Read it Big updates itself: when a new build is out, the app offers it to you. Every build that reached users is listed here, newest first, in plain language. You can check which one you are running from About Read it Big in the menu bar icon.
Version 1.0 Build 172 5 September 2026
Two full reviews of the code, line by line, looking for what would go wrong on your Mac rather than on mine. Fifteen findings closed, three of them serious enough that they could each have cost someone their licence or their work.
- A bad answer from the licence server can no longer switch everyone off at once. Once a week the app quietly re-checked your purchase, and if the answer came back “this key is not valid” it removed your licence on the spot. That answer arrives for a genuinely bad key, but also for reasons that have nothing to do with you: the product being edited on the store, an identifier changing, an outage at their end. Any of those would have looked identical for every customer at the same time, and within a week every paying user would have found themselves back on the free version, silently. The app now removes a licence only for a refund or a chargeback, which are the only answers that really say the purchase is over. “Not valid” has to repeat on three different days before it is believed.
- Opened from the disk image, the app now says so. The disk image has always had the shortcut to Applications, but nothing stopped you from double-clicking the app inside it, or dragging it to Downloads. Everything that followed was silent: the screen and accessibility permissions were granted to a location that disappears when the disk is ejected, so a later reinstall looked broken and needed them all over again; opening at login pointed at nothing; and updates cannot install onto a read-only disk, so the first one would have failed. The app now notices at launch and offers to move itself to Applications and reopen from there, before asking for any permission.
- A stay zoom no longer disappears the moment you click into it. The whole promise of the locked lens is that you click what you see. But if the window belonged to an app that was not in front, that first click brought the app forward, and a safety net meant for Command-Tab read it as “you have switched away” and closed the lens. Bringing forward the window you are already magnifying is no longer treated as leaving.
- Three activations instead of two, and the panel now tells you where you stand. With two, one reinstall or one new Mac was enough to lock you out of something you had paid for. The licence panel no longer asks for a key you have already given: it shows the key, who it is registered to, and how many activations you have used out of three. Attempts made after the limit no longer count against you either, which they used to, even when refused.
- Read it Big tells you when it crashed, instead of waiting to be asked. An app that lives in the menu bar and quits unexpectedly leaves nothing behind: the icon is simply gone. If that happens, the next launch now says so and offers to prepare an email with the log and the macOS report, which you can read before sending. There is also a Report a Problem entry in the menu, and the message carries your app version, macOS version and chip.
- Three crashes that had not happened yet. Unplugging an external monitor with the laptop closed leaves the Mac without any screen for a fraction of a second, and the lens does sixty checks a second while a zoom is open: it would have crashed there. A damaged shortcut setting would have stopped the app from starting at all, on every launch, with no way out. And a debug window with the live log, complete with window titles, could be opened in the shipping app by a key combination people plausibly press in other programs. All three are gone.
- Window titles are no longer written to the log. The title of a window says more than it needs to: the subject of an email, the name of a document, the bank account open at the time. The log now records the app and a window number, and nothing else. The log is what the feedback button sends, so this matters.
- The zoom starts faster. Every single magnification was asking the system for the full list of windows, twice, just to decide whether the little panel in the corner should be light or dark. On a slower Mac that question alone cost up to two tenths of a second, and it had already been removed from the other path for exactly that reason.
- Smaller things: Escape from a keyboard-triggered lens no longer also reaches the app underneath, where it would cancel a dialog or drop you out of full screen; the activation count refreshes instead of freezing at whatever it read the first time; Preferences now open with a line saying the app is running and where to find it; and the note for Intel Macs, which had been switched off by accident, is back.
Version 1.0 Build 148 15 August 2026
You can paste your licence key, and you can quit the app even when its icon is nowhere to be seen.
- Command-V works. It did not, in any text field in the app, including the one where you type your licence key. Read it Big lives in the menu bar and has no menu of its own, and on macOS the editing shortcuts come from that menu: without it, there was no paste. You receive your key by email, so the only alternative was typing thirty-five characters by hand. Cut, copy, select all and right-click all work now too.
- A way out when the menu bar icon is hidden. Between menu bar managers, a crowded menu bar and the notch, the icon can simply not be there, and then a menu bar app is indistinguishable from one that never started. Double-clicking the app while it is already running now opens Preferences, which has a Quit Read it Big button at the bottom. Command-Q works from any of the app’s windows.
Version 1.0 Build 142 5 August 2026
The zoom opens about four times faster, and a crash that would have landed at the worst possible moment.
- The zoom no longer stops to ask a question before it starts. The macOS 14 fix in build 133 worked, but it made the app request the list of open windows at the exact moment you began a zoom. That request had already been identified months ago as a visible delay and moved out of the way; it came back in unnoticed. Worse, the app asked only for windows currently on screen, and the lens is hidden except during a zoom, so it was almost never found. The app then fell back to a safe but expensive route: exclude the whole application from the capture. On the machine where this was measured, that route cost half a second to start and was taken on two zooms out of three. The lens is now identified once at launch, in the background, and nothing is asked while you zoom. Same measurements after the change: the magnified image appears in 36 to 66 milliseconds instead of 140 to 230, and the slow route was not taken once in twelve attempts.
- On macOS 14, Read it Big can magnify its own windows again. A side effect of that fallback: excluding the whole application also excluded its own Preferences and the demo inside the setup screens, which came out blank. That is the first thing a new user tries.
- A crash at the moment the app celebrates. The confetti window was the only window in the app missing the standard protection against being released twice, and getting the three extra trial days and then activating a licence a few seconds apart could trigger it. There is one crash report on record whose signature matches. Fixed.
- If Gumroad has an outage, your licence is no longer called invalid. The app could not tell a service failure apart from a bad key, and reported the worst of the two to someone who had paid. A failing service is now treated like a missing connection: you keep working.
- Under the hood: the keyboard shortcut is handed to the part of the app that watches for it in a form that cannot be corrupted while you change it in Preferences, and the one failure in window selection that used to be silent now says why in the log.
Version 1.0 Build 133 3 August 2026
The macOS 14 fix that the previous build got wrong, now confirmed on the machine where it actually happened.
- macOS 14: the fan of arcs is gone for real this time. Build 126 tried to fix it and could not, for a reason worth telling. The lens carried a flag meaning “do not capture me”. On macOS 14 that flag was ignored by the capture, but respected in the list of capturable windows: it removed the lens from exactly where the app had to find it in order to exclude it, and left it where it was supposed to disappear. The fix cancelled itself out. The flag is gone, the lens is now found and excluded properly, and a second safety net covers the case where it is not.
- The app now records which exclusion path it took, so if this ever comes back the log says why in one line instead of costing another round of guesswork.
Version 1.0 Build 126 2 August 2026
A serious fix for macOS 14, a licence you can actually find, and the trial extension that quietly did nothing.
- macOS 14: the lens no longer films itself. On macOS 14 the magnified area could dissolve into a fan of concentric arcs, and the zoom looked far past its limit. The app draws the lens over the screen and then captures that same area, so the lens has to be excluded from its own capture: on macOS 14 the mechanism it relied on was being ignored. Both symptoms had one cause, because in a feedback loop the magnification multiplies with every frame while the real setting stays exactly where you put it.
- You can find where to enter your licence. The menu entry now says Enter your license key rather than just License, and the last step of the setup offers the choice between the running trial and entering a key you already have. Before, the panel only showed up on its own when the trial expired, which is two weeks after the moment you needed it.
- The three extra trial days actually work. They used to be added to the date your trial began, so if you came back more than three days after it ended, clicking the button did nothing at all and quietly used up your one-time extension. They now run from the moment you ask for them, which is the whole point: this exists for people who forgot to try the app, and those people come back late.
- Asking for those days is now an explicit request rather than a silent gift, and getting them (or activating a licence) is celebrated properly, with confetti.
- Setup is clearer. The trial-or-licence step behaves like the trackpad-or-mouse one, its two sections are properly separated, and the final button confirms your choice instead of merely closing the window.
- You can tell which build you have without installing anything: the version and build now appear next to the download on the site, in the disk image name, and in the Finder’s Get Info panel.
Version 1.0 Build 106 1 August 2026
The release that fixed the free version for people without a trackpad, and stopped the keyboard shortcut from misbehaving.
- Holding the keyboard shortcut to peek is now free. It used to be switched off entirely without a licence, which meant that on a desktop Mac with no trackpad the free version did nothing at all. The line between free and full is now the feature, not the device you own.
- No more system beep when holding the shortcut. The key was slipping through to whatever app was in front, which also meant your shortcut was landing inside other programs.
- Esc closes the lens without also reaching the app underneath, where it could cancel a dialog or drop you out of full screen.
- Command-Tab now closes the magnification instead of fighting with it. Before, the app switcher itself got magnified, and then so did whatever app you picked.
- The info panel shown with a held magnification is lighter and less intrusive.
- Setup asks whether you use a trackpad or only a mouse, and the tutorial then teaches the gesture you will actually use.
- Setup is easier to read: bigger secondary text, the two permissions grouped in their own box, more space between sections.
- Setup warns you in advance about the macOS reminder that says the app accessed your screen N times, and explains that the number is simply how many times you magnified something.
- The purchase panel stays in front and returns if you trigger it again. Before it could slip behind a window, and the only symptom was a feature that looked broken.
- The purchase panel now says what you can keep doing for free, naming the exact keys configured on your Mac.
- Privacy policy rewritten line by line against what the app actually does, and third-party credits added to the About panel.
Version 1.0 Build 78 30 July 2026
Mostly about finding the app and understanding its settings.
- Launching the app when it is already running now opens Preferences. Read it Big lives only in the menu bar, so if a menu bar manager hid its icon there was previously no way back in: it looked like an app that would not start.
- Pinch behaviour became an explicit choice between a gradual dial and a fixed starting level, instead of a checkbox whose “off” state quietly meant something entirely different.
- Starting zoom moved out of the keyboard section, where it was greyed out even while it governed the trackpad, and it now shows the level actually in use. It also starts gentler, at 150%.
- Zoom levels are written plainly, so 2.5x can no longer be misread as something enormous.
Version 1.0 Build 70 21 July 2026
The first 1.0 build, with the freeze fixed and the lens made calmer to use.
- Fixed a freeze that could hang the app when the purchase prompt appeared over an active magnification. The prompt is now a normal window that never blocks the app.
- The purchase prompt no longer appears on alternate attempts only, which had made it look random.
- Panning has a tolerance band of about 100 pixels past the window edge, so reaching controls parked right at the border no longer takes surgical precision.
- Maximum zoom raised to 10x, with a note explaining that past roughly 200% the image is only enlarged, not sharper.
- The License window was redesigned: app icon, larger text, a clear call to action.
- Automatic updates fixed. Different builds were being published under the same filename, so the update check could report that an update was signed incorrectly.
Found something that does not work? The Send feedback button inside the app attaches the diagnostic log for you. A real person reads every message.