Full v4.0.0 Release Candidate release notes

Enhancements

• Automatic & manual updates through the app, no more manual downloads 🎉
• Added proper support for controlling Apple displays.
• Added option to show/hide brightness slider.
• Added option to show brightness slider for internal display and apple displays (enabled by default).
• Replication of built-in and Apple display brightness to corresponding brightness slider.
• Added suffix to similarly named displays for better differentiation.
• Option to disable slider snapping for finer control + disable slider snapping by default.
• Added option to show slider tick marks for better accuracy.
• Added option to use window focus instead of mouse to determine which display to control.
• control + command + brightness now controls external displays only (control + Brightness continues to control internal display only)
• Added separate tab for menu options.
• Added option to restore last saved values upon startup.
• Added option for audio device name matching for display volume control selection.
• Separated option to change all screens for brightness and volume.
• Added option for keyboard fine scale for brightness.
• Added option for keyboard fine scale for volume.
• Added version check upon startup for mandatory preferences reset upon downgrade or incompatible previous version + notification about this.
• Added implementation for command + f1 macOS shortcut to enable/disable mirroring.
• Added safer 'Assume last saved settings are valid' option as default instead of startup DDC read (or restore).
• Streamlined preference panes, 'Show advanced settings' now affect all tabs. This leads to a better and safer first timer experience (especially because of the influx of many new features).
• Added a Quit button to Preferences if menu is hidden (it was not passible to quit the application until this time in this mode only by re-enabling the menu).
• Lowered default first-run volume DDC default from 75% to 15% if read is not possible or disabled to prevent unexpectedly loud sound.
• Added slider skew setting on a per control basis to have the ability to manipulate DDC slider balance and OSD scale if display control is not linear.
• Added the ability to set min. and max. DDC bounds on a per display, per control basis.
• Audio device name override option for a display (manually assign a specific audio device to a display).
• Advanced setting to invert DDC control range (some displays have the scale reversed).
• Advanced setting to remap DDC control code (some displays have contrast and brightness mixed up).
• Ability to mark a DDC control as available or unavailable in advanced settings under Displays.
• Ability to automatically hide menu icon if there is no slider present in the menu.
• Option to show slider percentage for more precision.
• Option to set combined or separate OSD scale when combined hardware+software brightness is used.
• Apple like smooth brightness change (both for software, hardware, mixed and DisplayServices).
• Added support for DisplayLink, AirPlay, Sidecar, screen sharing etc. using window shades (this is an inferior technique to the existing software implementation - gamma control - but still better than nothing). Disabled for any kind of mirroring setups. ¹
• Brightness change synchronisation from Built-In and Apple displays to other displays. This makes Touch Bar, Ambient light sensor, Control Center and System Preferences induced changes affect all displays. Synchronisation uses a sophisticated indirect delta method + the user can intervene and adjust individual screen brightness at any time to easily compensate mismatching native brightness levels.
• Preferences pane tab selector has a simpler look on Catalina.
• All menu sliders are now scrollable using a magic mouse/trackpad swipes or mouse wheel.
• Added option for menu to show only items that are relevant to display which shows the menu currently.
• Added option to enable combined sliders (note: this option combined with enabled Apple/built-in display syncing and enabled 'change all' keyboard settings finally provides full synchronised control of all displays).
• Combined sliders can now display multiple displays when keyboard and brightness syncing is not enabled. ¹
• Redesigned sliders to look like Big Sur/Monterey Control Center's sliders. ¹
• Quit and Preferences... are now icons for a much cleaner look. ¹
• Added option to change additional menu options style or hide them. ¹
• Multiple displays are now in nice Big Sur styled blocks - no more ugly separators. ¹
• Added customisable gamma/ddc switchover point for combined brightness in the advanced section of Displays.
• Added comma separated list for control code override to enable edge cases like controlling Brightness and Contrast at the same time (use VCP list entry 10, 12 for that)
• Contrast can now be controlled from keyboard via control + option + command + brightness up/down.
• Custom keyboard shortcuts for brightness, contrast, volume and mute
• Added Internet Access Policy
• Added advanced option to enable zero brightness with software dimming.
• Added command + q shortcut in menu when it is in standard text mode.
• Rearranged Preferences to fit better on smaller screens in Advanced mode
• Alert when repeated interference is detected with applications.
• Added 'Avoid gamma table manipulation' option for peaceful coexistence with f.lux.

Other under the hood changes and bug fixes

• Standardised internal scale among various displays and DDC ranges for ranged controls.
• Uses the new internal scale for combined hardware-software brightness mode.
• Migrated scales to internal float representation to prevent loss of fine detail on transformations.
• Fixed double sound when muting multiple external displays at the same time.
• Fixed lack of initial volume configuration if slider is not shown in menu.
• Fixed wrong settings being applied to a display when replaced on Apple Silicon (UserDefaults preferences are now tied to specific display strings instead of CGDirectDisplayID - which is no longer semi-unique on arm64).
• A lot of refactoring, streamlining and general optimisations.

Thanks to all our translators

• Chinese - thanks to @dev-coco, @anmoliyang
• Chinese (Traditional, Taiwan) - thanks to @stiiveo, @dororojames
• Dutch - thanks to @JoniVR
• French - thanks to @the0neyouseek
• German - thanks to @jajoho, @curana
• Hungarian - thanks to @waydabber
• Italian - thanks to @picov
• Korean - thanks to @zzulu
• Turkish - thanks to @mennan, @ozkanozcan

Notes

• This is a release candidate. If you encounter any issues, you can try the last stable release v3.1.1 or last beta release v4.0.0-beta2.
• If you discover issues, make sure to report them in the linked release discussion.
• If you want to help translating, see #637
• Thanks to everyone who helps make MonitorControl better!