What’s new

Every Porchlight update, in plain language. The app updates itself — these arrive on their own.

0.2.2372026-08-17

• A security pass over what Porchlight leaves on your Mac. Your briefs, the safety-alert archive and the app's own database are now readable only by you, kept out of Time Machine backups, and no longer indexed by Spotlight, so they cannot be searched from the Mac's own search bar.
• Porchlight will tell you if the brief starts going somewhere new. If the delivery address on the Mac changes, a note goes to your account email with the old and new addresses, whoever made the change.
• The brief's design is re-checked every night before it is used. The emailed design is downloaded signed; now the signature is verified again each time it is read from disk, not only when it arrives.
• Full alert text is no longer written to a log file, so sending logs to support can never include what your child wrote.
• Everything the app needs to write a brief now runs from the software we ship and sign, rather than downloading extra components on first use.
• Safety words are matched even when they are disguised. Hidden characters, lookalike letters from other alphabets, and tricks like s.p.a.c.i.n.g no longer slip a word past the safety check.
• One message can no longer pretend to be two. A message written with line breaks in it used to be able to imitate a separate line in the conversation Porchlight reads, which could make the brief describe something nobody said.
• The brief writer now treats every message strictly as something to describe, never as an instruction it might follow.

0.2.2362026-08-17

• The Sunday edition spells names the way your contacts do, too. The name repair that landed for daily thread summaries now also covers the Sunday front page (headline and lead) and Instagram DM summaries, so an unusual or hyphenated surname can't drift anywhere in the brief.

0.2.2352026-08-17

• Taking back a reaction no longer counts as one. When someone removes a heart or a "?" from a message, Messages records that as its own line; the brief was counting those as reactions and quoting them. They are now ignored, and iMessage polls are named as polls.

0.2.2342026-08-16

• WhatsApp channels and archived chats stay out of the brief. A channel your child follows (a one-to-many feed, not a conversation) or a chat the family archived no longer appears in the daily brief or the Sunday edition's week-over-week, and old entries for them are cleared.

0.2.2332026-08-16

• Names are spelled the way your contacts spell them. When the brief's writer misspells a known name (an unusual or hyphenated surname is where it happens), the brief now snaps it back to the exact spelling from your contacts before anything renders.
• Group-chat housekeeping (renames, someone joining or leaving, a new group photo) no longer counts as messages.

0.2.2322026-08-16

• Every message the brief quotes is checked for readability first. If an iMessage app, sticker, payment, or other special message ever produces something that isn't human text, the brief shows what it was ("a sticker", "an Apple Cash message") instead of internal codes. Ask to Message, Find My, Photos, Maps, and Apple Store messages are named now too.

0.2.2312026-08-16

• Apple Cash and other app messages read cleanly. A payment now shows as "Sent $250 with Apple Cash" instead of the balloon's internal layout codes.

0.2.2302026-08-15

• A tidier Parent PIN card. One clean line, the field, and "Forgot PIN?" back beneath it — no more wrapped text.

0.2.2292026-08-15

• Fix: quiet mode locked you out. In 0.2.228, entering the correct parent PIN on a Mac with quiet mode on closed the window instead of opening Porchlight. The PIN now opens the app; only Cancel closes the window. And launching Porchlight again from Applications or Spotlight always brings the window back.

0.2.2282026-08-15

• New: keep Porchlight out of sight on a child's Mac. An opt-in for families whose Mac is the child's: no menu-bar icon, no Dock icon, no pop-ups, and the app asks for the parent PIN when opened. Off by default; turn it on during setup or in Settings → Privacy (the PIN protects the switch). Briefs and alerts still email you, and your child's "what your parent sees" page tells them it may run this way.
• The Parent PIN card reads clearer. Titled "Parent PIN", it explains where the PIN came from and puts "Forgot PIN?" right there in the line.

0.2.2272026-08-15

• The home screen knows what time it is. A brief written in the morning is "Today's brief", not "Tonight's" — the headline, the ready notification, and the ready dialog all follow the clock now.

0.2.2262026-08-15

• Discord shows the servers your child belongs to. The section now lists their servers — with how active your child is in each and, when Discord shares it, how big the server is — and it always appears once a package is imported, saying plainly when there were no recent direct messages. Other members' messages are never read or shown.
• The update window tells the whole story. When you skip a few versions, the notes now include everything that changed since your build, not just the newest release.

0.2.2252026-08-15

• A quieter home screen while the brief writes. The reassurance under the progress bar is one short line now.
• Warmer wording in the brief. "This period" is gone from every section; the brief says "lately", "this week", or "since the last brief".

0.2.2242026-08-15

• A slightly larger Porchlight mark on the home screen. The wordmark in the top-left corner grew so it reads as the identity it is, rather than sitting smaller than the Settings button beside it.

0.2.2232026-08-15

• Held-firm safety categories can no longer be switched off. Self-harm, grooming, and sexual content always said Porchlight holds firm on them — now the Off setting is greyed out and unselectable for those three, so the promise and the control agree. Everything else stays fully yours.

0.2.2222026-08-15

• The launch film goes full screen. The paper-plane film now fills the window edge to edge; the rounded frame is retired.

0.2.2212026-08-15

• Instagram now watches both directions. The brief shows who follows your child, not just who they follow — new followers appear with context (a friend they follow back, a private account, an account worth a glance), and the section header counts both sides of the graph.
• The rhythm of it. Conversations that cluster late show their window ("mostly 9–11pm"), late-night saves are counted, and Instagram now feeds the Pulse's Rhythm reading and the Sunday week-over-week.
• Urgent words in DMs alert immediately. A watch-word tier-1 phrase in an Instagram DM or message request now sends the alert email at the moment it's read, instead of appearing in the next evening's brief. The alert is honest that Instagram is read at brief time, not continuously.
• What they searched. The monthly Instagram map lists recent searches from the data export — stated intent, like the Gemini questions.
• The Google window is yours after sign-in. It no longer closes itself: once connected it stays open on Google's own activity settings (Porchlight reads best with Web & App Activity on) until you close it.
• Discord imports the folder. Your Mac usually unpacks Discord's download into a folder called "package" — the import picker now takes that folder as readily as a .zip, and says so.

0.2.2202026-08-15

• Instagram DMs now read like Messages. Each conversation carries its tone and topic chips, the moments worth knowing, and a quoted excerpt window with an honest count ("Showing 3 of 12 messages"). Shop and broadcast blasts are set aside instead of counting as conversations, and "New in DMs" now means genuinely new — not everyone, every night.
• New: message requests. Strangers knocking on the DM door (requests sit outside the inbox until accepted) now appear in the brief: who they are, whether your child follows them, never their content. A concerning phrase inside a request is flagged like any other message.
• Names on the follow graph. New follows show the account's real name, what it is, and whether it's verified or private — and a "Worth knowing" flag now always says exactly what matched and where, so you can judge it.

0.2.2192026-08-12

• Software Updates grew up. The pane now shows exactly what's installed (version, build, channel), links "What's new" straight to that version's release notes, says when it last checked, offers Install & Relaunch right there when an update is waiting, and ends with release-notes, privacy, and support links.

0.2.2182026-08-12

• Google Gemini in the brief now shows the questions themselves — what was actually asked, not just a one-word theme. Answers and anything uploaded stay unread, and the on-device logs never carry text. The Gemini switch's description and the support article say the same.
• Every source wears its real icon — Spotify, Apple Music, Discord, Roblox and the rest show their official marks on the tiles and inside each source's screen, replacing the thematic stand-ins.
• The progress bar no longer dips from 1% to 0% in its first moments — it starts at 1 and only ever climbs.
• The progress bar no longer dips from 1% to 0% in its first moments — it starts at 1 and only ever climbs.

0.2.2172026-08-12

• "Build brief now" responds instantly. The lamp used to wait for the brief-writing engine to boot before showing anything — up to twenty silent seconds on a busy Mac. The click now lights the band immediately ("Starting tonight's brief", bar at the ready) and the real progress takes over the moment the engine reports in.

0.2.2162026-08-12

• The Instagram tile and its screen agree now. The tile could read ON · Export File while the screen only offered "Connect" — both true, spoken in different languages. The screen now says it plainly when it's running from an imported export, and what connecting changes.

0.2.2152026-08-12

• The Sources grid sorts itself sensibly: everything that's on or connected comes first, alphabetically, with switched-off sources after — no more on/off patchwork.
• The reconnect email got its manners: "reconnect Google account" (no stray "the"), each source now links straight to its illustrated support article, and the standard footer with the support hub is on it.

0.2.2142026-08-12

• The real fix for Google, Spotify, and Instagram connections. The sign-in window and the nightly brief were quietly using two different cookie stores — a side effect of renaming the helper apps, invisible on the machines we tested because both halves happened to agree there. They now always use the same one. Reconnect each source once (Settings → the source → Connect) and it sticks for real this time — the brief reads exactly what the window saved.

0.2.2132026-08-12

• The "still working" note stopped shouting and stopped fibbing. During a long quiet stretch it used to replace the headline (and get cut off mid-sentence), and it always blamed "first-time downloads" even deep into the writing step. It now appears as a small calm line under the status — full sentence, matched to what's actually slow.

0.2.2122026-08-12

• Reconnecting Google now proves itself, and the tile believes it. The "Sign-In Expired" band used to persist until the next brief ran, even after a perfectly good reconnect — it clears the moment the reconnect verifies. And "verifies" is now literal: after the sign-in window closes, Porchlight re-reads the session from a fresh process and only then says Connected — with the verdict shown right beside the button, including the honest failure if a session ever fails to stick again.

0.2.2112026-08-12

• The brief's progress bar keeps its number. The percentage could appear once and then vanish for the rest of the run; it now stays put the whole way. The bar also spans the status band properly instead of squeezing the "Looking out for…" line into an awkward wrap.
• The support site got a full redesign: a searchable hub at porchlights.ai/support with a "something looks wrong?" fast lane, six task-based sections, and step-by-step screenshots that update themselves with every release.

0.2.2102026-08-12

• Support articles on the website now show a real screenshot of each source's settings screen — Instagram, Google, Spotify, and Screen Time — in your Mac's light or dark look, regenerated automatically whenever those screens change in a release.

0.2.2092026-08-12

• The Sources screen says everything the same way now. Every tile's bottom band answers one question — where is this read from — in the same words: This Mac, Google Account, Spotify Account, Instagram Account, iPhone or iPad, or Export File. The old mix ("Always On", "Safari + Chrome", "Their Account", "Export + DMs") is gone, and so is the third section: it's Start Here, then Extra Depth.
• Disconnect looks like a button everywhere — the same bordered red control on every source, instead of a grey word that didn't look clickable.
• Switches that depend on a connection now wait for it. Instagram's direct-messages and feed-interests options, and YouTube Music's include switch, stay locked with a plain explanation until the account they read from is actually connected — no more toggles promising data that can't arrive.

0.2.2082026-08-12

• Instagram connecting works again — and instantly, when a session is already held. The connection check was reading the sign-in page instead of the session itself, so a perfectly good sign-in could end with "didn't finish." It now checks the session directly, the same way Google and Spotify do. A new "Connect a different account…" button signs the old session out first — the connect window closes itself the moment it sees a live session, so switching accounts has to start with the sign-out.
• The Spotify sign-in window no longer pins itself above everything. It arrives front and center, then behaves like a normal window — so you can bring up Mail or a browser to grab the 2FA code Spotify emails you.
• Connection results now appear right beside the Connect button instead of at the bottom of the section, where a failure could hide below the fold.

0.2.2072026-08-12

• The opening film moves with more intent. It now plays about 20% brisker and settles back to true speed for the final two seconds, so the paper plane's resolve into the wordmark keeps its full weight. Same film, same quality — only time changed.

0.2.2062026-08-12

• Every connection now keeps its session the same proven way. The fix that made Google and Spotify sign-ins stick is now one shared mechanism used by all connected sources — Instagram included — and any source added in the future inherits it automatically. Each connection can also prove its own storage is healthy on any Mac, with no sign-in needed.

0.2.2052026-08-12

• Connections finally hold. A Google or Spotify sign-in could end with the green "Connected" banner and still be gone by the next brief: both services hand a connect window like Porchlight's a session marked "this browser visit only," and the Mac faithfully discarded it the moment the window closed. Porchlight now gives the session a real shelf life before the window closes — reconnect each source once and it sticks. Instagram's connection got the same protection.

0.2.2042026-08-12

• Reconnecting Google actually sticks now. The connect window could report success and then lose the session on close — a sign-in that never reached disk, so every following brief read Google as empty. The window now writes the session durably before it closes (the same fix Spotify got in July), and a brief that finds a dead session says RECONNECT on the Google tile instead of quietly reporting nothing.
• Google activity reading survives Google's page changes. The Gemini/YouTube/Search reader hung on one Google-internal class name that Google rotated, silently reading zero from a full activity feed. It now falls back to the page's structure (the date attribute every entry carries), and when it still finds nothing on a signed-in page it records a content-free census of the page shape — so "Google changed the page" and "a genuinely quiet day" stop looking identical.
• Spotify's connection is explained where it matters. The wizard, Settings, and the sign-in window itself now say it plainly: the connection is Porchlight's own sign-in window on this Mac — the Spotify app being logged in isn't enough — and once connected, listening from every device on the account folds in, iPads included.
• When Spotify can't be read at all, the log now says exactly why instead of nothing.

0.2.2032026-08-12

• You can tell what's connected at a glance now. Every source tile ends in a full-width status band that says it in a word — amber ON or CONNECTED, quiet OFF, unmissable RECONNECT when a sign-in has expired. Off sources also fade back.
• The sign-in windows finally speak up. The instruction banner in the Google, Instagram, and Spotify connect windows is now bold amber (and flips solid green when you're done) instead of near-invisible grey.
• The frame around the opening film is much thinner — the film reaches almost to the window's edge.

0.2.2022026-08-12

• The original opening film is back. The hand-drawn rebuild couldn't match the soul of the Google Flow footage, so the launch plays the film itself again — remastered from the 4K export, in the slim rounded frame.
• Photo descriptions actually work now. A version mismatch deep in the on-device vision libraries had silently broken every photo caption since early August; briefs will describe shared photos again ("appears to show…") from tonight.
• Support diagnostics now cover Spotify, Roblox, and Discord, report each connection's health from the last brief, and call out when a Google feature is switched on while the Google connection itself is off.

0.2.2012026-08-11

• The opening film is now drawn live, not played from a file. Same story as before — the paper plane on the sill, out through the window, the loop under the moon, becoming a star, the name in the sky — but rendered natively, pixel-perfect at any size. The compression blur and blocking are gone for good, and the app is 9 MB lighter.
• The Family Agreement's drawing is now a small ornament instead of a poster.

0.2.2002026-08-11

• Your Family Agreement is one click away again. Settings → Privacy now has a View Family Agreement button — the record you signed at setup, readable any time (viewing never re-signs it).
• The lantern illustration is gone from Troubleshooting, and the Agreement's drawing no longer sits in a white box.

0.2.1992026-08-11

• The opening film, this time truly sharp. Remastered from a 4K export — the blockiness in dark gradients is gone — and the frame around it is much slimmer, so the film reaches nearly to the window's edges while keeping its rounded corners.

0.2.1982026-08-11

• The illustrations arrive in the app. The Family Agreement now opens with the bicycle under a lit window — the child's side of the promise, drawn — and Troubleshooting greets you with the porch lantern. Same hand-drawn night-sky family you'll see across the website.

0.2.1972026-08-11

• The opening film, remastered. The launch sequence is re-encoded at much higher quality (the blocky compression is gone) and now plays inside a rounded frame on the slate ground instead of edge-to-edge — smaller, sharper, more composed. A click still skips it instantly.

0.2.1962026-08-11

• A new opening. Launching Porchlight now begins with a short film: a paper plane sails through the night, becomes a star, and the name settles into the sky. A click skips it any time, and it stays out of the way if your Mac asks for reduced motion.

0.2.1952026-08-09

• App Store asks are no longer mistaken for conversation. "Asked to get an app" and "asked to subscribe" requests — the ones you already approved or declined live on your devices — now appear as one factual line in the Screen Time section, exactly like asked-for-more-time requests, instead of being summarized as a cryptic message.
• Unreadable placeholder characters never reach the brief. An empty request bubble used to show up as "�" and get described as "a single emoji"; photo messages could show stray box characters in the quoted lines. Both are cleaned up before the writer ever sees them.

0.2.1942026-08-09

• The brief no longer asks you to second-guess it. When Porchlight isn't sure who said something, it used to print the doubtful line with a "take this line lightly" note — confusing, and it quoted words nobody sent. Now it quietly fixes the line (crediting the right person when the messages make that clear) or leaves it out entirely. What reaches you is only what holds up.

0.2.1932026-08-08

• The Health source now says "iPhone or iPad" everywhere it used to say just iPhone — the companion runs on both, and the words finally say so.

0.2.1922026-08-08

• Settings never silently loses your changes anymore. Pressing Done, hitting Esc, or closing the window now saves unsaved changes exactly like the Save button — and if something can't be saved yet (no guardian email, no child name), Settings stays open and says so plainly instead of quietly dropping your edits.

0.2.1912026-08-08

• Every porch card is now yours to keep or hide. The built-in cards (the source offers and tips) could be re-worded but never removed; now each one has a show/hide switch that reaches your Mac on its next hourly check-in.

0.2.1902026-08-08

• Your dashboard names Macs the way you would. Each child now shows the kind of computer they're on — "Mac Studio", "MacBook Air" — with its computer name alongside, instead of software version numbers that identify nothing.

0.2.1892026-08-08

• Your account dashboard now knows which Mac is which. Porchlight reports your computer's own name (never anything else), so families with several children see each child's sources and brief settings in their own tab, labeled by child, with the computer named right there — instead of one unlabeled view.

0.2.1882026-08-08

• Two home-screen polish fixes. Cancelling the parent-PIN check no longer leaves the PIN field's blue focus ring floating over the home screen while the card fades away. And the porch cards give their buttons room to breathe — body text can no longer sit flush against "Turn it on."

0.2.1872026-08-08

• The golden buttons now answer your mouse. Hovering "Send a brief now" (and every primary button) turns the lamp up — a warm lift and a wider glow — and a button that's busy now looks busy instead of staying fully lit while it ignores clicks.

0.2.1862026-08-08

• Housekeeping under the hood: a few of the home screen's phrases can now be refreshed by us without shipping an update. Nothing changes unless we change it, and nothing new is collected — wording only, riding the app's existing hourly check-in.

0.2.1852026-08-07

• A brief that can't send now sends itself the moment the connection returns. If your Mac is offline at brief time, the brief is written and saved as before — but instead of waiting for tomorrow, Porchlight now watches for the network to come back and finishes the delivery right then, same evening, with the night it covers still on the subject line. The notification and the lamp both say exactly that.

0.2.1842026-08-07

• If notifications are off, Porchlight now says so. Declining the notification prompt used to mean every banner — brief arrivals, delivery problems, safety alerts on this Mac — silently vanished forever. Settings → Support now shows a repair note with a one-click jump to the right System Settings pane, only while notifications are actually off.
• Forgot your PIN before activating? You're no longer locked out. On a Mac that hasn't set up email delivery, there was no inbox to send a reset code to — and both Settings and re-setup sit behind the PIN. The prompt now explains that plainly and offers to erase the PIN so you can set a fresh one.
• Setup won't let permissions be granted to the wrong copy. Running Porchlight from Downloads or the installer image used to warn but let you continue — and the permissions you granted died the moment the app moved. Setup now pauses there and offers "Move & Relaunch," which puts Porchlight in Applications and reopens it, one click.
• The internal Debug section left the menu bar; the lamp's own status covers what it showed.

0.2.1832026-08-07

• Screen Time requests stop pretending to be conversation. When your child taps "ask for more time," Apple sends that request through Messages — and the brief was counting each one as a message, then guessing at contents it couldn't read. You already approved or declined those requests the moment they arrived, so they no longer appear in Messaging at all. Instead, the Screen Time section notes the pattern in one line: how many asks, for which apps, how many approved.
• Unreadable system residue is dropped, not narrated. A Messages row with nothing a person could read (no text, no photo, no known message type) used to reach the brief as a placeholder character the summary would then invent a story about. Nothing readable, nothing reported.

0.2.1822026-08-06

• Send us your logs, in one click. Settings → Support gains a button that sends the app's own status logs to support — counts and timings, never anything your child wrote, with anything shaped like an address or number scrubbed out first. If the upload can't get through, the same button offers to compose an email instead.
• The help page's search works now. Searching the support questions used to look like it did nothing, because matches inside collapsed answers stayed collapsed. Matching questions now open themselves while you search, and clearing the search puts everything back the way you had it.

0.2.1812026-08-06

• One way into Settings. The ⌘, shortcut and links from the web dashboard now open Settings inside the main window — same PIN step, same fade — instead of spawning separate windows. If the window was closed, it opens first and lands exactly where the link pointed.

0.2.1802026-08-06

• The brief always opens in your browser. If your Mac was set to open HTML files in a text editor — common on developers' machines — "View the latest brief" showed the brief's raw code instead of the brief. Porchlight now hands the brief straight to your default web browser, whichever one that is, everywhere a brief or notice opens: the home screen, the menu bar, the lamp, and notification clicks.

0.2.1792026-08-06

• The home screen becomes a working surface. The status now reads as a headline beside the lamp, with the two buttons right there on the same line — and "From the porch" is a row of cards you can actually see, with the next one peeking in from the edge. Nothing rotates, nothing hides, nothing jumps.

0.2.1782026-08-05

• Settings fits. Opening Settings from the home screen now grows the window to hold it — panes were cropped, the Done button was clipped, and Save Changes looked like it did nothing because its "Saved ✓" confirmation sat below the window's edge. Going back to the home screen returns the window to exactly the size you had.
• The home screen holds together. The lamp, its status, and who Porchlight is watching now sit on one centered line of sight, and the card and buttons rest on a shelf that rises from the bottom of the window instead of floating in space. Flipping through the porch cards no longer makes the layout jump — every card keeps the same footprint.

0.2.1772026-08-05

• Settings opens in place. Pressing Settings on the home screen used to open a PIN window, which then opened a separate Settings window. Now the window you're already in asks for the PIN, fades to Settings, and Done (or Esc) brings the home screen back. No more window stacking.

0.2.1762026-08-05

• The porch deck learns new cards on its own. The rotating card on the home screen can now receive new entries — a tip, a newly supported source, a question for you — without waiting for an app update. They arrive quietly on the same hourly check-in the app already makes, and removing one removes it everywhere.

0.2.1752026-08-05

• The app has a home now. Once setup is done, opening Porchlight no longer shows the setup checklist trailing "You're all set." Instead: the lamp and tonight's status front and center, who Porchlight is looking out for, one-click Settings, and the two buttons you actually use — view the latest brief, send one now.
• From the porch. A single card that changes each time you open the window: a source your child uses that you haven't turned on, a tip on reading the brief, news when there is some, and every so often a simple ask — tell us what would make the brief better. It never rotates while you're reading, and the arrows let you flip through the deck yourself.

0.2.1742026-08-05

• The lamp tells the truth about delivery. If a brief was written but couldn't be sent — an offline Mac at digest time — the app still said "Tonight's brief left for your inbox," because it only checked that the brief existed, not that it arrived. It now says what actually happened: "written but couldn't reach your inbox — it's saved on this Mac, and Porchlight will try again."

0.2.1732026-08-05

• Porchlight's notifications look like Porchlight. When the agent needed to tell you something — most importantly that a brief couldn't be sent — the banner arrived wearing a generic script icon, because it was posted by a system scripting tool rather than by the app. Those messages now come from Porchlight itself whenever it's running, and still get through the old way when it isn't, which was always the point.
• Uninstalling ends cleanly. After removing everything, the app asked whether you were sure you wanted to quit, and told you monitoring would carry on — of an install that no longer existed. Confirming a full removal is answer enough.

0.2.1722026-08-05

• Nothing switches itself on. YouTube Music arrived switched on, on the reasoning that it reads no new data and only decides which part of the brief your child's listening appears in. In setup that made it the one lit toggle in a list of dark ones, which reads as a choice made for you. Messages is the only source on when you start; everything else waits to be asked for.

0.2.1712026-08-05

• The sign-in windows say what to expect. When you connect a Google, Instagram or Spotify account, the window now tells you that password managers can't fill it — copy the password and press ⌘V — and, for Google, that a passkey login needs "Try another way." macOS does not let any app fill a sign-in page it doesn't own, including with Apple's own Passwords app, so this is a limit worth naming rather than leaving you to discover it.
• Those windows are called Porchlight. They used to identify themselves in the menu bar by their internal filename, so a parent typing a Google password saw "nl-cloud" as the app asking for it.

0.2.1702026-08-05

• The brief speaks plainly, even when it is unsure. A note above a conversation used to be headed "QA, unverified attribution" and explained itself in engineering terms. It now says "Take this line lightly," and tells you why in ordinary words: that nothing the person actually sent matches it, so it may belong to someone else.

0.2.1692026-08-05

• The installer puts Porchlight in your Applications folder. If a copy of Porchlight already existed anywhere else on the Mac — in Downloads, on the Desktop, restored from a backup — macOS would quietly install on top of that copy instead, leaving the Applications folder empty and the app never opening itself afterwards. The installer now always installs where it says, and if anything does go wrong it tells you instead of finishing with a checkmark.
• Typography, made consistent. The brief was set in twenty-four different text sizes that had accumulated one at a time, and a single conversation could switch between two typefaces four times. It now uses one set of sizes throughout: Porchlight's own writing reads in one face, labels and numbers in another, and italics mean one thing — someone's actual words.

0.2.1682026-08-05

• Voice notes are no longer a blank. When your child sends or receives a voice message, Porchlight listens to it on your Mac and folds what was said into that conversation's summary, the same way it already reads a photo. The recording is never uploaded and never kept, and the brief never claims anything about how someone sounded — only what was said. Phone and FaceTime calls are unchanged: still never recorded, still never transcribed.

0.2.1672026-08-05

• Roblox and Discord now count toward the week. Both sources fed the Daily Brief, but nothing they saw was kept for the Sunday Edition — a Discord friend never showed up in who your child is talking to more or less lately, and a game that stuck never showed up as a trend. Both are now part of the weekly picture.
• The website lists every source again. Roblox and Discord were missing from "what feeds the brief" on the homepage, and from the privacy and support pages. Thirteen sources, all listed.

0.2.1662026-08-05

• A calmer frame around the Family Agreement. The tall arch behind it is gone. In its place, a softly rounded panel with a thin line of lamplight across the top — brighter at the middle, fading out at the edges. It holds the words instead of competing with them. The same change landed on the website.

0.2.1652026-08-05

• Names of things are no longer shredded. A safeguard meant to catch invented people was also erasing real names it learned from photos and links — a shared "REON POCKET PRO PLUS" came out as "someone POCKET someone someone". It now checks against everything Porchlight actually read, images included.
• The disclaimer under every conversation is gone. A block headed "Read this summary with care" appeared beneath each thread. It was intrusive, and most of what it doubted was fine.
• People are named naturally. A person's full name appears once in a conversation, then just their first name — instead of every sentence repeating "Jordan Alvarez-Reed".
• YouTube Music actually arrives now. It's a separate part of a Google account, and Porchlight was never fetching it — so the source read as on and stayed silent. Fixed.
• Bright spots and Try this no longer repeat each other. On a quiet day both were drawn from the same moment and printed it twice.
• Settings → Sources: the two optional groups are now one, "Extra depth".

0.2.1642026-08-04

• People are named, never gendered. A brief referred to a daughter as "he". Porchlight doesn't know anyone's gender and doesn't track it, so the brief now uses names throughout — and checks itself, because the rule shouldn't depend on the writer remembering it.
• Photos are described, not interpreted. A caption claimed a product was "designed for children and battery-operated" — neither of which a photograph can show. Captions are now limited to what's visibly there, and any sentence claiming what something is for is dropped before it reaches you.
• Invented people get caught in Messages too. The safeguard that replaces a made-up name with "someone" already protected WhatsApp and Instagram; it now covers Messages, the source everything else rests on.
• The accuracy check now looks at people. When a summary blends two people together — a request about one attributed to the other — Porchlight flags it above the conversation instead of presenting it as fact.

0.2.1632026-08-04

• You now see the conversation, not just four lines of it. A short exchange is shown in full in the brief instead of a handful of quotes the writer picked. Longer ones show a continuous stretch around the moment that matters, and the brief tells you plainly when there's more — "showing 11 of 40 messages". Quotes with no run-up could make an ordinary conversation read as something else entirely; that's fixed.
• Summaries now say when they're unsure. Porchlight re-reads each summary against the actual messages and, if a sentence isn't well supported or something important was left out, it says so above the conversation rather than presenting a tidy account you can't check.
• Underneath: the writer is no longer told to avoid hedging about facts, so it can say "it isn't clear from these messages" when that's the truth.

0.2.1622026-08-04

• Two new sources: Roblox and Discord. Both off until you turn them on in Settings → Sources.
• Roblox reads Roblox's own session log on your Mac — which experiences were played and when — and adds each game's name and Roblox's maturity rating, so a name you don't recognise comes with "Mild · Violence (Repeated/Mild)" beside it. No account, no password. Roblox chat can't be read by Porchlight or any other app, and the brief says so rather than letting you assume otherwise.
• Discord reads the data package your child downloads from Discord (Settings → Data & Privacy → Request all of my Data), imported here on your Mac. Direct messages only — servers are never imported — with the same safety flags and per-conversation summaries as Messages. Because a package is a snapshot it reads as history, so it can't raise an alert the moment something is said; Messages still does that live.

0.2.1612026-08-04

• The lamp breathes. Porchlight's lamp on the "You're all set" screen now has a quiet 8-second breath in every state — a gentle rise and fall while lit, a wide swing while tonight's brief is being written, a low smolder if a run hits trouble, and the faintest stir even at rest. Alive, like a porch light should be.

0.2.1602026-08-04

• The lamp settles in. The status on the "You're all set" screen now sits in the app's own typeface, knows what time it is — after your digest hour it says the brief is catching itself up instead of promising "tonight at 7" at eleven — and correctly shows "delivered" all evening once the brief has gone out.
• The lamp is a button now. Click it to read the latest brief (if one was written in the last day) or to start a fresh one on the spot.

0.2.1592026-08-04

• The app now tells you what it's doing. The "You're all set" screen's badge became a living lamp: unlit while resting, gently breathing while tonight's brief is being written — with a line naming exactly what Porchlight is reading, and small porch lights coming on as each source is gathered — then steadily lit once the brief has left for your inbox. If a run hits trouble, the lamp dims and says so calmly; it retries on its own.

0.2.1582026-08-03

• YouTube Music stands on its own. It's now a source in its own right — its own tile in Settings → Sources beside Apple Music and Spotify, and its own card in setup — rather than a switch tucked inside the Google panel. Same promise as the other music sources: themes and top artists in the Music Listening section, never a tracklist.
• Also fixed underneath: the blend no longer requires Apple Music to be on. A Spotify-only or YouTube-Music-only family gets the Music section all the same.

0.2.1572026-08-03

• YouTube Music counts as music now. Songs played on YouTube Music used to land in YouTube Views, where listening read as watching — a child who lives on YouTube Music showed a silent Music section and a crowded YouTube one. Plays now join Music Listening beside Apple Music and Spotify: same artists, same on-repeat signal, same late-night reading. The section names whichever services actually contributed each night. If you'd rather keep them with videos, there's a switch in Settings → Watching & Searching.

0.2.1562026-08-03

• Alert texts are coming. When a safety alert email goes out, Porchlight can now also send a short text saying one exists — the text never carries what was flagged; the details stay in your email. Turn it on in your account at porchlights.ai once texting goes live, and every alert email now shows you where.
• Phone & FaceTime found its place. The "Order of the brief" list was missing it, and saving that list quietly pushed the section to the end of your brief. It's listed now, and it stays where you drag it.
• No more "Experimental" labels. WhatsApp, Instagram, Instagram messages, and Phone & FaceTime have earned their place; the labels are gone from Settings and the brief.

0.2.1552026-08-02

• Your account page can now see your settings. The app reports its digest settings — delivery time, recipients, section order, and each child's sources — on its hourly check-in, and the account dashboard at porchlights.ai shows them. Reading only: changes still happen in the app, on your Mac.
• The dashboard can open the app. "Open Settings in Porchlight" on the account page now opens Porchlight on your Mac, straight to the right Settings pane. If you've set a parent PIN, the PIN is asked first — a link can never skip it.
• Small words, made consistent. A few places in the app said "this Mac" where the rest of Porchlight says "your Mac." They match now, and the Sources list says "Messaging" like the brief does.

0.2.1542026-08-01

• The brief breathes. The longer passages — the one thing to know, the Pulse reading, each section's read on the day — now arrive as short paragraphs instead of one dense block. Same words, set with air.
• One way of saying it. Wherever the brief mentions your computer, it now says "your Mac," never "this computer." And sections name their sources plainly: Messaging reads from iMessage & SMS, Health Insights from Apple Health, Music from Apple Music and Spotify.
• The lamp behaves like a lamp. By day the Porchlight wordmark wears a quiet amber; after dark it glows. The Family Agreement now sits under a gentle arch and reads in Porchlight's own serif voice.
• Under the hood: the What's New page gained a link for every version, and the Pulse spectrum shows one lit segment instead of four colors — intensity, never a traffic light.

0.2.1532026-07-30

• Nothing new to look for in this one. Porchlight's updates are now prepared on a new machine, and this build exists to prove the whole path from that machine to your Mac. The app itself is unchanged.

0.2.1522026-07-30

• The three Google sections now sit together. Gemini had drifted to the bottom of the brief, below phone calls. It belongs with YouTube and Google searches, and now reads in that order.
• Gemini has its own mark. The sparkle appears beside it in the brief, in Settings, and wherever Porchlight names it.
• A section can no longer go missing without saying so. Porchlight's email design updates separately from the app, and a design that had not yet heard about a new section quietly left it out. It now recognises that and falls back to a design that knows every section, so nothing you switched on can disappear from a brief in silence.

0.2.1512026-07-30

• Google searches and Gemini reach the brief again. Google keeps a combined activity page and separate pages per service, and the combined one is almost entirely YouTube. Porchlight was reading only that page, so on a heavy viewing day the searches and the Gemini questions never made it into the brief at all. It now reads each service directly, and one busy service can no longer crowd out the rest.

0.2.1502026-07-30

• YouTube, Google searches and Google Gemini are now three separate sections. They used to share one heading that changed shape depending on what you had switched on, so three different things looked like one. Each has its own section now, its own read on the day, and its own line when there is nothing to report.
• Gemini is named. Where the app said "AI assistants" it now says Google Gemini, because that is the only one Porchlight reads. It stays off unless you switch it on, and you still see only the subjects they asked about.
• More of the day reaches the brief. Porchlight now reads further into your child's Google activity instead of stopping at the first page, so a busy day is no longer cut short.
• Licences have a window of their own. Help then Licenses shows the licence and credit for every model Porchlight runs on this Mac.
• A second route for safety alerts. If the email service has trouble, alerts and reconnect notices now go out through a backup provider instead of waiting for it to recover.

0.2.1492026-07-30

• The YouTube list is now what they actually chose to watch. A lot of what Google files alongside real viewing isn't viewing at all, and it was crowding the real thing out, often by a wide margin. A section that could only show a handful of real items now shows all of them.
• Late-night numbers are honest again. That same filler landed in the small hours and inflated the late-night count, which feeds the Pulse rhythm reading. Both are corrected.
• New, and only if you want it: what they ask AI assistants. Children ask an assistant things they would never ask a person. Turn it on separately in Settings and the brief shows the subjects they asked about, never the questions themselves, never the answers, and never anything they uploaded.
• No more "reconnect your Google account" when nothing is wrong. A television left playing overnight could look like a broken connection. It no longer does.

0.2.1482026-07-29

• Safety alerts can no longer miss a late-arriving message. Messages that sync in from iCloud after the hourly check now get caught on the next pass instead of being skipped permanently.
• A brief that succeeded is never reported as failed. Two race conditions that could email you a failure notice after a successful night are closed.
• Fewer lost nights. A brief-time hiccup at the email service is retried automatically, a first-night model download on slow wifi is no longer cut off partway, and low disk space is flagged before it can quietly spoil the evening.
• Reconnect emails are honest about the fix. You're only asked to re-sign-in when signing in is actually the fix; problems on our side no longer send you through a pointless reconnect.
• Preview households: the nightly note arrives even when the app is closed, problem notes are no longer titled "Tonight's brief is ready," and preview nights now count correctly as successful.
• Under the hood: an update can't install itself over a brief that's still being written, and a batch of smaller hardening fixes across the app and service.

0.2.1472026-07-29

• A brief missed because the Mac was shut off now catches up. When your Mac comes back on, Porchlight notices last night's brief never ran and writes it then — no more silently skipped nights.
• If an update ever fails to start properly, Porchlight fixes itself. After repeated startup trouble the app opens in a minimal recovery mode, fetches the fixed version automatically, and says so plainly. Briefs and alerts keep running throughout.
• Changing who receives the brief now notifies the previous recipients. If someone changes the delivery list from the dashboard — including someone who shouldn't have — the people who stop receiving it hear about it immediately.
• Copying your setup to a new Mac no longer doubles the briefs. A migrated copy now asks to be paired fresh instead of impersonating the original Mac.
• On a Mac set to a language other than English, Screen Time now says plainly it isn't supported yet instead of pointing you at the wrong fix.
• Under the hood: Porchlight's private files are excluded from Time Machine backups.

0.2.1462026-07-29

• A quiet texting day no longer means no brief at all. If your child simply didn't message but other sources are on, the brief still arrives — and Sunday no longer mislabels that healthy quiet day as a missing one.
• Pause is now a real switch. It shows when monitoring is paused, says plainly that briefs and safety alerts are both off, and has a Resume that puts everything back on your configured schedule.
• Porchlight repairs its own schedule. If the nightly job gets switched off — by a pause, a failed install, or macOS's Login Items — the app now notices and puts it back, instead of quietly never running again.
• Opening the app can no longer disturb tonight's brief or reset your chosen digest time.
• Under the hood: a damaged internal database is now set aside and rebuilt rather than stopping Porchlight indefinitely, and a long model download can't block the evening brief.

0.2.1452026-07-28

• A safety alert that can't be sent is now retried until it arrives. Previously a brief network problem at the wrong moment could lose an alert entirely; alerts are now held safely on your Mac and re-sent, and if one truly can't be delivered, Porchlight tells you rather than staying quiet.
• Porchlight notices when your briefs stop. If no brief has gone out for a day and a half, you get an email explaining what to check — instead of silence you have to spot yourself.
• Sources can no longer look healthy while quietly broken. If Instagram, Google or Spotify changes something that stops Porchlight reading properly, that now counts as a problem to tell you about, rather than being reported as a quiet day.

0.2.1442026-07-28

• When something goes wrong, you'll hear about it. A brief that can't be sent, a night that hits an unexpected error, or a quality check that stops a brief now all reach you with a plain explanation — previously some of these could pass in silence.
• Safety alerts are harder to break. The alert email is now fully sanitised, and Porchlight no longer stops alerts when it merely can't confirm your subscription — it keeps watching and tells you.
• Fewer ways for one problem to become no brief at all. Losing access to Messages, a busy database, or a hiccup in one score no longer takes the whole evening's brief down with it.
• The phone-quiet note works again, and Porchlight is gentler on memory while sending — a fix for briefs that were written but never arrived on smaller Macs.

0.2.1432026-07-28

• Porchlight now remembers nine weeks instead of five, so the Sunday Edition can eventually spot the slow changes a single week hides — the level that was unusual a month ago quietly becoming normal.
• More of the past can be recovered. A one-time catch-up can now also rebuild YouTube and Google history, when each Instagram account was followed, and this Mac's own app usage — so the weekly has real history behind it from the start instead of waiting for weeks to accumulate.
• Everything recovered stays on your Mac, as derived facts only: counts, names and minutes, never what anyone wrote.

0.2.1422026-07-28

• The splash's film grain is dialed back by half — texture you feel, not texture you see.

0.2.1412026-07-28

• The opening light got warmer. The splash now has the texture of a photograph instead of a screen: fine film grain, softly darkened corners, and a porch light that glows unevenly and breathes — the way a real bulb does.

0.2.1402026-07-27

• The Sunday Edition got a memory. Each night now banks what it learned — who your child talked with, what they listened to and watched, how the night went — as private derived facts on your Mac (never message text, and never leaving the Mac). Sunday reads the week back: who rose and who faded, what stuck and what passed through, which nights ran late, and where the week turned.
• A written Sunday lead. When the week has enough real material, the edition opens with a short written paragraph connecting it — plain and specific, in the same voice as the rest of the brief.
• Catch up instantly. A one-time backfill can rebuild recent weeks from what's already on the Mac, so the first rich edition doesn't take a month to arrive.
• A bad night can't erase the week anymore. If one source fails, the rest of the night is still recorded — and Sunday says honestly which days are missing instead of quietly averaging around them.
• Fixed: "The one thing to know" had been silently absent from recent briefs; it returns tonight.

0.2.1392026-07-27

• The brief asks for feedback once, not thirteen times. "Was this section accurate?" appeared under every section; it now appears under the first one, and the 👍 👎 pair alone carries the rest. Same feedback, far less noise.

0.2.1382026-07-27

• WhatsApp threads read like a person wrote them. Three fixes from the first real brief after last night's send fix: the same group no longer appears twice (WhatsApp quietly mints a new chat id when a group is recreated — they render as one conversation now); a thread that is only an attachment with no text gets a plain factual line instead of machine filler; and phrasing like "no further communication in the thread" can never reach your email — anything that describes the material instead of your child is replaced with the plain line.
• The quiet stretch of the evening run now says what it's doing. The gathering stage runs several minutes of on-device thinking with nothing to show for it, so the progress gauge read "last movement 5 minutes ago, stalled?" during a perfectly healthy run. Each step announces itself now — "thinking about Screen Time", "thinking about music", "writing the one thing to know" — in the menu bar and the Terminal gauge alike.
• The menu bar can no longer contradict itself about a dead run. It said "Building the brief… nothing is stuck" two lines above a Debug row reading DEAD. The heartbeat, the reassurance line and the Send digest now button all treat a dead process as not running, so the button comes back instead of staying disabled forever.
• The Debug section's Terminal button copies a command that actually runs. It copied `nl-agent …`, which isn't on anyone's PATH ("command not found"); it now copies the full path to the app's own copy and confirms with a dialog instead of a notification that can be silenced.
• Crash evidence survives housekeeping. The app's routine model checks were overwriting the record of a killed run before the next brief could report it. The evidence is set aside now and reported however many checks run in between.

0.2.1372026-07-26

• Fixed: the bug that has silently stopped every brief since July 24. When WhatsApp had history but nothing recent — true on any Mac where WhatsApp Desktop hasn't run in a couple of days — a time-zone mismatch crashed the run right after the writing step. No error reached any log, so evenings simply ended with nothing sent. The brief now renders the "WhatsApp hasn't synced since…" note it was trying to write, and completes.
• An internal error can never again be silent. If anything unexpected stops a brief, it is now written to the log Copy report reads, the run is marked failed so the app stops showing progress, and you get one plain email saying the brief didn't finish. This closes the last of the three silent endings: a hang trips the watchdog, a system kill is reported by the next run, and an error now reports itself.

0.2.1362026-07-26

• Only one brief can be written at a time. Pressing "Send digest now" while a brief was already being written quietly started a second one — two copies of the on-device writer at once, which is exactly the memory load that has been cutting evenings short on smaller Macs. A second request now steps aside and says a brief is already in progress.
• Copy report now answers "is it still running?" The diagnostics report includes the current run — its phase, and whether the writing process is actually alive or was killed — so a support log can distinguish a stuck evening from a stopped one on its own.
• A Debug section in the menu bar. While Porchlight is in heavy testing, the lamp's menu now shows exactly what the evening run is doing: a live percentage, the current phase and its count, whether the writing process is actually alive, and how long since it last moved. If a run was killed by the system, the menu says DEAD and names the phase it died in, instead of showing a spinner forever. A button copies the matching Terminal command (`nl-agent progress --watch`) so there's nothing to remember.

0.2.1352026-07-26

• You can now watch a brief being written. For debugging: open Terminal and run `nl-agent progress --watch` for a live percentage bar of the run in progress — which phase it is in, how far through, whether the writing process is still alive, and how long since it last moved. If a run has been killed, it says DEAD instead of leaving you guessing. Nothing about the brief's content ever appears — phases, counts and timings only.

0.2.1342026-07-26

• If this Mac ever stops a brief partway through, the next brief tells you. On a Mac short of memory, the system can end Porchlight's evening run without warning — no error, nothing sent, and until now nothing said so afterwards. The next run notices, says so in one email, and carries on; the note also appears in Settings → Copy report so support can see it.
• The brief frees its writer sooner. The on-device writing model now releases its memory the moment the last sentence is written, instead of holding several gigabytes through the final assembly and send — exactly the window where a busy Mac was cutting the evening short.
• Wellbeing & Mood now explains itself. The line under the Pulse used to be one stock sentence per band. It is now written each evening from what actually moved and why — which pillar is carrying the score, which is soft, and what the soft one looks like in that particular day. When the writer is unavailable, the stock sentence still appears, so the card is never blank.
• The Awareness section is more honest in two small ways. The glance strip no longer says "nothing flagged today" on a day when Awareness has a mention — it says so in amber instead. And on a day with no flags at all, the brief now still tells you when the context check set matches aside as banter, because "we looked, and it was fine" is worth hearing.
• Settings tools that use the writer work on the first try. A few actions (like testing a safety word) could fail with a technical error if run before an evening brief had. They set the writer up themselves now.

0.2.1332026-07-26

• The Continue and Back buttons are clickable everywhere, not just on the words. Clicking the coloured part of the button just left or right of the text did nothing, so a confident click sometimes felt like the app had ignored you. The whole button responds now. This was meant to be fixed a few releases ago and wasn't — the earlier fix looked right and didn't work.

0.2.1322026-07-26

• Clearer words in a few places. The first screen describes the brief a little better, the sample brief's window is titled the way the real brief is, and the line about urgent alerts says plainly that a dedicated message is sent at any hour.
• The setup sidebar reads consistently. Three steps were named in sentence case in the sidebar and Title Case on the screen itself — the same step, named two ways one click apart. They're The Digest, First Run and Add More in both places now.

0.2.1312026-07-26

• If a brief ever stalls, Porchlight now says so instead of going quiet. The last release fixed the one thing that could hang. This release removes the possibility of a silent night altogether: Porchlight watches its own progress while a brief is being written, and if it stops moving, it stops waiting — it writes down exactly where it got stuck, clears itself out so the next evening runs normally, and emails you to say the brief didn't finish and that nothing was lost. The limits are deliberately generous, so a slow evening on a busy Mac still finishes and still arrives.

0.2.1302026-07-26

• Fixed: a brief could stop halfway and never arrive, silently. If the on-device writer stopped responding partway through (most likely on a Mac that was short of memory), Porchlight waited for it forever. No brief arrived, nothing said anything was wrong, and the app showed nothing in progress. It now gives the writer a deadline: if it goes quiet, that one section is left out, the writer is restarted, and the brief still arrives. The same deadline applies while the writer is starting up, which is the moment it is most likely to stall.

0.2.1292026-07-26

• Your brief now opens with the one thing to know. A short paragraph at the top weighs the whole evening and says what it actually amounts to, with a confidence figure so you can see how much of the day it was drawn from. It never invents significance: a quiet day reads as a quiet day.
• Bright spots. The wins that would otherwise go unmentioned — someone talked a friend through a bad afternoon, finished a hard thing, brought snacks for the team — collected at the end of the brief. Nothing is padded: on a day with nothing to report, the section simply isn't there.
• Try this. Two or three openers for the dinner table, drawn only from the good parts of the day and never from a worry, so asking never gives away that you read anything.
• Wellbeing & Mood now names the Pulse section, which had no heading at all.
• A tidier Safety Alerts. The section is called Safety Alerts now. The Custom chip no longer looks like a button you can press — it's a status, and it lights up on its own the moment you change a dial. The reset offered next to a changed dial now works, and says where it puts things back to: Back to Baseline.
• The installer is called Porchlight. The download and the update file were still named after the old name.

0.2.1282026-07-26

• Updates actually arrive now. Porchlight could get stuck on an older version: once it had quietly downloaded an update, it stopped looking for new ones, never told you the update was waiting, and "Check for Updates…" would do nothing at all until you quit and reopened the app. All three were the same underlying mistake, and it's fixed. You'll now see when a new version is ready, the check always answers, and a Mac that stays on installs the update by itself overnight and comes right back.
• Quitting explains itself, whichever way you quit. The note about what does and doesn't stop when you close Porchlight — your brief and safety alerts keep running; the menu-bar lamp and its self-updating don't — only appeared if you used Quit in the menu-bar menu. Using ⌘Q, the app menu, or the Dock closed it silently. Now they all show it, once.

0.2.1272026-07-25

• A word about laptops, during setup. If you install on a MacBook, the delivery step now tells you what a closed lid means: Porchlight can only read and send while that Mac is awake, so a sleeping laptop delays the brief and any urgent alert until it wakes. Nothing is missed, and if your home has an always-on Mac, that's the better place for it. Desktops don't see the note.
• Clearer wording in a few places. The last setup step reads "Add sleep & activities". Settings says "Web Browsing". The brief's Health section now says your child's iOS device rather than "iPhone", because the companion app runs on an iPad too.
• The brief is named consistently. It's the Daily Brief throughout the app, the emails, and the brief itself.

0.2.1262026-07-25

• Fixed: Software Updates said "Saved — checking now." on its own. Opening Settings showed that line with nothing clicked, and once it appeared it never went away. Worse, it meant Porchlight quietly checked for an update every single time you opened Settings. Both are fixed, and the message is gone: the description under Stable/Beta changes the moment you switch, which is confirmation enough.
• The brief reads more like a person wrote it. Long sentences stitched together with dashes have been broken into proper ones throughout, and the repeated "themes only, never a list" notes at the end of each section are now plain sentences. The writing itself is asked to do the same from now on.
• Music now shows both services. Where the brief blends Apple Music and Spotify, the heading shows both marks rather than only Apple Music.
• Small wording fixes. "Web Browsing" is capitalised consistently, in Settings and in the brief. The Wellbeing section is titled "Wellbeing & Pulse".

0.2.1252026-07-25

• "Troubleshooting" is now "Support", and it has what you'd expect in it. Alongside reporting a problem, there's a new Help & Billing card with links to the answers on the website and to everything about your subscription. Signing in there uses an emailed link — there's no second password to remember. And if you'd rather talk to a person, replying to any Porchlight email reaches one.
• Uninstall has moved somewhere sensible. It used to sit at the bottom of your brief settings, next to who receives the brief and what time it arrives — an odd place for it. It's now the last item under Support, and it's called "Uninstall" rather than "Advanced".
• Fixed: signing in and finding help on the website could hit a password wall. The account and help pages were still behind our pre-launch gate, so following them from the app led nowhere useful. They open properly now.

0.2.1242026-07-25

• Safety Words is easier to read. The panel now has a title, and the explanation up top no longer runs everything together: one line on what the page does, then each of the four settings — Alert Now, Flag In Brief, Awareness, Off — named in bold so it's clear those are the choices.
• You can put the safety dials back. If you've changed some and want the original settings again, the page now tells you how many differ from your chosen starting point and offers "Put Them Back". It only appears when something has actually been changed.
• Slightly larger text in Settings. The body text was smaller than macOS normally uses, which made some panels harder to read than they needed to be.
• "Edit Brief Details" replaces the odd "Brief settings" link at the top of Overview.

0.2.1232026-07-25

• Buttons are clickable everywhere on the button. Only the text inside each button was actually responding — the coloured pill around it was decoration, so a click a few pixels off did nothing. Every button in setup and Settings now responds across its whole surface.
• Fixed a clipped label. The YouTube & Searches card said "Their Google Acc…". It now reads "Google Account" — one Google sign-in covers both YouTube and searches.

0.2.1222026-07-25

• The setup window opens at a sensible size. It was opening tall enough to fill a whole screen — a leftover from when the setup checklist was much longer. It now opens compact, and you can still drag it larger.
• Clearer labels on the source cards. The small grey text in the corner of each card now tells you one useful thing: where that information is read from — "This Mac", "Their iPhone", "Safari + Chrome" — or what to do next, like "Connect Google". Several cards were previously just repeating their own title back at you, and two said "auto-refresh", which meant nothing to anyone.

0.2.1212026-07-25

• The brief leads with how the day is moving, not a number. The Pulse card used to open with a big 0–100 figure. It now opens with the word for the day — Bright, Steady, Flickering, Check in — and which way things are heading compared with your own child's usual. Same measurement underneath, and it still places the marker on the scale; it just isn't printed as a score any more. A number out of 100 reads like a grade for a person, and this was never that.
• Sources are now grouped by what they're worth. Start here, Strongly recommended, If they use it, Extra depth — each with a line telling you whether it's worth your next five minutes. And it now says plainly where you can stop: most families are done after the first four, and the brief is already good. The small "EXP" tags are gone; the grouping says the same thing in words instead.
• A page you can show your child. Settings → Privacy now offers to open a plain page written for them: what Porchlight sees, what it never sees, and what to do if they think it's unfair. Much easier than explaining it cold, and it's usually less alarming than what they'd imagine.

0.2.1202026-07-25

• Safety Words opens where you clicked, not in a second window. Choosing Safety Words used to show a single line with an "Edit safety words" button that opened the whole editor as a separate window on top of Settings — covering the list that shows you where you are. The categories, their dials, and every word Porchlight watches for are now right there in the panel. Nothing about the parent PIN changes: Settings is still locked at the door.

0.2.1192026-07-24

• The Settings window is wider, and it stops moving. The new categories left the window too narrow, so the source names were breaking apart mid-word. It's now a wider, shorter shape with room for them. Switching between categories also used to nudge the whole window and everything in it a few pixels; it now stays exactly where it is.
• "Brief settings" opens the section instead of a pop-up window. It was still opening a separate panel on top of everything, which covered the very list showing you where you are. It now just takes you to The Brief.
• A clear way to tell us something's wrong. Settings → Troubleshooting now leads with "Report a problem or idea…". It attaches your version and a technical summary so we can usually work it out without asking you questions, and it never includes anything your child wrote.

0.2.1182026-07-24

• Settings is organized into categories instead of one long scroll. It had grown to eight stacked sections, which meant scrolling past everything to reach anything. It now works the way macOS System Settings does: categories down the left — Porchlight, Watching for, This Mac — and one panel at a time on the right. Overview is still what opens first, so a glance still answers "is it working?". Recipients and digest time have moved out from behind a button and into their own panel.
• The brief is readable at night. If your Mail app is in dark mode, parts of the evening brief were nearly invisible — the video titles under YouTube, and the labels beside your child's health numbers, were dark brown on a dark background, with harsh bright lines between the rows. Every one of those is now proper light text on the dark card. Light mode is unchanged.

0.2.1172026-07-24

• Quitting Porchlight now explains itself — honestly. Closing the app doesn't stop anything: your nightly brief and safety alerts are run by your Mac, not by the app window. Quitting now says so once, and names the two things that do stop — Porchlight can't install its own updates, and the lamp leaves your menu bar. If you actually want to stop monitoring, it points you at "Pause monitoring". You can still quit immediately; nothing is in your way.
• A gentle reminder if the app stays closed for a long time. Since updates can only install while the app is open, a brief will now mention it if Porchlight hasn't been opened in about a month. One line, once it matters.
• Occasional news, quietly. Porchlight can now show a short note about something new — a source we've added, a feature worth knowing about — on the app's home screen, and sometimes as one line in the brief. It's always dismissible, never covers anything, and is never used for anything urgent: safety always reaches you as an alert.

0.2.1162026-07-24

• If we alert you during the day, the evening brief now says so — right at the top. Urgent alerts are sent the moment they're found, and until now the nightly brief made no mention of them, so a day that had one could still read as unremarkable. Every brief that follows an alert now opens with a clear banner: "We reached out to you about something potentially important today at 2:14 pm." It names only the time — the details stay in the alert email itself.
• Settings shows when more than one person gets the brief. With two parents added, the summary line showed only the first address; it now reads "you@email.com +1". Same for households with more than one child.

0.2.1152026-07-24

• The Screen Time permission now shows up as "Porchlight Screen Time" — finished. The previous update fixed the request coming from "python3.11", but macOS still displayed the helper's internal filename ("nl-st") in the Accessibility list. The helper now ships under its real name, so both the prompt and the Privacy & Security list read "Porchlight Screen Time".

0.2.1142026-07-24

• Screen Time asks for its permission as "Porchlight" now — and only when you turn it on. Adding Screen Time needs one macOS permission (Accessibility — it's the only way Apple lets anything read Screen Time). That request used to appear as a bare, unsettling "python3.11 wants to control your computer." It now clearly comes from Porchlight, the setup screen tells you it's coming and exactly why, and it's only ever requested if you switch Screen Time on. Nothing about Screen Time ever leaves your Mac.

0.2.1132026-07-24

• Fixed: connecting a Google account could close its own window before you signed in. On a fresh Mac, the Google / YouTube sign-in window sometimes decided it was already connected within a few seconds — while the page still showed you logged out — and closed too fast to actually sign in. It now confirms the real Google session before finishing, so the window stays open until you're genuinely signed in.

0.2.1122026-07-24

• "Send digest now" can no longer be lost. The run is now handed to macOS itself (the same scheduler that runs your nightly brief), so quitting or updating the app mid-build can't silently kill it. Before this, a manual run could vanish without a trace if the app closed while it worked.
• After a background update, the app now says so. If Porchlight updated itself while open and a panel can't load, it now tells you plainly — "Porchlight updated in the background; quit and reopen" — instead of "Something went wrong."
• Fixed: the Sunday Edition's week-long memory could quietly stop collecting. On days without health data, the nightly collection of the week's moments failed silently — which would have thinned out Sunday's "week on the porch." It now collects every night regardless.
• The Sunday Edition gets its front page. Sundays now open with a proper masthead and a headline written from your child's actual week — "A quieter, kinder week" — grounded only in the week's collected moments, with an honest plain fallback when there isn't enough history yet.

0.2.1112026-07-24

• Screen Time requests now read clearly. When your child asks for more app time, Apple sends that as a special interactive message — which used to show up as an unnamed thread with "no content." Now it names the people in the thread and reads the actual request: "Riley asked for more time for Spotify · Approved for one hour." Other interactive messages (Apple Cash, Digital Touch, and the like) are named too, instead of appearing blank.

0.2.1102026-07-23

• Automated notifications are set aside more reliably. Texts from toll-free numbers (like a health service on an 800/833 line) and no-reply email senders — a sleep tracker's morning report, a "your notes are ready" ping — now fold into the quiet "set aside automated messages" line instead of showing up as conversations. Real people are never affected: an ordinary number, a real email, or anyone your child actually replied to always stays a full conversation.

0.2.1092026-07-23

• The Music section now reflects what your child is actually listening to lately. It reads only recent plays and leans toward the most recent, so it can't surface years-old favorites as if they were on repeat today. When there's been no recent listening, the section simply stays quiet rather than filling in old ones.
• Fixed: a couple of brief sections could show raw text instead of a clean summary. In rare cases a thread or notification summary rendered the model's unfinished output — stray code-like characters and half-written JSON — instead of the plain-language summary. Those sections now always read cleanly, and fall back to a short note if a summary can't be formed.
• Your referral link now leads somewhere useful. The "Give a month, get a month" link in your brief now opens a page that hands you your personal invite link to copy and share, and explains exactly how it works — instead of the sign-up page.

0.2.1082026-07-23

• Uninstalling now truly removes every trace. When you remove Porchlight and choose to delete its data, it also clears the saved logins for any accounts you connected (Instagram, Spotify, Google) and its own app preferences and caches — not just the briefs and settings. Nothing connected is left behind on the Mac.
• Fixed: during a free trial, the nightly brief could fail to arrive. A trial install (before you've activated a subscription) could hit an error while preparing the brief. Trials now generate and send the brief as expected.

0.2.1072026-07-23

• Tune your brief from the brief itself. Each flag now carries a "Not a concern? Stop flagging these words" link, and awareness items a "flag these from now on" link — one tap adjusts what Porchlight watches for, and it takes effect that same night. Your choice never leaves your Mac (the link carries an anonymous reference, never the word). And in your child's birthday month, a gentle line suggests revisiting your Safety Words, since what fits changes with age.
• The Web Browsing section now shows the Safari icon, matching the other services in your brief.

0.2.1062026-07-23

• Safety Words is tidier. The full word list now folds down to a single line ("111 words · 1 added by you") — click to open it when you want the detail. Age presets and category dials stay right where they were.
• The context-check toggles can't misreport again. The app now displays exactly the state the safety engine computes — so a mid-update moment can never show toggles off when the engine has them on. Rapid toggle-flipping is also safer: changes are saved one at a time, none lost.

0.2.1052026-07-23

• The context check is now on out of the box. Every eligible category (never Self-harm, Grooming, or Sexual content — those stay literal, always) gets the on-device context read by default. Turn any category's check off in Safety Words if you'd rather see every literal match. Everything else about it is unchanged: unsure means you see the flag, and the brief always tells you when anything was set aside.

0.2.1042026-07-22

• New: the context check — fewer false flags, your call, honestly labeled. For categories you opt in (Safety Words → the toggle under each category), Porchlight's on-device model reads the sentence around a match before it becomes a flag — so "I'm dead 😂" stops surfacing. When it sets anything aside, the brief says so plainly ("Context check set aside 2 matches as banter"). When it's unsure or unavailable, you still see the flag. It is never used for Self-harm, Grooming, or Sexual content, and never for middle-of-the-night alerts — those stay literal, always. Turning it on shows what it would have set aside this month, so you decide with your family's real numbers.
• Fixed: the digest's new section icons now actually reach beta Macs. The brief's template system never knew this Mac was on the beta channel; it does now. Icons, "Flickering," and the FaceTime wording all arrive with your next brief.

0.2.1032026-07-22

• Fixed: Safety Words showed an empty list, and setting any dial could have stopped the nightly brief. A handful of built-in watch patterns are compound ("discord" only counts alongside "add me…"), and 0.2.102 mishandled them. The editor now shows all 110 words, compound patterns dial like any other word, and a safeguard guarantees the brief and alerts always run even if this feature ever misbehaves again. If you tapped an age preset on 0.2.102, it's honored correctly after this update — nothing to redo.

0.2.1022026-07-22

• New: Safety Words — tune what Porchlight watches for. Settings now has a Safety Words editor: start from your child's age, dial whole categories (alert now / flag in the brief / quiet awareness / off), see every word Porchlight watches with how often it actually fired, and add your own words — with a "would have fired 14 times this month" check before they go live. Your list lives only on your Mac, and updates never touch it.
• FaceTime audio and video are no longer confused. A FaceTime audio call now reads as what it is — "voice, not video." The brief only says "face to face" when it truly was.
• The Pulse band "Unsettled" is now "Flickering." Same meaning, better porch.
• The brief's sections now carry their real service icons — the same WhatsApp, Instagram, YouTube and other logos you see in setup.
• Sign-in windows now linger four seconds after connecting, so the green confirmation is easier to catch.

0.2.1012026-07-22

• You can now disconnect a service right from setup. On the "Add more to your brief" page, click the green "Connected" pill and confirm — Porchlight signs out, and the button returns to "Connect" whenever you want it back. (YouTube and Google Search share one Google sign-in, so disconnecting either covers both — the confirmation says so.)

0.2.1002026-07-22

• Connecting an account now finishes by itself. The Instagram, Google, and Spotify sign-in windows show a clear status strip — and once you're signed in, it turns green ("✓ Connected — all set") and the window closes on its own two seconds later. No more guessing whether you're done. Already signed in? It confirms and closes by itself.
• Setup now recognizes accounts you've already connected. The "Add more to your brief" page shows Instagram, Google, and Spotify as Connected when they already are — no more "Connect" button for an account that's been connected all along. This also stops a setup re-run from quietly switching those sources off.

0.2.992026-07-22

• The "Add more" page's icons are fixed. In 0.2.98 they drew small and off-center; every service icon now shows at its proper size — including the real WhatsApp and Phone & FaceTime artwork.

0.2.982026-07-22

• Setup is simpler — one page to add anything beyond Messages. Instead of a separate screen for each source, setup now starts with Messages (enough for a real brief on its own) and gathers everything else on a single optional "Add more to your brief" page. Turn on WhatsApp, phone & FaceTime, Instagram, YouTube, Google, music, Screen Time, or sleep & activity right there — or add them anytime in Settings. Nothing is on unless you choose it.
• YouTube and Google searches are now separate. They used to be one setting; now you can include one without the other, and the daily brief shows what they watch and what they look up as their own sections.

0.2.972026-07-22

• Fixed: certain messages could crash the brief at the very end. A broken character — from a garbled emoji, a quirk in how a message was stored, or a stray token from the writing model — could make the final step of building the brief fail instead of finishing. The brief now cleans any such character out and always completes; nothing else in your day is affected.

0.2.962026-07-22

• Setup finishes in seconds now — the first brief arrives by itself. First Run used to make you watch the entire first digest being written, which could take many minutes (and longer whenever Instagram slows its responses). Now it checks that everything genuinely works — Messages readable, the writer ready — in a few seconds, then finishes setup and writes your first brief in the background: "Look for it in your inbox within the next 15–30 minutes." The menu bar shows live progress in the meantime.
• No online source can stall the brief anymore. Account reads (Instagram, Spotify) now run in parallel with strict time budgets; if a service is slow or throttling, the brief uses the last-known picture and moves on — bounded time, every night, by construction.

0.2.952026-07-22

• Setup's progress steps light up in the right order. While your sample digest was being written, the live status ("Writing the brief") showed under Scanning recent messages instead of Building your sample digest. The steps now follow what's actually happening — scanning lights while reading, building lights while writing.

0.2.942026-07-22

• Housekeeping. Reliability fixes for Porchlight's own overnight test harness — nothing changes in the app you use.

0.2.932026-07-22

• Fixed: the first digest could fail at the finish line. Re-enabling Phone & FaceTime exposed a week-old defect in a logging line that only runs when calls are switched on — the brief would do all its work, then fail with an error instead of arriving. Fixed, and the test suite now runs a full brief with every single source switched on so a gap like this can't hide again.

0.2.922026-07-22

• "Back" looks like a button now. In setup, Back (and "Skip for now") used to be bare text that didn't read as clickable. They're proper buttons now — quiet ones, so Continue stays the bright action on every page.

0.2.912026-07-22

• The setup sidebar is now clickable. Every step you've already reached is a click away — jump back to reread the Agreement or revisit a source, then jump straight to where you were. Steps you haven't reached yet stay locked, so a first walk-through still goes in order.

0.2.902026-07-22

• Every section now speaks when it has nothing to show. Screen Time, Web Browsing, Instagram, Music, and YouTube/Google used to disappear from the brief on an empty or unreadable day — indistinguishable from broken. Each now says its one honest line ("No browsing in this window." · "No Screen Time data arrived — usually Share Across Devices needs a nudge."), completing the promise the Phone & FaceTime and WhatsApp sections made earlier: a source that's on never vanishes silently.
• Setup stopped feeling frozen — and got much faster. The writing model now starts downloading in the background the moment setup opens, so by the time you finish the questions it's done or nearly done. Wherever a download is still running, you see live progress — "2.1 of 6.3 GB" — instead of a spinner, plus an honest note that big first-time downloads take a while and it's safe to walk away. Interrupted downloads now resume instead of starting over, and setup no longer downloads a spare model it doesn't need.
• The brief shows its work while it's being built. Open the menu bar during a build and you'll see exactly what Porchlight is doing — "Describing shared photos (3 of 8)" — instead of a bare "building…".
• The Family Agreement is now written in plain English. The placeholder legal text is gone; what you sign now says, in ordinary words, what Porchlight does, where everything stays, and the spirit it's meant to be used in — including our favorite section: tell your child.
• Housekeeping: a new cleanup command (`prune-models`) removes model files your setup no longer uses; they re-download automatically if ever needed again.

0.2.892026-07-21

• The WhatsApp "stopped syncing" note now fires exactly when it should. The version of this note released moments ago used a fixed cutoff that missed the most common real case — WhatsApp Desktop closed since the previous evening. It now compares the last sync against the brief's own look-back window: if nothing could have been seen, the brief says so instead of calling it a quiet day.

0.2.882026-07-21

• WhatsApp now says why it has nothing to say. When WhatsApp is on but a brief has nothing to summarize, the section used to disappear without a word. Now it always shows up and tells you which of three things is true: a genuinely quiet day ("No WhatsApp messages in this window."), a store that has stopped syncing — which happens whenever WhatsApp Desktop hasn't been open in over a day — with the time of the last sync and the one-step fix, or a store that couldn't be read. The stopped-syncing note matters most: WhatsApp only flows into the brief while WhatsApp Desktop runs on this Mac, and until now that going stale was invisible.

0.2.872026-07-21

• Re-running setup no longer switches sources off behind your back. Walking through the setup assistant again used to quietly reset every source to its factory state — and Phone & FaceTime, which had no setup toggle at all, was switched off on every complete walk-through (with Instagram and YouTube/Google following whenever their connect steps weren't redone). Setup now starts from your current settings, and Phone & FaceTime has a proper toggle in the Messages step.

0.2.862026-07-21

• The new writer switches on by itself. 0.2.85 introduced the better brief-writer but asked existing setups to flip a switch. This build removes the chore: the first run after updating moves any setup still on the factory writer over to the new one automatically. If you've deliberately chosen a different writer, that choice is respected and never overridden.

0.2.852026-07-21

• The brief has a new writer. We compared two models blind, side by side, on real conversations — same transcripts, same photo descriptions, judged before knowing which was which — and the newer model (Gemma 4) was clearly better, especially at keeping straight who said and did what. It now writes the nightly brief. It runs in its own isolated workspace on your Mac, pinned to the exact version we tested; if that workspace ever can't start some night, the brief is written by the previous model instead of not arriving at all. As always, everything runs on your Mac and nothing leaves it.
• Saving Settings no longer touches the writer choice. A housekeeping fix found during this work: saving any Settings change used to quietly reset which model writes the brief. It doesn't anymore.

0.2.842026-07-21

• The Phone & FaceTime section no longer disappears on quiet days. When calling is switched on but a day simply had no calls, the brief used to skip the section entirely for a night or two — which read as broken. Now the section always shows up: "No calls in this window." on a quiet day, a plain note when the call history couldn't be read, and the fuller explanation only after several quiet days in a row.
• WhatsApp contacts keep their names through WhatsApp's identity change. WhatsApp has been quietly moving chats onto internal privacy IDs instead of phone numbers. When a chat switched over, the brief lost the person behind it — showing a bare "•••1463" instead of the country flag and number, and even announcing someone your child talks to every day as "New on WhatsApp." The brief now sees through the switch: people keep their name or their 🇵🇹 +351-style number, nobody is re-announced, and WhatsApp's internal IDs can never appear in the brief or be mistaken for a foreign phone number.
• Troubleshooting got eyes on WhatsApp. The diagnostics report now includes a content-free sketch of how WhatsApp's data is shaped on this Mac — counts and formats only, never a number, a name, or a message — so a question like this week's is answerable from a single report.

0.2.832026-07-21

• Housekeeping for a better brief-writer. We're evaluating a newer model for writing the nightly brief — one that's stricter about who-said-what. This build teaches Porchlight's side-by-side comparison tool to run that newer model safely, in its own isolated workspace, without touching anything the nightly brief depends on. Nothing changes about your brief tonight; this is the groundwork for choosing its next writer carefully.

0.2.822026-07-21

• Who-did-what in conversation summaries got materially stricter. Two real mistakes drove this: a photo was credited to someone who never sent a message, and a shared news article's subject was described as the sender's own plans. Now, who shared each photo is recorded as fact — the summary can no longer guess it — and the summarizer is explicitly held to two rules: the people in a conversation's title aren't the senders of its messages, and the events inside a shared article or screenshot belong to the people in it, not to whoever shared it.
• Photos shared over WhatsApp are now described too. The same on-device photo understanding that covers Messages now reads WhatsApp images — including who actually shared each one. Nothing leaves the Mac.
• The nightly run explains itself better in the troubleshooting log — including one line confirming whether the Phone & FaceTime section had calls to show.

0.2.812026-07-21

• The brief can finally describe the photos your child shares. Porchlight has always had on-device photo understanding, but it could never read the format iPhones actually use — so in practice every shared photo failed, quietly, and the brief only ever said "shared a photo". iPhone photos are now converted on your Mac before they're read. Nothing leaves the machine, and the working copy is deleted the moment the description is written.

0.2.802026-07-21

• Unknown numbers now show which country they're from. A caller or chat with no contact card used to be a row of anonymous digits. International numbers now decode properly — a small flag and the country's dialling code, like 🇵🇹 +351 •••1463 — so you can tell at a glance whether your child is talking to someone down the street or on another continent. North American numbers keep showing their area code. It's all worked out on your Mac from the number itself; nothing is looked up anywhere.
• A friendlier menu-bar icon. The Porchlight icon in the top menu bar was a thin sliver that was easy to lose among a dozen others. It's now a solid rounded mark with the porch light cut out of it — much easier to spot.
• Photos shared without a caption no longer show a line of gibberish. When someone sent a picture with no words attached, the brief could quote a string of Apple's internal file codes as though it were the message. It now simply says a photo was shared.
• When a brief can't be made, the email explains itself. If Porchlight can't read the Messages history one night, it now sends a plain note saying what happened, that nothing is lost, and the one setting that almost always fixes it — instead of a raw error message.
• Small honesty and polish fixes throughout the brief: the Screen Time section now carries the same privacy line as every other section; the plain-text version of the brief gained the at-a-glance summary, the softer "Awareness" notes, and the closing signature it was missing; and the inbox preview line now says something useful without ever revealing a name or a finding.

0.2.792026-07-21

• International numbers are no longer labelled as American. A contact with no card whose number is from outside the US used to render with a "+1" in front of it, which was simply wrong. Unknown numbers now show a US area code only when the number really is one; everything else shows just the last four digits. WhatsApp and Phone & FaceTime present numbers identically now.
• The calls summary stops overstating a quiet day. Two calls totalling under a minute no longer get a line about who "most of the talking" was with — it now says plainly that they were brief.
• Clearer promise about which calls appear. The Phone & FaceTime setting used to say an iPhone's cell calls would be included via call-history syncing. In practice Apple doesn't deliver those to every Mac, so the setting now promises what it can: calls made or taken on this Mac, with iPhone calls as a bonus when Apple does sync them.

0.2.782026-07-21

• Unknown numbers now show their area code. A caller with no contact card used to appear as "+1•••9622", which told you nothing. It now reads "+1 (512) •••9622" — enough to tell a local friend from a number three states away, still never the full line. Anyone in your Contacts is named as before.

0.2.772026-07-21

• Calls your child places now count. macOS marks outgoing calls in a way that made the brief treat every call placed from the Mac as unanswered — so a FaceTime your child started never showed up, only ones they received. The brief now goes by talk time: any call that actually connected counts, whoever dialed. If Phone & FaceTime has seemed permanently quiet on your Mac, this was almost certainly why.

0.2.762026-07-21

• The Instagram section now tells you what it means, not just what it saw. It opens with one plain sentence connecting the period — what the new follows lean toward, where the saves are drifting — instead of leading with counts. New follows are grouped by what they are ("New — Cars & machines · three accounts") rather than a wall of handles, and the section closes with one concrete conversation starter when there's a fresh hook: something to actually ask at dinner.
• "New this period" is now real. Instagram quietly returns a slightly different follow list every time it's read, and the brief was counting the reshuffle as new follows — some days by the dozens. The brief now keeps a memory of every account it has ever seen, so "new" means genuinely new, and a bookkeeping reshuffle says so honestly instead of pretending to be news.
• A flagged account now explains itself. When "Worth knowing" can't show an account's bio, it says why it was flagged and how much weight to give it — "worth a glance, not an alarm" — instead of a bare handle with no context.

0.2.752026-07-21

• The brief now tells you when Phone & FaceTime has nothing to read. If the switch is on but this Mac hasn't seen any call history for a few days, the brief says so plainly — usually FaceTime isn't signed in on the Mac, or the iPhone isn't sharing its calls — instead of the section quietly disappearing. It's the same honesty the Health section gained when a linked iPhone goes quiet.
• Call history is read correctly no matter how this Mac stores its dates. macOS keeps call timestamps in one of two internal formats; the brief now detects which one it's looking at instead of assuming. On some Macs this is the difference between an empty section and a working one.
• The troubleshooting report answers more on its own. Settings → Diagnostics now checks the call log directly — does it exist, is it readable, how fresh is it, as counts only, never who — and includes the nightly run's own log, so a "why is this section missing?" question takes one copy-paste instead of a back-and-forth.

0.2.742026-07-21

• The interests map now reflects who your child is right now — not everything they've ever glanced at. The Instagram section used to pile up every interest it had ever seen and show the same list forever. It now weighs each one by how strongly and how recently it shows up: something your child actively follows, likes, and gets served rises to the top, while a passing curiosity quietly fades over days or weeks. The picture stays current on its own, and the "one thing worth asking about" is drawn from the interests that genuinely matter most.
• A fuller, honest read on what's shaping the feed. The brief now also folds in the topics Instagram itself has inferred for your child — the ones behind the ads they're shown. It's a deliberately quiet signal, weighted well below the things your child actually chooses, so it adds context without ever crowding out the real interests. As always, only the plain interest labels are kept — never an ad, a product, or a caption.
• The setup and Settings screens now carry the Porchlight mark, replacing a small icon left over from the old name.
• Everything here stays on your Mac and reads as interests, never their posts, searches, or messages.

0.2.732026-07-21

• The "what the feed is pushing" setting now reads correctly. The optional Instagram signal added yesterday is fully live: it reads the topics Instagram’s Explore is steering toward — including Instagram’s own topic labels for what it’s showing — and the posts your child saves, turning them into plain interest labels on your Mac. As always, only the interest labels are kept; never a caption, a search, or a post.

0.2.722026-07-21

• The Instagram section stops repeating itself. It used to show the same map of interests every single day. Now the full picture of who your child follows and what they're into appears on the first brief and refreshes about once a month — and in between, the section shows only what actually changed: new follows, new interests, recent activity. On a day with nothing new, it simply steps aside.
• See what Instagram thinks your child is into. Using the topics Instagram itself tracks and the feed it serves them, the brief can now show the interests the algorithm is steering toward — grouped plainly — and flags a new one the moment it appears. It's the closest honest read on what's shaping their Reels, and it never looks at a single video or caption: only the interest labels.
• Optional: what the feed is pushing. A new switch in Settings → Instagram adds the topics the recommendations are steering toward, plus what your child likes, saves, and searches — as interest labels only, never posts or captions. Off unless you turn it on, and it needs the account connected.
• Everything here stays on your Mac and reads as interests, never their posts or messages.

0.2.712026-07-20

• The Sunday Edition. Once a week, the evening brief opens with the week instead of the day: two or three moments that mattered, one thing worth asking about (chosen so it never reveals where you heard it), the week's shape as a simple chart, what moved against their own baseline, and — new for any product like this — what we flagged and whether it actually came up again. It grows honestly: early editions say plainly what still needs more history.
• The sample brief in setup is easier to actually read. The preview is taller, gently scrolls itself until you take over, and can expand to fill the window.
• Fixed a flicker on Continue that only appeared on Macs using a mouse (scrollbar styles differ from trackpad Macs).

0.2.702026-07-20

• Design improvements to the brief can now reach you without an app update. The daily brief's layout is fetched securely at send time and checked with a cryptographic signature before use, so a refinement can land the same night. Your family's data still never leaves the Mac — only the blank design travels, and if anything is ever wrong with it, the brief simply uses the version built into the app.

0.2.692026-07-20

• The brief now says so when the iPhone companion goes quiet. If no health numbers have arrived from a linked iPhone for a few days — usually because the app was swiped closed — the Health section says exactly that, and that opening the app once brings the numbers back. No more silent gaps.
• The Pulse keeps a proper trend ledger now. Each day's score and its underlying pillars are recorded on your Mac, so the weekly views we're building can show real history from day one. Nothing leaves the Mac, as always.
• Installer polish. The disk image's installer is now labeled "Install Porchlight.pkg," and the Sleep & Activity setup card tells you what to expect after the companion is installed.

0.2.692026-07-20

• Porchlight now looks like Porchlight on every Mac. The app carries its own typefaces, so the wordmark, headings, and text render in the real brand fonts everywhere — not just on machines that happen to have them installed.
• The brief tells you when the iPhone app goes quiet. If a child's sleep and activity numbers stop arriving for a few days, the brief now says so plainly — and tells you the fix (open the app once on the phone) instead of leaving you to wonder.
• Groundwork for weekly trends. Porchlight now keeps a private daily record of the Pulse score and its pillars on your Mac, so a future weekly edition can show how the week actually moved. Nothing changes in tonight's brief; the history starts building now.

0.2.682026-07-20

• The app is named Porchlight on your Mac now. In Finder, the Dock, and the Applications folder the app finally reads Porchlight — the last place the old name was still visible. Existing installs quietly rename themselves the first time this version runs; your setup, history, and permissions carry over untouched.
• The brand's true typeface. On Macs where Neue Haas Grotesk is installed, the wordmark and headings now set in the real thing. Everyone else keeps the same faithful stand-in as before — no visual jolt.
• Clearer iPhone-companion guidance. The Sleep & Activity card now tells you what to expect after install: nobody needs to open the app again, sleep numbers need a worn Apple Watch, and if the section ever goes quiet, opening the app once wakes it.

0.2.672026-07-20

• The opening logo is a touch smaller. The Porchlight wordmark on the launch screen was sitting a little large; it's now about 20% smaller, with more room to breathe. Same gather-into-the-light motion.

0.2.662026-07-20

• The daily brief now has a proper dark mode. In dark email apps (Gmail, Apple Mail), the brief used to get auto-darkened into a muddy, hard-to-read version. It now renders in Porchlight's own dusk-slate night look — calm slate, clear cream text, the light still amber — legible either way, and it follows your mail app's light/dark setting.

0.2.652026-07-20

• New: phone & FaceTime calls. Porchlight can now include who your child actually talks to on the phone and FaceTime — and for how long — read from this Mac's call log (with their iPhone's calls included if call history syncs to the Mac). Like everything else, it's about the shape of things, not the details: who they talk to most and the rhythm of their calls, never a call-by-call log. There is no audio and no transcript anywhere in this — only who, and how long. Turn it on in Settings → Sources → Phone & FaceTime. Experimental, and off until you switch it on.

0.2.642026-07-20

• The opening animation, refined. The fireflies are now tiny sparks — true to the original motion design — and the moment starts slow and dreamy, then gathers speed into the light coming on.
• The sample brief now shows everything. The example digest in setup (and on the website) includes all nine sources Porchlight reads today — WhatsApp, Instagram, web browsing, YouTube & searches, blended music, sleep & activity, and more — as representative content.
• Email delivery now heals itself. If this Mac's sending credential ever stops working (as happened during our domain move), Porchlight quietly fetches a fresh one and the brief goes out — no re-activation, no silent failures.
• Words caught up with reality. A few places still said sources were "rolling out" — they're live, and the app now says so.

0.2.632026-07-19

• You can now see the opt-in checkboxes at night. The setup wizard's "Include …" tick boxes were nearly invisible against the dark background. They now have a clear outline, and turn amber with a checkmark when on.
• Re-activate and De-activate, for real. The Delivery panel's "This Mac is activated" card now has both buttons — Re-activate refreshes this Mac's sending credential (the fix if briefs ever stop arriving), and De-activate stops emailing from this Mac while briefs keep landing in the app. The old card promised this and offered no way to do it.
• The "On" badge in Settings is readable again. Source tiles' status pills were too dark against the night background.

0.2.622026-07-19

• Fixed a crash in Settings. Removing an email recipient (the trash button in Digest delivery) could quit the app instantly — same for removing a child or guardian during setup. All three are fixed. If the app went down while you were editing delivery settings, this was it; nothing was lost.

0.2.612026-07-19

• The opening is now the true Gather. The splash matches the approved motion piece exactly: warm fireflies drift across the whole window, and when the light calls, every one of them curves home, is absorbed, and the word's glow swells once. Edge to edge, seamless, one scene.
• Links in the app now point at porchlights.ai. "Copy download link", support addresses, and the subscription pointer all moved to the new home.
• The finish screen is honest about its buttons. "Add sleep & activity" now visibly confirms when it copies the install link (it always copied — silently), and "Find it in your menu bar" shows the actual little lamp icon instead of describing a shield that's no longer there.

0.2.602026-07-19

• The opening moment is now The Gather. When Porchlight opens, warm sparks drift in from the dark and gather into the light as it comes on — one seamless scene, no more visible seams around the glow. It plays once, skips on a click, and respects Reduce Motion.
• Fixed: a switched-off source no longer reads "Connected." If you'd signed in to Instagram but left it switched off, the Settings tile still said "Connected." Off now means Off — and the Instagram panel says plainly when you're signed in but the source is off.

0.2.592026-07-19

• Night mode, and a light that follows the sun. Porchlight now wears warm paper by day and a calm dusk slate at night. By default it matches your Mac's appearance — or choose Match the sun in Settings → Appearance and it flips at your local sunset and sunrise, worked out right on your Mac (no location asked, nothing sent anywhere). Prefer one look? Always day and Always night are there too.
• A porch light in your menu bar. The menu bar icon is now Porchlight's own little lamp — same place, same menu, easier to spot.
• A small moment when the brief arrives. When you ask for a brief with the app open, a handful of warm sparks gather into the light as it lands. It plays once, stays out of the way, and respects Reduce Motion.
• Our home is porchlights.ai. Links in the brief and on the site now point at porchlights.ai. Everything keeps working exactly as before — no action needed.

0.2.582026-07-19

• Nightlight is now Porchlight. Same app, same team, same privacy promise — a new name and a warmer look. You don't need to do anything: your setup, your child's history, and all your settings carry over untouched.
• A fresh design everywhere. The app, the daily brief, and the website now wear Porchlight's look — warm paper by day, dusk slate by night, and the light always on the word itself. The brief is the same brief, just easier on the eyes.
• Briefs now arrive from porchlights.ai. Your daily brief is sent from digest@porchlights.ai — if one ever lands in spam after the change, add that address to your contacts. Replies and questions reach us at support@porchlights.ai.

0.2.572026-07-19

• Porchlight now tells you when a connection needs re-signing-in. Accounts you connect — Spotify, the Google account behind YouTube & Searches, Instagram — can quietly sign themselves out (a password change, a security prompt, an expired session). Before, that source would just silently vanish from the brief. Now, if a connection drops, you get a short, clear email telling you exactly which one and where to reconnect it — the daily brief carries the same reminder at the top, and Settings shows a "Reconnect" tag on the source. A source you turned off on purpose never triggers any of this. Reconnecting takes a few seconds — you sign in on the Mac; the password never leaves it.
• Richer Music section. The brief now reflects more of what your child actually listens to on Spotify — the mixes and playlists they come back to and what they've had on recently — not just one-off tracks. Same rule as always: the mood and the artists, never a track-by-track list.
• Fixed: "On repeat" could show a stale favorite. The Music section could surface an all-time favorite that hadn't actually been played recently (an old Apple Music play count). It now only counts songs played in the brief's window.
• Fixed: a repeating password prompt. On some Macs, connecting Spotify could pop a macOS "wants to use your confidential information" prompt on every run. Spotify now uses the same secure, silent session store as your other connected accounts. One-time step after updating: reconnect Spotify once in Settings → Music.

0.2.562026-07-19

• Setup now covers every source. The first-run setup used to skip Instagram, Spotify, WhatsApp, and Web Browsing — you could only add them afterward in Settings. Now they're right in the setup flow, grouped by kind: Messages (with WhatsApp), Instagram, Music (Apple Music + Spotify), and Watching & Web.

0.2.552026-07-19

• The Music section now names its sources. When both Apple Music and Spotify are connected, the brief blends them into one Music section and shows "Blended from Apple Music and Spotify" underneath — so it's clear what's feeding it (or just the one you have connected).
• A more natural default order for new setups — messaging and interests first, media and web next, wellbeing (Health, Screen Time) at the end. Existing briefs keep the order you chose; drag to reorder anytime in Settings.

0.2.542026-07-19

• Spotify now appears in Settings. Connect it under Settings → Sources → Spotify — sign in once and your child's listening folds into the daily brief (the mood in themes and their top artists, never a tracklist). The password never leaves this Mac.

0.2.532026-07-19

• New: connect your child's Spotify. In Settings → Music, connect their Spotify once and Porchlight folds their listening into the daily brief — the mood in themes and the artists they're into, never a track-by-track list. Connect once and it keeps itself current on its own. The password never leaves this Mac, and their listening stays on it too.

0.2.522026-07-19

• Instagram DMs now stay recent. The DM section could include conversations from months or even years ago the first time it ran. It now only reads messages from about the last month, so the brief reflects what's actually current — old, inactive threads are left out.

0.2.512026-07-19

• Behind-the-scenes reliability work: an internal self-check our nightly quality tests use to confirm your Settings save correctly every build. Nothing about your brief, or how you use Porchlight, changes.

0.2.502026-07-18

• Clearer diagnosis if a brief is ever delayed. On the rare occasion the on-device model is momentarily unavailable, Porchlight now records exactly why — so the diagnostics report (Settings → Troubleshooting) shows the cause at a glance instead of a generic message. No change to your briefs themselves.

0.2.492026-07-18

• The parent-PIN prompt is ready to type. When Settings asks for your PIN, the box is already focused — just type and press Return, no clicking first. (Same for the code and new-PIN steps of a PIN reset.)

0.2.482026-07-18

• New in Settings: Corrections. If the brief ever gets a name wrong, or flags an Instagram account you know is fine, fix it yourself — right on your Mac. Tell Porchlight "this number shows as Jordan" or "this account is fine," and every future brief honors it. Your correction never leaves this computer.
• Safety coverage that grows. We can now add new watch-words to the safety net — new slang, new risks — and every Porchlight picks them up by its next brief, no update needed. Additions only: the built-in protections can never be weakened this way.

0.2.472026-07-18

• Tell us when a section is off — or spot-on. Every section of the brief now has a small 👍/👎. One tap sends us your read on that section, with a few quick reasons if something's wrong, so we can fix it fast. Built to our promise: only which section and what kind of issue ever reach us — no messages, names, or content, ever.
• Tappable Instagram accounts. Every @account in the Instagram section now links straight to its profile, so you can look one up in a tap.

0.2.462026-07-18

• Instagram DMs, no export needed. If you've connected the account, direct messages now come in automatically each brief — the same one-time sign-in that reads who they follow. No more requesting and importing an export just for messages. As always: a short, plain gist of each conversation with the same safety flags as Messages, read on this Mac, never word-for-word, never sent anywhere. (Prefer to import an export instead? That still works.)
• The Instagram section groups interests more accurately. People your child follows are no longer mis-sorted by a coincidence in their name — a family member won't land under "Cars & machines" because a word happens to sit inside their surname.
• WhatsApp shows names, not just numbers. Conversations now use the name from your contacts, and when a number isn't saved, the display name WhatsApp itself shows — falling back to a masked number only when there's nothing else.

0.2.452026-07-18

• The Instagram section now has real substance. Interests are grouped into themes — Sports, Music, Travel, Gaming, and more — built from the whole follow list, not a slice, so even a first read of thousands of follows produces a real picture. Accounts followed recently now actually show under "New this period."
• Fix: a name could be flagged unfairly. A watch-word buried inside an ordinary name (like a surname) no longer triggers a safety flag. Real signals — in a handle or an account's bio — still do.
• DMs now say what they need. If direct messages are switched on but no Instagram export has been imported, the brief says exactly that (and where to fix it) instead of silently leaving DMs out.
• Settings: one Instagram panel. Follows and DMs now live in a single Instagram tile — the separate DMs tile is gone, and the tile shows "+ DMs" when messages are included.

0.2.442026-07-18

• Fix: the Instagram section could vanish for accounts that follow a lot of people. Reading a big follow list takes real time — Porchlight reads the complete list, hundreds of accounts per page — and an internal time limit was quietly cutting the read short, so the section never made it into the brief. The read now takes the time it needs, keeps itself steady even when it runs in the background, and if a read is ever interrupted partway, it keeps everything gathered so far instead of giving up.
• New: Troubleshooting in Settings. If something ever doesn't look right in your brief, one click copies a diagnostics report you can send us — a technical snapshot of which sources are on and their connection states. No messages, no names, no personal content — ever. A second button reveals the app's logs.

0.2.432026-07-18

• Clearer Instagram connect. While Porchlight reads who your child follows, it now says you can close the window — the read finishes on its own in the background, whether the panel is open or not.

0.2.422026-07-18

• Health is now easy to set up. Settings → Health (and a new step in setup) now shows exactly how sleep & activity reach the brief: a free Porchlight app on your child's iPhone. Scan the QR code with the phone's camera — or copy the install link — and you're in our beta in a minute. Optional as always; without it the brief simply leaves health out.

0.2.412026-07-18

• Fix: the Instagram section could disappear. After connecting an account, the brief's automatic background refresh could occasionally read zero follows and blank the whole section. The brief now keeps your last known follows instead of ever wiping them, so the section stays put.

0.2.402026-07-18

• Fix: switching Instagram accounts. If you disconnect Instagram and connect a different account, the brief now shows the new account's follows — before, it could keep showing the old account's list. Disconnecting now fully clears the old account's data.
• New: a Privacy section in Settings. A clear, always-visible summary of how your child's data is protected — read only on this Mac, derived summaries only, nothing uploaded — with a link to the full Privacy Policy.

0.2.392026-07-18

• Settings dashboard polish. The new source grid is tidier — evenly sized tiles in a balanced layout, so it stays calm and scannable as sources are added.

0.2.382026-07-18

• Redesigned Settings. Your data sources are now a grid of tiles instead of a long scroll — each shows its state at a glance (On, Connected, Off, or needs setup), and you tap one to set it up or turn it on. Your brief's own settings — who it's sent to, when, and the order — sit together up top. It stays tidy as more sources are added.

0.2.372026-07-18

• Two Instagram connect fixes. Connecting your child's account now confirms and shows "Connected" in a few seconds, instead of sitting on "Connecting…" while it does the first read (that now happens in the background). And disconnecting now turns the Instagram switches off — both follows and messages — so the brief reflects it right away.

0.2.362026-07-18

• Experimental: Instagram direct messages. If you choose to, the brief can now include your child's Instagram DMs — a short, plain read of each conversation with the same safety flags as Messages, exactly like the Messages and WhatsApp sections. It's a separate switch under Settings → Instagram, off until you turn it on, and it reads only from the data export you import — the messages are read on this Mac and never leave it. Not their follows' posts, not anyone's media — just a gist of the conversations.

0.2.352026-07-17

• The Instagram section reads clearly now. Interests are grouped into a clean, scannable list — each theme with the accounts under it — instead of a dense paragraph that could occasionally garble a word. A followed account worth knowing is still called out plainly at the top, and the tie-in to the rest of the brief now reads as one clear line.

0.2.342026-07-17

• Fix: connecting Instagram now sticks. After you signed in, the button could stay on "Connecting…" or fall back to "Connect Instagram account" without registering that you'd connected. Porchlight now confirms the connection by actually reading the follows list, and recognizes an existing sign-in without reopening the window.

0.2.332026-07-17

• Instagram: connect once, no more manual exports. In Settings → Instagram you can now Connect Instagram account — sign in once (we never see the password) and every brief keeps the follows list current on its own. It reads only who your child follows, and it reads the complete list — including accounts Instagram's own screen can tuck out of view. Prefer not to connect? Importing an export still works.
• The Instagram read is now genuinely useful. Instead of a vague line, it groups interests by theme with the actual accounts, flags a followed account worth knowing every brief (not just the week it's added), and connects the dots to the rest of the brief — like an interest in space also showing up in their browsing.
• The Pulse score now shows it's out of 100 — so a number like 58 reads clearly against the Bright-to-Check-in scale.
• Fix: the experimental WhatsApp brief no longer garbles dates (a stray "someone" where a month should be).

0.2.322026-07-17

• Experimental Instagram — sharper themes, and flags you can trust. When your child follows someone new, Porchlight now looks up what that account publicly is — so it groups their interests more accurately and flags a new follow worth a look by what it actually is, not just how its name reads. It checks only public profile info and never signs in as your child, so it can't affect their account. The write-up is also more careful now: it won't reassure you about an account it can't actually verify.

0.2.312026-07-17

• Experimental: Instagram. A new section shows the interests behind who your child follows — grouped by theme, from Instagram's own data export that you import on this Mac. Not their posts or messages, and it flags followed accounts worth a look. Turn it on in Settings → Instagram, then import the export Instagram gives you.

0.2.302026-07-17

• Experimental WhatsApp: a short, concrete read per conversation — a one-line gist for each of the busiest chats, instead of one high-level paragraph. And a fix: the brief will never mention a name that wasn't actually in your child's chats.

0.2.292026-07-17

• The experimental WhatsApp section is now a short, curated read instead of a long one. It skips small talk and business/notification chats, leads with the one or two things actually worth knowing, and keeps the same safety flags. Less noise, more signal.

0.2.282026-07-17

• Copy and paste now work in the Google sign-in window. When you connect your child's Google account, you can paste your password — for example from your password manager — instead of retyping it, and the usual keyboard shortcuts (cut, copy, paste, select all) work there now.
• Early experiment — WhatsApp. You can now try adding WhatsApp to the daily brief from Settings. It reads WhatsApp Desktop right on your Mac, the same way Messages is read, with the same safety flags — WhatsApp Desktop must be installed and your child's account linked to it. It's brand new and still being tested, so it stays off until you switch it on, and it may miss messages or pause itself.

0.2.272026-07-16

• The Web Browsing section of your daily brief now includes Chrome. With your child's Google account connected and Chrome sync on, pages they visit in Chrome — on any of their devices — join the story alongside Safari. Same promise as always: themes and sites only, never a list of pages.

0.2.262026-07-16

• Behind-the-scenes maintenance. Nothing about your daily brief has changed.

0.2.252026-07-16

• Fixed conversations sometimes showing the wrong name for a contact. When your address book has more than one card for the same number — say an old card named "Mom" next to the real one — the brief now picks the name your contacts actually agree on, preferring the properly filed full name.

0.2.242026-07-16

• Apple Music now asks for access the moment you turn it on — flip the switch in Settings and macOS shows its permission dialog right away. (In 0.2.23 the switch existed but the permission could never appear — sorry about that.)
• One less permission at setup — Screen Recording is no longer requested. Reading text inside shared photos never needed it.
• We now ask only for your child's birth month and year — never the full birthday. It keeps the brief tuned to their age, and the exact day was never needed.
• Start your free trial right from setup — choose "Email it to me" and begin your 10-day trial without hunting for the website. Your family's first brief is free to preview on your Mac; daily briefs come with the trial.
• The digest-time picker now shows your Mac's time zone, so there's no guessing when the brief will arrive.
• Households now allow up to 6 children and 6 email recipients — sensible room for any family.

0.2.232026-07-16

• Your daily brief can now include your child's music listening from Apple Music — the mood it suggests and a song on repeat, read on this Mac. Never a full tracklist.
• Health Insights now connect the dots — like a short night lining up with late-night activity — instead of only listing the numbers.
• Links shared in messages now show what they were — an Instagram reel's title, an article's headline — read from what your Mac already saved. Nothing is fetched from the internet.
• Clearer safety flags: each one now shows the exact word that triggered it, and simply mentioning an app like WhatsApp no longer flags — only a real "add me on…" does.
• Fixed a setup screen that could show the wrong digest time.

0.2.222026-07-16

• New Web Browsing in the brief: your child's Safari history across their devices (via iCloud), summarized as themes and top sites — never a list of pages.
• Preview-mode briefs now let you know when they're ready, and a new Open latest brief menu item opens the newest one in a click.

0.2.212026-07-15

• Redesigned the digest-time picker — set any time in a click or two.
• New Order of the brief setting to arrange the sections the way you like.
• You can now sign in and activate with a mobile number, not just email.
• A security fix to the parent-PIN screen.

0.2.202026-07-15

• The brief now sets aside automated texts — verification codes, delivery and promo messages — so you only see real conversations.
• New Contacts moved below the conversations, where it reads more calmly.

0.2.192026-07-13

• The brief can now understand shared photos (described on this Mac, never uploaded).
• Added a Run setup again walkthrough for revisiting any step.

0.2.182026-07-13

• Health & sleep from your child's iPhone can now join the daily brief.

0.2.172026-07-13

• A batch of polish to the daily brief's wording and layout.

0.2.162026-07-13

• Added YouTube & Google searches as a source, through your connected Google account.