Changes
- Run desktop apps on the canvas. On Linux and macOS, add a desktop app from the rail or the command palette and pick it from the list of your installed apps. It runs live inside a node: you click and type in it, and it ends when you delete the node. Browsers and Electron apps run on a profile of their own, so they start signed out and leave yours alone. On Linux the picture stays as sharp as MAO's own text at any zoom. Apps that only work on X11 do not run yet, and the node says so.
- Agents can use those apps. An agent connected to a desktop app can read its buttons and fields with mao portal snapshot, take screenshots, click, drag, scroll and type. On apps and browser pages, mao portal drag can now use another mouse button and hold keys while it moves.
- See where an agent is working. While an agent acts in a desktop app, a small paper plane in its colour, with its name, stands at the exact point of each action. It goes 10 seconds after the agent's last action, or as soon as you press in the app. The app and the agent's own screenshots never see it.
- An Orchestrator can place an app. mao portal create --app puts an app on the canvas beside the agent and connects it to that agent alone, and mao portal apps --available lists what can be placed. Only the Orchestrator that placed an app can close it. An app you placed stays yours.
- A much lighter canvas. A canvas with many nodes and busy agents now pans, drags and zooms far more smoothly, on less CPU and GPU. Terminals off screen no longer make the canvas redraw, wires and terminals cost much less to draw, and what is covered is not drawn. A very large canvas on an older Intel Mac is better but not yet fully smooth.
- macOS: what to expect. Hosting a Mac app needs Screen Recording and Accessibility, and MAO refuses input rather than pretending it worked when Accessibility is missing. After an update, macOS may ask for your Keychain password, and MAO waits until you answer. Hosting has only been run on Intel Macs so far, not on Apple Silicon.
- Tasks wait until an agent is ready. A task is pasted only when the agent is at its input. A task sent to an agent mid-turn waits for the turn to end. Otherwise the node says "task waiting" and you choose Send or Drop from its menu. The first task of each Codex session always waits for your Send, and so does every task to Gemini, OpenCode, Antigravity, a custom command or a remote terminal.
- A calmer, more consistent interface. Type sizes, corners, icon weights and key hints follow one scale across the app. Notes draw their Markdown properly, and a long note fades at its last line. Settings is one column. The command palette finds more things by name. Blocking sheets dim the canvas.
- Coming back to a canvas shows the layer you left. It used to go back to Ground.
- mao --version, and the right mao. In a MAO terminal, $MAO_CLI always runs the MAO that terminal belongs to, even when your shell finds an older mao first, and mao --version says which build answers.
Fixes
- Sheets open on the canvas on screen. Apply and Save arrangement, Undo and Redo, Changes, Git history and Open on server could act on the first canvas you opened, and the sheet only showed when you went back to it. Rename and Back up workspace now act on the workspace on screen too.
- Ctrl+K no longer crashes MAO on a canvas you switched to in the same window.
- A stamped note is its own note. A note stamped from a saved arrangement shared one file with the original, or came out empty on a layer or another canvas. An arrangement you save now keeps the note's text, and each stamp gets its own copy.
- Open tasks survive a crash. After a crash and restart, tasks could sit unsent in an agent's input box and stay marked as delivered.
- A middle-button drag that starts on a terminal pans the canvas. The press took that terminal's keyboard and stopped the pan. A terminal that already has the keyboard still pastes on a middle click.
- New skills reach your agents. A skill added in a release never arrived in a folder that already had the earlier ones. It is now added once, and one you removed stays removed.