A faster, steadier glass panel
Most of this release is under the glass: opening the panel is quicker and the backdrop keeps up with the window at your monitor's refresh rate instead of a fixed 60 Hz. Nothing about how nex looks or behaves has changed.
A new mark for nex
The app has a new icon. Same launcher, new face: the orange mark replaces the blue magnifier in the taskbar, the tray, the Start menu shortcut, the installer and the window.
One press, every scale
The Win key now behaves like a system key again: one press opens the panel, a second closes it, and chords stay chords. Start never opens behind the panel, Win+E opens Explorer once, and Win+Shift+S still reaches the…
The panel is glass now
The panel is no longer a page painted over a blur. It is drawn as a pane of glass: the desktop behind it bends into the rim, the edge picks up light, and the whole thing sits above a soft contact shadow.
- The backdrop bends into the edges instead of only softening, and color splits slightly at the very edge.
- Edge light sits on all four sides at rest. It leans toward the pointer only while the pointer is over the panel.
- The silhouette lives in the surface, so corners stay anti-aliased and no longer overflow at 125% scaling.
- The reveal waits for a frame at the size the panel actually has, so it never shows the previous session's rows.
- Dividers and the scrollbar reach the right edge again, after the invisible resize frame was clipping them.
- Attached-file and PC chips use the same 1px edge, 6px radius, and row inset as the rest of the panel.
Glass that is live from the first frame
A short polish pass on the glass: opening over playing video no longer holds a frozen picture, and the surface reads cleaner over bright wallpapers.
- A show pulls the newest desktop frame before revealing, instead of the poll's copy from up to a quarter second earlier.
- Lighter wash and quieter grain, so the panel reads as clean glass rather than a milky layer.
- The soft shadow under text is kept on dark backdrops and removed on light ones.
The panel is now made of glass
The first release of the native glass material. The search surface stopped imitating a blurred panel and started sampling the desktop behind it, with an opaque fallback for machines where the GPU path cannot start.
- The panel captures what is behind it and refracts that content at the rim.
- When transparency is off, or the renderer fails, the panel falls back to an opaque surface instead of a blank window.
- Panel corner radius and row radius share the same 8px geometry.
Chat UI pass
The chat surface became usable with a keyboard: hover-revealed actions, a boxed composer, and a model picker rebuilt as a real dropdown.
- Every dropdown shares one surface, hover fill, and left accent selection.
- Custom model IDs enter through a Use-query option instead of a raw input.
- Context chips match the panel's edge and radius.
Text finally renders right, and the helper grew up
A release about sharp text and reliable activation. ClearType returns where it can, the helper owns activation, and the pieces behind the hotkey stop fighting the system.
- ClearType in search, rows, hover, media, chat, and menus. Transparent glass still renders grayscale by design.
- A single activation path through the helper, with demotion to the keyboard hook and a foreground stack for restore.
- Icons that expose a tiny frame on a big canvas fall through to the dense icon instead of serving a blurry one.
- Outside clicks dismiss immediately, including with the file picker open.
