Aria 0.1.4
A lighter Aria that stops drawing when nobody can see it, opt-in crash reports you can read before they're sent, and a heads-up when a permission gets switched off.
Release, 2 min read
Aria lives in your notch all day, so it has to be cheap when you're not looking at it. That's what this release is about.
I started by measuring. A new script launches a copy of Aria with throwaway data, lets it settle, and fails if idle CPU or memory goes over budget. Idle Aria on my M4 sits at about 0.02% of one core and about 135 MB of memory. That's one Mac on a busy day, so read it as a ballpark, but it's now a gate every release has to pass.
The orb was the obvious cost. It now draws at most 30 frames a second when you aren't hovering or talking to it, and stops completely while the display sleeps, the screen is locked or its window is hidden. When you come back it picks up without a jump. If you turned on the music-reactive orb, it used to refresh a chunk of the app on every audio frame; now it only reads the music level when it actually draws. Same Mac, release build against release build, music playing: about 13% of one core in 0.1.3, about 10.5% now. Better, not done. That mode is still the one heavy thing in Aria, and it's next.
Crash reports are new and off by default. If you turn them on, the next launch after a crash sends one small report: the version, your macOS version, the crash type and where in the code it happened. No names, paths, prompts or anything you typed. Settings shows the exact bytes before anything goes out, and turning it off deletes whatever is waiting. The full list is on the what Aria reads page.
Aria also checks its macOS permissions when it starts. If you switched one off, say Accessibility after a macOS update, the main window tells you which one, what stops working without it, and opens the right pane in System Settings.
Smaller things: Settings shows your plan in one line (during the beta every feature is open), connecting Claude Code or Codex during setup now shows the exact config change first, a failed workspace squash merge restores only the files it touched, and the privacy text in Settings is short with the detail one click away.
Downloads are still invite-only while I finish testing on a second Mac. Known problems are on the known issues page.