascot presents
- Each change is now a card with a heading and what it actually does for you, instead of a run of sentences.
- The companion introduces the release with a line of its own, rather than the screen being plain text.
- Only the What's New screen changed — the island, Ted's notices and the idle cost are exactly as they were.
The Ted channel recovers on its own
3 things to get excited about
The Ted channel recovers on its own
- If Cortex Shelf couldn't open its listener at launch — a previous instance still shutting down, or leftovers from a forced quit — it gave up and stayed deaf for the whole session, without saying so. Ted's notices simply never arrived.
- It now retries: three short attempts right after, and then whenever Ted launches or the Mac wakes.
- Nothing watches the socket in the background, so the island still costs nothing while idle.
Ted shows up in person
5 things to get excited about
Ted shows up in person
- Ted's notice is now a card below the notch: the mascot presents the message, with title and body in plain sight — no hovering needed to read it.
- The action and the dismiss button stay visible, and long messages scroll inside the card instead of being cut off.
- The mascot waves when you arrive, dances along with your music, and giggles when you pet it.
- With the screen locked the card folds away and only the mascot remains — the content never shows to whoever is looking.
- The island still animates nothing while it sits idle.
Ted's notices actually arrive
3 things to get excited about
Ted's notices actually arrive
- Between two release builds nothing Ted announced reached the island — it worked in development, which is exactly why it went unnoticed.
- The island verifies the code signature of whoever is speaking before showing anything, and that question reached the kernel after the sender had already closed and exited. A correctly-signed sender was refused every time.
- The sender now holds the connection open until it has been identified. Requires Ted Agent 0.10.1 or later.
Ted speaks through the island
5 things to get excited about
Ted speaks through the island
- When Ted has something that matters, the island reacts: the sparkle pulses, the rim blooms in his colour, and the subject stays in the pill until you look.
- Hover to act without opening anything; a counter shows how many notices are waiting behind the current one.
- The connection is local and verified — Cortex Shelf checks the code signature of the app speaking before showing anything. No network, no account.
- With the screen locked the subject disappears and only the fact remains: your inbox never shows up in the notch.
- Turn it off in Settings → Privacy. Requires Ted Agent 0.9.7 or later.
One click, not two
4 things to get excited about
One click, not two
- The island opens on the first click. Until now, if you were working in another app, the first click was swallowed and only the second one opened the panel.
- The pill's controls behave the same way — mute, “Join” and the music controls respond right away, with no need to focus Cortex Shelf first.
- It's how a layer living in the notch should have behaved all along, like the menu bar.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Shelf meets Ted
3 things to get excited about
Shelf meets Ted
- An optional local connection with Ted: the apps recognize each other when both are open. Requires Ted 0.9.5 or a later compatible version.
- The connection follows app launches and exits without continuous background checks. Each app continues to work on its own.
- This release establishes the foundation for integration. Ted alerts in the Shelf island will come in a later update.
A designed install window
4 things to get excited about
A designed install window
- The DMG install window is now drawn: grid paper in the app's colour, an arrow pointing to your Applications folder, and the version in a title block — the first thing you see when you download from the site.
- Carries the new app icon from 0.3.10, which shipped without release notes of its own.
- No source changes since 0.3.10: the app itself behaves exactly as before.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
A new face for Shelf
2 things to get excited about
A new face for Shelf
- Meet the new Shelf app icon, featuring a happy new friend.
- Everything inside Shelf stays the same.
A livelier Cortex Shelf
4 things to get excited about
A livelier Cortex Shelf
- Home and onboarding gain a more expressive identity, with companions that react to your cursor and actions.
- Settings, Shelf, Clipboard, Notes, and Screenshots have clearer layouts, more room, and friendlier empty states.
- Search, AI, Music, Focus, and Ports respond to interactions with subtle motion and useful feedback.
- Animations respect Reduce Motion, and important text and controls stay steady while you work.
Fixes the app quitting on its own
5 things to get excited about
Fixes the app quitting on its own
- Fixed the app's worst bug: it would quit by itself and then refuse to reopen. An in-progress calendar event — or any all-day event — trapped the agenda in a loop until it ran out of stack memory.
- Because the app reads your calendar on launch, the crash repeated on every attempt for as long as the event lasted, which is why it felt permanently dead.
- The countdown now only considers events that haven't started yet; in-progress events still appear in the day's list.
- Present since the first public release (0.1.0). If your Shelf ever closed on its own, this was it.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Urgent fix for the call hang
5 things to get excited about
Urgent fix for the call hang
- If you installed 0.3.6, please update. On some calls the new microphone/camera indicator could hang the app and consume memory without stopping.
- System camera events are now coalesced, listeners are only rebuilt when the device set actually changes, and a circuit breaker drops camera watching rather than fighting the system.
- “Show microphone and camera on the island” (Settings → Privacy) now really stops the watchers, not just the pill — and ⌥⇧M keeps muting even with it off.
- Switching microphones mid-session (connecting AirPods, say) is detected again.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
You're live — mic and camera on the notch
5 things to get excited about
You're live — mic and camera on the notch
- The island shows when your microphone is open and names the app that's listening — Zoom, Meet, Chrome. No new permission: Cortex Shelf reads device state, never your audio.
- ⌥⇧M mutes and unmutes your microphone system-wide, without hunting for the meeting window. Hover the pill to mute in one click.
- The camera icon opens the mirror, so you can see exactly what it's sending.
- Event-driven throughout — nothing polls, and cold start is unchanged. Turn the indicator off in Settings → Privacy.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Annotate, colorful now-playing, quick capture, trust cycle
5 things to get excited about
Annotate, colorful now-playing, quick capture, trust cycle
- Annotate screenshots — arrow, box, highlight, blur and text right on the image, in the Screenshots section, then save or copy.
- The island takes the music's color: the rim and the track bar pull the palette from the playing album art.
- Quick capture shortcuts — ⌥⇧N turns your selection into a new note; ⌥⇧S sends it to the Shelf, no window needed.
- Trust cycle — passphrase-encrypted backup & restore, a panic shortcut (⌥⇧Esc), and "erase everything on this Mac" in Settings → Privacy.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Join the meeting from the notch
3 things to get excited about
Join the meeting from the notch
- When your next event has a Zoom, Meet, Teams or Webex link, the collapsed pill shows a Join button — one tap opens the call. The Agenda column gets the same shortcut.
- Settings polish: the toggle switches now all line up in the same column on the right.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Notes, redesigned
2 things to get excited about
Notes, redesigned
- The Notes window is now a two-column layout — note list on the left, editor on the right — cleaner and easier to navigate, in the Cortex family's look.
- You can now give a note a title in its own field at the top of the editor.
Calendar permission fix (distributed builds)
1 thing to get excited about
Calendar permission fix (distributed builds)
- Fix: on signed & notarized builds, the Calendar permission prompt in onboarding now appears as it should — adds the matching Hardened Runtime resource-access entitlement alongside the Info.plist usage key.
Calendar permission fix
1 thing to get excited about
Calendar permission fix
- Fix: on macOS 14+, tapping Allow for Calendar during onboarding did nothing — the system prompt now appears as it should (EventKit full-access needs the newer Info.plist usage key).
Deeper, keyboard-first, bilingual
8 things to get excited about
Deeper, keyboard-first, bilingual
- Universal search across Clipboard, Notes, Shelf and Screenshots at once — including text inside images (OCR) — with per-result actions and full keyboard navigation.
- A real AI assistant: multi-turn memory, a global ⌥⇧A shortcut that grabs the selection from any app, and stop/regenerate — every send still gated by the review sheet.
- Focus that finishes: a Pomodoro with phased cycles, daily stats, an end-of-phase cue, and a "do not disturb" that quiets the island.
- Supercharged clipboard: local transforms (JSON pretty, base64, slugify), named encrypted snippets, and a paste-in-sequence queue on ⌥⇧V.
- Shelf and Notes grow up: named stacks with retention on the Shelf; markdown, checklists and [[…]] backlinks in Notes.
- Automation: a cortexshelf:// URL scheme drives the app from Shortcuts, Spotlight and the command line.
- Real English: the app now speaks Portuguese or English to match your Mac's language preference.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Private, fast, honest
6 things to get excited about
Private, fast, honest
- Encrypted clipboard at rest: your clips and images are sealed with AES-GCM, keyed in the Keychain — your most-copied secrets no longer sit in plaintext.
- You approve every AI send: before any prompt leaves for your local CLI, a review sheet shows the exact text with sensitive spans (emails, API keys, JWTs, secrets) auto-masked, and an encrypted egress ledger records what left.
- Trust Center onboarding that names and justifies each permission before asking — nothing fires implicitly anymore.
- Ports → dev servers: the Ports section labels what's actually running (Vite, Next.js, Postgres, Redis…), opens web servers in your browser, and escalates from a graceful stop to a force-kill.
- Redesigned Settings with a proper sidebar, a local crash reporter you can copy to support, an honest "music unavailable" state, accessibility (Reduce Motion, VoiceOver), and a lighter, faster launch.
- Still 100% local: no account, no telemetry, no server.
Hello, Cortex Shelf
6 things to get excited about
Hello, Cortex Shelf
- A productivity layer that lives in the Mac notch — no Dock icon, no window, no login. Collapsed it's a static black layer indistinguishable from the notch itself; the interface only renders while you interact.
- Ten sections one hover away: Shelf for parking files, a searchable smart Clipboard, quick Notes, Screenshots with on-device OCR, Music with now-playing controls, a Pomodoro Focus timer, today's Agenda, an open-ports killer, camera Mirror, and a universal Search.
- Live notch states: now-playing, a focus countdown, a "next meeting in 12 min" glance, and quick toasts when you copy or drop a file.
- Command-palette search — fuzzy, ranked, keyboard-first, opened from anywhere with ⌥Space.
- Real locked notes: AES-GCM encryption with the key in your Keychain, unlocked by Touch ID — never plaintext on disk, never in search.
- Local-first and private: zero network calls, zero telemetry. AI is optional and streams through your own claude or codex CLI.
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