Teaching a Mac to keep a widget

On Windows, a click-through, always-on-top strip is a known recipe. On a Mac it is a negotiation. The goal for this stretch was to give the widget a Mac side without writing a native plugin — and to do it for a tester who had never opened the project.

A guide for someone who has never seen it

Before any Mac fix, there was a build-and-test guide written for exactly that person. Each round afterwards, the guide was updated to ask about the new window, not just the old bugs — "point the Mac guide at a retest rather than a first run". The README arrived the same day, in Turkish and English.

Five rounds

The commits from 12 to 14 September are a conversation:

• Make the Mac keys follow the keyboard layout. Stop the Headquarters opening empty, and fetch it across Spaces.
• Let the strip settle among desktop widgets and on the Dock. Put it on a frosted, rounded plate.
• Let the Mac widget take the shape of the desktop widgets around it — then scale the whole fight to fit whatever shape that is, with the HUD kept at strip size inside a zoomed widget.
• Act on the fifth round of feedback: plate-only backdrop, shorter strip, small widgets under windows.
• Bring the medium widget back, make the small one easy to hold, and turn the boar around.

That last one is real: a sprite was facing the wrong way, and it took a tester to notice.

Meanwhile, content

The same days added four content packs — a race, two classes and five weapons each — with ownership read from Steam and the Steam inventory mirrored into the bag. PixelLab generated the pack heroes, their weapon icons and a portrait for every hero. The party tab became a character sheet with drag-to-reorder formation, and clicking a hero on the strip opens a window about them right there.

Windows got its own fix in return: the strip now stays up behind maximised windows and other screens' fullscreen apps.