What's changed in Tap Zap, version by version. MacOS and Windows ship independently — each platform tracks its own version number and release cadence.
Currently shipping: MacOS v2.36 (Beta) · Windows v2.34
v0.1.0
Pop!_OS / COSMICOctober 17, 2026Experimental
A COSMIC Wayland prototype for Pop!_OS.
Free amd64 DEB. Pop!_OS 24.04 package, checksums and complete matching source. Requires the separate TAP ZAP COSMIC (prototype) login session; ordinary COSMIC is retained.
VM-tested. Installation, login/autostart, controls, OFF/Quit restoration, two virtual displays and both s2idle and S3/deep suspend/resume passed in the Pop!_OS VM. A later lab QEMU RTC fix passed with unchanged app binaries.
Free, source-matched build. Native x86_64 binaries, tray helper, exact source, licenses and checksums for Linux Mint 22.3 Cinnamon on X11.
Built and tested in Mint. The native build, 35 source tests, virtual-display warmth, red, dimming and normal OFF restoration passed inside a Mint virtual machine. A Cinnamon popover reopening crash was fixed.
Testing limits. Native Mint physical-display testing is still pending. PWM, HDR, suspend and hotplug support are not established; existing X11 recovery issues remain open.
Refined preset controls. Warmth and brightness fields now match TAP ZAP's dark styling, with clear values and red arrows.
Cleaner clicks. Opening a preset or time no longer leaves a rectangular outline behind. Keyboard navigation keeps its visible focus.
Cleaner display scaling. Rounded fields render correctly at higher Windows display scaling.
v2.33
WindowsOctober 14, 2026
Your warmth and brightness, ready on time.
Your own scheduled presets. Choose warmth and optional brightness for Day, Evening and Night in Settings. Keep current brightness if you prefer. Save your times and preset values together.
Ready by your chosen times. Smooth fades begin up to an hour early and turn ZAP on automatically. Closely spaced presets fade one after another.
Independent manual controls. Adjust warmth without stopping scheduled brightness, or brightness without stopping warmth. Turning ZAP off waits for the next scheduled window.
Smoother recovery. Delayed timers recover from the last applied values. Existing times and warmth are kept, with scheduled brightness set to Keep current.
Known limits. The Windows installer remains unsigned. Browser or SmartScreen warnings may appear; existing display and driver limitations still apply.
v2.36
MacOSOctober 13, 2026
Your warmth and brightness, ready on time.
Custom scheduled warmth and brightness. Choose both for Day, Evening and Night in Settings, or keep your current brightness. Save your times and preset values together.
Gradual changes before your chosen times. Fades begin up to an hour early so each preset is ready on time. ZAP turns on automatically when a scheduled fade begins.
Smoother recovery and manual control. Delayed timers recover from the last applied values. Manual warmth and brightness changes stay independent, and stale saved waits cannot turn ZAP on early.
v2.35
MacOSOctober 7, 2026
Clearer color conflict warnings.
Night Shift and True Tone alerts. On supported Macs, Tap Zap warns when either feature is on alongside ZAP. Open Display Settings directly from the alert.
Conflicts stay visible. A red warning bar inside the app explains what to turn off or quit. Dismissing the alert keeps the bar visible until the conflict is gone.
Brightness layout fixed. The brightness slider stays inside its track when a warning appears, including when several conflicts are active.
v2.34
MacOSOctober 6, 2026
Your warmth, on time.
Auto Schedule in Settings. Choose Day, Evening, or Night and set a daily start time for each. ZAP turns on at those times and fades smoothly to the chosen warmth over 60 seconds.
Times that are easier to set. Scroll or drag the recessed time dials, or click a number to type. Click outside the picker to close it. Save Times keeps your changes; the schedule switch takes effect immediately.
Manual control stays simple. Turning ZAP off keeps it off until the next scheduled start. Turning Auto Schedule off keeps your saved times and leaves your current warmth in place.
Find Tap Zap more easily. Settings now includes Show Icon in Dock. Opening Tap Zap again brings its panel back without starting another copy.
Automatic conflict warnings. Tap Zap warns when supported similar apps such as f.lux or Iris are running.
v2.32
WindowsOctober 8, 2026
Your daily warmth, on schedule.
Auto Schedule in Settings. Choose Day, Evening and Night start times. Tap Zap turns ZAP on at each saved start and fades smoothly to the preset over 60 seconds. Keep Tap Zap running in the system tray.
Easy time controls. Scroll or drag the recessed time dials, or click a number to type. Schedule times save together, with clear feedback for conflicting times.
Automatic conflict warnings. Tap Zap warns when supported similar apps, including f.lux and Iris, are running.
A clearer interface. Consistent Settings and Auto Schedule headers, refined preset spacing and corners, and the updated ZAP label styling.
Find the app more easily. Choose Show Icon in Taskbar in Settings. Opening Tap Zap again brings back the existing panel.
Known limits. The Windows installer remains unsigned. Browser or SmartScreen warnings may appear; physical display and driver limitations from v2.31 still apply.
v2.31
WindowsOctober 3, 2026
Faster PWM Safe controls and a safer upgrade.
More responsive controls with PWM Safe on. Monitor discovery, brightness checks, and restoration now run on a background worker instead of pausing the Tap Zap window. Customers with built-in and external displays reported much faster panel and slider response; this is not a claim of faster game performance.
Brightness protection and restoration. Supported displays locked at 100% are checked every two seconds. Tap Zap retains a saved brightness value if a restore fails or a display disappears, then retries when it returns.
Clearer recovery on older graphics drivers. Legacy Mode guidance now distinguishes a change that needs a restart from a setting Windows already had, and offers a modern-mode fallback when a driver still rejects the color change.
Safer upgrades. Setup asks you to quit a running Tap Zap before replacing it, allowing its normal brightness and cursor restoration path to run.
Known limits. The Windows installer is unsigned, and browser or SmartScreen warnings may appear. The filter does not cover the password or UAC secure screens. External DDC/CI restoration and the new cursor and post-unlock behavior are still being checked across hardware.
v2.25
MacOSJune 13, 2026
Stability hardening and one-tap support diagnostics.
New COPY FEEDBACK FOR SUPPORT button in Settings — one tap copies an email-ready diagnostics bundle (your version, OS, displays, and filter state) to paste into a reply to support. Your license key is never included.
License activation is now double-tap-safe — a quick double-click on Activate can no longer use up an extra device activation.
Hardened quitting and display handling — quitting, or sleeping, switching, or unplugging a display mid-adjustment, can no longer leave the color filter in an inconsistent state.
v2.23
WindowsJune 13, 2026
Major fix for older graphics drivers, plus a one-click unlock when Windows blocks colors.
Fixed: sliders that did nothing. On some older or locked-down graphics drivers, WARMTH/BRIGHTNESS and the EVENING/NIGHT presets had no effect while DAY still worked — Windows was silently rejecting the stronger color changes. Tap Zap now detects this and offers a one-click fix that unlocks the full color range (it asks you to restart Windows afterward).
Fixed: FLICKER wouldn't stay on. PWM-Safe Mode could switch itself off after a restart on slower machines. Startup now waits for the display to wake and re-applies the 100% brightness lock instead of giving up.
Fixed: app invisible at startup. The tray icon could fail to appear, and "start at login" could point at a stale location. The icon now re-adds itself reliably, and the startup entry repairs its own path on every launch.
Better support diagnostics: the COPY FEEDBACK bundle now reports your graphics adapter, color-range state, and a saved event log, so startup issues can be diagnosed from a single paste.
Clearer FLICKER labeling on laptops that have only a built-in screen.
v2.22
WindowsMay 29, 2026
The text cursor stays visible on white backgrounds.
Fixed: the text (I-beam) cursor could vanish on white backgrounds — in Notepad, text boxes, and forum fields — because the warmth tint turned it red on an already-red background.
Inverting cursors like the I-beam are now left in their native form so they stay visible everywhere; colored cursors (arrow, hand, resize handles) are still tinted as before. Applies to both Legacy and Magnification color modes.
v2.24
MacOSMay 14, 2026
License-paste fixes and purchase-flow polish.
Fixed: valid license keys could be rejected. The license field was auto-capitalizing what you typed, but keys are case-sensitive — so real keys came back as invalid. It now preserves your key exactly and quietly strips any stray spaces or line breaks from a sloppy paste.
Clearer error when a key doesn't validate — "Check for typos or extra spaces" instead of a flat "invalid."
Earlier in the cycle: a cleaner, collapsed PWM-safe flicker warning, a hover tooltip, and several edge-case stability fixes.
Post-purchase download page restyled to match the rest of the site.
PWM-Safe Mode pins hardware brightness to 100% on built-in MacBook panels and supported Apple displays, so software dimming never has to fight backlight flicker.
Auto-Brightness (Ambient Light Compensation) is paused while Tap Zap is running so the system stops fighting your slider — fully restored on quit.
Auto-show the popover on first launch so the menu bar icon is easy to find — silent on every launch after.
Warmth slider now glides smoothly to the new value when you tap a preset, instead of snapping.
Preset buttons no longer flash mid-drag — they only highlight once you release on a matching value.
License activation screen redesigned: bigger logo, real focus ring on the input, shake on error, staggered entrance, ZAP-style activate button.
Fixed: flicker warning silently disappeared on MacOS Tahoe (26.2) because the legacy IOKit display path stopped enumerating — now uses a Tahoe fallback.
Fixed: prior brightness wasn't always restored correctly when toggling PWM-Safe Mode on built-in panels.
v2.22
MacOSApril 15, 2026
A more natural warmth curve.
Replaced the old linear warmth math with a chromaticity-based CCT → xy → RGB mapping for a more natural mid-range progression.
Added a smooth red tail from 2000K down to pure red, removing the abrupt drop at the bottom of the warmth slider.
DAY, EVENING, and NIGHT presets now snap to exact Kelvin points on the curve: 4000K, 2700K, and 0K (pure red).
Preset highlights now use a tolerance check so the correct button lights up reliably on the new curve.
Honest flicker warnings: separate mild and severe states, with the severe warning making it explicit when software dimming cannot help (built-in panel below 80%).
v2.21
WindowsMay 27, 2026
One-tap support diagnostics.
New COPY FEEDBACK FOR SUPPORT button at the bottom of Settings — copies a single email-ready bundle to your clipboard with your version, OS, displays, filter state, and the recent event log. Paste it into a reply to [email protected] and we'll have everything we need to help.
Your license key is never included in the bundle. The bundle says so explicitly.
The subject line bakes in your platform + version + a stable opaque device tag, so we can tell two reports from the same machine apart without ever seeing your machine UUID.
Event log now captures in release builds (previously debug-only) — 500-entry ring covering session events.
v2.20
WindowsMay 17, 2026
Polished license entry screen.
Cleaner license input: smaller, better-proportioned text field with native edit-control margins instead of custom padding math — no more vertical clipping at any DPI.
Cue banner simplified to LICENSE KEY so the input reads as a labelled field rather than a sentence prompt.
Activation input border re-aligned with the surrounding panel for a tighter visual rhythm.
v2.19
WindowsApril – May 2026
PWM-Safe Mode arrives on Windows. Cursor tint. Brightness floor.
PWM-Safe Mode pins hardware brightness to 100% via WMI on built-in laptop panels and DDC/CI on supported external monitors — auto-reverts cleanly if the lock can't be verified.
Multi-monitor support: every DDC/CI-controllable external is locked together. Externals that don't expose DDC/CI keep the existing manual "set to 100%" guidance.
Cursor tint restored: common system cursors now inherit the active warmth and brightness filter instead of staying bright white on a separate layer.
Brightness slider now stops at 10% by default. New ALLOW EXTREME DIM setting unlocks dimming below the floor when you really want it.
Matched the warmth curve to MacOS — same chromaticity-based mid-range and same smooth red tail. Both Magnification and Legacy paths use the new curve.
Per-monitor DPI awareness so the popup window stays crisp on 4K and high-DPI laptops.
Auto-show the popup on first launch so the tray icon is easy to find — silent on every launch after.
Honest flicker-warning copy aligned with MacOS — clearer language about what software dimming can and cannot do.
v2.18
WindowsApril 14, 2026
Brutalist UI overhaul.
Background, header, and footer panels rebuilt to match the MacOS design system — same #0D0D0D deep black, same #1A1A1A panel grey, same red.
New fader caps with the same 4-stop gradient as MacOS, plus pill-style value badges in Consolas Bold (red border for warmth, grey for brightness).
Settings screen retitled and rebuilt with proper vertical alignment on every row.
Center divider, fader track spacing, and gear icon position fine-tuned for clean rendering on dark backgrounds.
Drop-shadow gap on the right and bottom edges of the popup eliminated.
v2.15
Windows2026
Native rewrite. Around 200 KB. Zero runtime dependencies.
Complete rewrite from WPF / .NET 8 to native C++ on the Win32 API — no .NET runtime, no Electron, no install footprint.
Color filter now runs on the Magnification API (MagSetFullscreenColorEffect) for system-wide coverage.
Custom GDI drawing for the brutalist UI: studio faders, gradient caps, tick marks, the lot.
System tray integration with a popup window that anchors near the tray.
Settings persist to %APPDATA%\TapZap2\ as a plain INI file.
Sleep / wake handled via WM_POWERBROADCAST, single-instance enforcement via global mutex.
Fixed: 4K and high-DPI scaling issues from the .NET build.
v2.14
MacOS2026
Slider stability fixes.
Fixed: slider rubber-banding bug on MacOS 12 Monterey.
Replaced the SwiftUI fader implementation with a pure NSView + CALayer path for tighter control.
Drag tracking now uses screen coordinates for stable behavior across multi-monitor setups.
v2.13
MacOS2026
Brutalist redesign.
Bold UI redesign — the brutalist black / red / white aesthetic the app ships with today.
Red status indicator unified across the popover.
Improved fader precision at the very top and bottom of the slider range.