Every release, in plain language.
0.0.2 — 2026-08-19
Distributable: the release that makes Tempo installable by anyone rather than buildable by its author, and keeps it up to date afterwards. Signing and notarization are not in this release — they need an Apple Developer Program membership that is some way off, so Tempo ships unsigned and macOS warns the first time you open it; the download page has the one step past it, and updates after that carry no warning.
Sessions. A duration that isn't a preset no longer means a trip to Settings: scroll on the un-started timer and it moves a minute a step, up to add and down to take away, and it stays where you leave it. The vessel now tells the whole story of a Session — empty before you start, filling as the time goes, completely full when it's up — and the timer face breathes evenly: the presets, the digits, and the action word are the same distance apart, and the words sit as far from the bottom edge as the presets sit from the top. The vessel also stays where you put it: the popover closes when the pointer leaves rather than at the first click landing anywhere near it, and the finished crest no longer drags the surface sideways as it settles.
Updates. Tempo keeps itself up to date. It checks on its own schedule — you are asked once whether it may, and you can change the answer any time with the switch in Settings — and there is a Check for Updates… button for when you would rather ask than wait. An update is verified against Tempo's own signing key before it is allowed to install, so a download that has been tampered with is refused rather than run. The windows that appear during a check or an install belong to Sparkle, the updater Tempo uses; Tempo owns the switch and the button and nothing else. Settings also gained two rows that leave the app: Changelog and About Tempo both open tempo.movmnt.quest, so the changelog is published in one place rather than two that could disagree.
Settings. Presets have a switch of their own. Turn them off and the three words leave the timer and their fields leave the window; the values you set are kept for when you want them back. The last card is one row now, with Quit on the left and the version on the right, and neither says Tempo inside a window already called Tempo Settings. The three presets also now sit shoulder to shoulder in a single card rather than stacked in three, and each field is a recessed well rather than another plane of the same cream — a field you can see is a field you can type in. The fields dropped their placeholders, which never showed anyway because a preset always holds a committed value, and each carries its name on the accessibility layer instead. They also stopped towering over the rest of the window: the numbers and their steppers were built at the timer's scale, not a settings window's, and now sit at the same size as every control beside them.
The download. Tempo is a disk image now: open it, drag Tempo across to Applications, and that is the install. One download serves both kinds of Mac — Apple silicon and Intel — and it runs on macOS 14 or later. Dragging it to Applications rather than leaving it in Downloads is what Launch at Login needs, which is why the folder is right there in the window.
The page. tempo.movmnt.quest answers Accept: text/markdown with a Markdown rendering of itself for agents, keeping HTML the default for browsers, and carries the robots.txt, sitemap.xml, per-page Open Graph, and social card it needs to be found. It now also says what is true about installing Tempo: a first-launch section explains the warning macOS shows an unsigned app and gives the two ways past it, which differ between macOS 14 and macOS 15 or later, and the terms page no longer claims releases are signed and notarized. One other claim came down with it — the home page said a completion notification reaches you through Focus, which needs the same Program enrollment and has never been true of a shipped build.
0.0.1 — 2026-08-07
The first release. Tempo is a menu bar timer for one deliberate stretch of work at a time.
Sessions. Start a Session from three preset durations or type your own — anything from 1 minute to 8 hours, in whole minutes. The presets start at 5, 10, and 25 minutes and are yours to change. The menu bar orb fills as the Session runs, refreshing every 10 seconds, and the timer reads the wall clock rather than counting ticks, so sleeping the Mac, closing the lid, or a daylight-saving change leaves the finish time where you put it. Cancel ends a Session; Again repeats the last one.
Alerts. Tempo asks for notification permission the first time you start a Session, not before. When a Session completes you get a notification with an Again action and a two-strike chime played at the volume you set (70% to begin with). Starting a new Session clears an alert you never dismissed. If you decline permission the Session still runs and counts normally — a warning in the popover tells you the notification won't arrive.
Settings. Appearance override (System, Light, or Dark — System to begin with), the three presets, alarm volume, Launch at Login, and Quit Tempo.
Known limitation. Completion notifications are ordinary notifications in this release, so a Focus mode will hold them back until you look. Breaking through Focus needs a capability that comes with Apple Developer Program enrollment, and arrives in a later release. The alarm sound is played by Tempo itself and is unaffected.
0.0.1 is a source tag with no download — the signed, notarized app arrives with 0.0.2.