Everything from previous preview and beta releases plus the following:

Fixes:

• Fix Incorrect window spacing when --centericon and --buttonstyle stack are used together #578
• Fix issue where dark mode disabled buttons look clickable #579
• Fix show: and hide: code so if a blurscreen is present we manage it properly. #581

Updates:

• Updated listitem status
  • Can now specify an SF symbol with optional colour as the status. When updating the status from one SF symbol to another, the update will animate with the sf symbol content transition, e.g. going from shield.fill to shield.slash.fill the slash will animate in place. example listitem: index: 0, status: shield.fill listitem: index: 0, status: shield.slash.fill
• Inspect-mode related changes and additions from PR #582 (thanks @headmin):
  • Add inspect-mode UI additions along with requested changes to preset 1-3
  • Refactored Preset 1-2 layouts, add UI customization along with better workflow control
  • Improved detections in plist tracking, support plist checks in presets 1-3.
  • Add initial attempt on state machine patterns functionality (WIP)
  • Applied SwiftLint formatting across inspect .swift files
  • Add complementary functionality for inspect-mode based workflows

🪲 Issues, Bugs?

For any bugs, problems or questions with this beta release, please create an issue 🛠️

Everything from previous preview and beta releases plus the following:

Fixes

• Empty variables as parameters cause no window to be drawn #543
• --displaylog encoding text issue #422
• --overlayicon does not appear when using --centericon #573

Additions

• Allow listitem's to be selectable (one or many) #465
  • new argument --enablelistselect enables selection of listitems on click. selection status is sent to stdout as "<title>" : "<status"
• Buttons can now have symbols and adjustable text size
  • new arguments --button1symbol --button2symbol --infobuttonsymbol. Takes one sf symbol name as a value. Optional properties: position, size, style, color. see --help button1symbol for more info.
    • example: --button1symbol sunrise.fill,multicolour,leading
  • new argument --buttontextsize accepts a number value to set the desired text size
  • button text values can now be specified as nil to disable button text

🪲 Issues, Bugs?

For any bugs, problems or questions with this beta release, please create an issue 🛠️

This is the first proper beta release of swiftDialog 3.0.

Contains all the features and fixes of the previous preview releases as well as the following:

Fixes

• missing --loginwindow flag for root user exec
• --commandfile not being respected in 3.0 beta #568
• many, many changes to the construction kit, aka --builder mode

Additions

• Added searchable option to drop down lists
  • example:

  dialog --selecttitle "Search Me",searchable --selectvalues "Apple,Banana,Cherry,Date,Elderberry,Fig,Grape,Honeydew,Kiwi,Lemon,Mango,Nectarine,Orange,Papaya,Quince,Raspberry,Strawberry,Tangerine,Ugli Fruit,Watermelon"
  

• Added --sound to play a sound on launch. Accepts file or url
  • example dialog --sound /System/Library/Sounds/Glass.aiff
  • if you pass in a very long audio file, add the --showsoundcontrols option.
• Added animated gif support (finally)

🚚 swiftDialog documentation is moving 🚚

You can view a preview of the updated documentation at https://beta.swiftdialog.app/

Inspect Mode

--inspect-mode, which was announced at the MacSysAdmin conference has some more documentation. Available at the new documentation location here https://beta.swiftdialog.app/advanced/inspect-mode/

Builder Mode

--builder mode has been updated with some fixes for broken functionality and updates for some of the new layouts. Documentation here

🪲 Issues, Bugs?

For any bugs, problems or questions with this beta release, please create an issue 🛠️

Hej from MacSysAdmin Göteborg

New

The is preview release contains all the content from the previous v3.0 releases

Announcing --inspect-mode

swiftDialog now contains a set of preset views that monitor filesystem events and present them as information rich dialogs.

Basic docco to get you started can be found here https://github.com/swiftDialog/swiftDialog/wiki/Inspect-Mode

Links to MSA talk, additional documentation and demonstration code to come

Updates since Preview 2:

• Update --resizable behaviour #553
  • --width x --height y --resizable now works to create a resizable window at the specified dimensions (and position if --position is used)
• Fix inconsistent --title none behavior #550
• Fix vertical content placement when --message is not visible
• Fix --buttonstyle stack to fill the width of the window #554
• dialog binary compiled for universal support #552
• Increase spacing between checkbox label and checkbox
• Adjust dropdown selector to fill to space, not fit to content, when running on macOS 26
• Adjust dropdown selector width value to be consistent with other visible elements (i.e. textfield)
• Update textfield processing
  • replace methods deprecated in the macOS 15 SDK
  • overlay on live regex checking (--textfieldlivevalidation) no longer prevents selection the field on click
  • fix an issue where textfield content was not included in stdout if 'OK' was clicked before the cursor left the textfield area (possible fix for #527)

🚨 dialog binary changes

In this release the dialogcli binary is now included in the app bundle. On install a symlink is created at /usr/local/bin/dialog that points to /Library/Application/Support/Dialog/Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/dialogcli.

% ls -la $(which dialog)
lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  71 18 Sep 14:36 /usr/local/bin/dialog -> /Library/Application Support/Dialog/Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/dialogcli

These changes should not affect standard behaviour when installed using the provided pkg but you can now re-locate the Dialog.app bundle elsewhere and do the following:

• run sudo /custom/path/Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/dialogcli --link to update the /usr/local/bin/dialog symlink destination
• call .../Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/dialogcli directly
• symlink the bundled dialogcli to any location or name of your choosing

ℹ️ If your workflow currently calls .../Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/Dialog with arguments directly, please update to call dialogcli instead following this release.

Issues, Bugs?

For any bugs or problems with this preview release, please create an issue 🛠️

Fixes since Preview 1

• Handle dialog process termination (control+c, pkill etc) #545
• Fix --position x,y where x and y coordinates were swapped #546
  • Also includes fix if provided coordinates go beyond visible screen area. Dialog windows will be bounded to the display.
• Fix issue where list item icons didn't appear when configured using json #548
• Fix typo in German localisation #549
• Installer package now enforces macOS 15 minimum requirements

What's New

This preview release was built on Xcode 26 and macOS 26 RC. Please use this initial preview to validate your workflows against macOS 26 and the updated visual style.

🚨 Breaking Change 🚨

swiftDialog 3.0 supports macOS 15 and macOS 26

⚠️ macOS 14 and earlier are no longer supported. ⚠️

Support for macOS 26 visual style

This release will have macOS 26 appearance when run on macOS 26 and macOS 15 appearance on macOS 15

There is a new "squircle" icon to match the macOS 26 branding style and avoid landing in squircle gaol.

The old "Important message" boilerplate text for title and message have been removed. Leaving title or message blank will produce blank message and title. Default icon uses the built in AppIcon resource instead of an SF symbol

Changes to /usr/local/bin/dialog

/usr/local/bin/dialog is now a compiled binary written in swift. Previously this was a shell script that handeled command line processing and launching of the Dialog.app app bundle.

For this initial release this generally performs the same function as the shell script but will be expanded over time. Support for running the Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/Dialog binary directly will be removed in a future release

⚠️ Important Note: In this release, when running Dialog.app/Contents/MacOS/Dialog directly, the number and order of arguments matters. For the sake of brevity, specify flags (arguments with no parameter like --ontop) at the end of your command.

Other additions

• Add support for specifying an exact location on the screen using --position x,y #452
• Add support for actions in listitems. Actions are limited to URLOpen. #472
• Add file path option to textfield fileselect to set the initial file path. Defaults to users home directory if not used. #451
• Add support for collapsable paragraphs
• Add iconalpha as an option to listitems #508
• Add optional --loghistory for use with --displaylog #539
• Added a custom indeterminate linear progress bar (this was required as macOS 26 linear progress bar does not animate correctly)
• --image and --icon can now accept multiple values as a single comma seperated list, e.g. `--image "/path/image1.png","/path/image2.png","/path/image3.png" #536
• [insert new feature here]

Fixes

• fix cmd+Q always being honoured #519
• Enable button1 usage with stacked style and timer #520
• Fix issue where textfield input is clipped if return is hit too quickly after entering data #530
• Fixed an issue where the window position was not being correctly calculated on subsequent runs where window dimentions change between runs

Issues, Bugs?

For any bugs or problems with this preview release, please create an issue 🛠️

Fixes:

• Fixed an issue where specifying an icon from json required the icon to be in an array even if there was a single icon. fixes #493
• Notification click closes dialogs in v2.5.5 #499
• Update dialog script version message when no user logged in by @HowardGMac in #510
• Use whole path for scutil (resubmit) by @MikeRich88 in #515
• Added trailing padding to helpimage
• Adds key authorisation to sending notifications if one is required #485
• fix missing options for --textfield in help #485

Contributions:

Additional options for working with notifications

• Adds ability to set an identifier for a notification, allowing you to easily replace a notification with an updated one. Also the ability to remove a specific notification by identifier or all notifications.

Example:

dialog --notification --identifier "update.message" --title "Updates" --message "Please update by tonight."
dialog --notification --identifier "update.message" --title "Updates" --message "Please update within the next hour."
dialog --notification --identifier "update.message" --remove

Thanks to @chrisgrande

Added buttonsize as a command line and control file variable

• Support for mini, small and large button button sizes, using the built in macOS sizes. The button size will default to the current value of regular if not specified or not valid.
• Support for button size to the builder mode for testing and JSON generation.

Button style is applied to button1, button2 and the info button. It is also applied in the normal and stacked button layout.

It does not scale the help button, which is a fixed size.

Examples:

dialog --buttonsize large --commandfile /var/tmp/dialog.txt
echo "buttonsize: mini" >> /var/tmp/dialog.txt   

Thanks to @k2graham

Options to hide and show the dialog window from the command file

• Added hide: and show: commands to the list of command file commands to hide and show windows. This does not prevent window updates from occurring while a window is hidden.

Thanks to @fabienconus

What's Changed

• Update dialog script version message when no user logged in by @HowardGMac in #510
• Use whole path for scutil (resubmit) by @MikeRich88 in #515
• Added trailing padding to helpimage
• Adds key authorisation to sending notifications if one is requires #485
• fix missing options for --textfield in help #485

Adds a fix to address #499 Notification click closes dialogs in v2.5.5