Landing 1.6: Widgets, Live Activities, and a New Design Language

Six months and hundreds of thousands of downloads later, we’re shipping the most ambitious Landing update yet. Version 1.6 introduces widgets, live activities, and a completely refreshed design language — all while staying true to the lightweight, native experience you love.

Expandable Widgets

The island was always designed to surface quick glances of information. But sometimes you need a bit more. With Landing 1.6, hover over the island to expand it into a widget panel.

Widgets available at launch include:

• Calendar — Your next three events at a glance. Click to open the event in Calendar or your preferred app.
• Weather — Current conditions, hourly forecast, and precipitation alerts pulled from Apple Weather.
• System Monitor — CPU, memory, and battery stats in a compact, beautiful layout.
• Quick Notes — Jot down a thought without leaving your current app. Notes sync via iCloud.

Third-party developers can build their own widgets using our open SDK. Documentation is available on our GitHub.

Live Activities

Inspired by iPhone’s Live Activities, Landing 1.6 can track long-running tasks directly in the island:

• Package tracking — See delivery status updates in real time from supported carriers.
• Sports scores — Follow live games with score updates that animate into the island.
• Build status — Connect your CI/CD pipeline and watch builds progress from green to red (hopefully green).
• Ride sharing — Track your Uber or Lyft arrival without switching apps.

Live Activities use a publish-subscribe model. Apps push updates through our local IPC channel — no network overhead, no cloud dependency.

Refined Design Language

We’ve refined every surface in Landing 1.6:

• New spring animations — Reworked physics for more natural, responsive motion. The island now breathes.
• Adaptive blur — The background blur dynamically adjusts based on the content behind the island, ensuring legibility in any context.
• Typography refresh — We’ve adopted SF Pro across the board for tighter alignment with macOS system UI.
• Dark mode improvements — Better contrast ratios and more nuanced color mapping in dark environments.

Performance Improvements

Despite adding widgets and live activities, Landing 1.6 is actually faster than 1.0:

Metric	v1.0	v1.6
Cold launch	280ms	180ms
Memory usage	28MB	22MB
CPU (idle)	0.4%	0.2%
Animation frame rate	60fps	120fps

We achieved this through aggressive use of Metal for rendering, lazy loading of widget content, and moving all animation calculations off the main thread.

What’s Next

We’re already working on Landing 2.0, which will introduce customizable island layouts, Shortcuts integration, and inter-app communication. If you have ideas for what you’d like to see, reach out — we read every piece of feedback.

Update to Landing 1.6 today from the app or download it fresh from our website.