Ascendara 12: new themes, Theme Studio and a smoother app

Ascendara 12 is about how the app looks and feels. It adds six new themes and a Theme Studio for making your own. The app now opens and moves between pages more smoothly, and you can change how the menu bar looks. Downloads also got more reliable: they retry more problems on their own and explain the ones they can't fix in plain words.

Six new themes

There are three new light themes, Coral, Lagoon and Royal Pearl, and three new dark ones, Aurora, Crimson and Royal Night. Each one changes every part of the app, from the sidebar and buttons to the startup screen.

The older themes are still there. You'll find them under Classics in the theme picker, for anyone who still likes them. Setting up Ascendara for the first time now shows a live preview of the app as you try each theme.

Theme Studio

Theme Studio is a new page for building your own theme, one color at a time. Colors are grouped by where they're used: the core colors, cards and menus, the dock, status messages, the startup screen and the download and achievement pop-ups that appear outside the app. A preview shows each change as you make it.

Studio also checks readability. It scores how well your text stands out from what's behind it, and marks colors that are hard to read. If you'd rather not start from nothing, the Community tab lets you load a theme someone else made and edit it before saving.

• Edit every color, grouped by where it appears in the app
• A live preview of every change
• Readability scores for text, card text, muted text and button text
• Start from a community theme and make it your own
• Ascendara asks before you leave with unsaved changes

A smoother app

Ascendara now stays on its startup screen until your home page and its images are ready. Then the logo flies up into the menu bar and the dock slides into place. Pages fade from one to the next, and going back to Home is instant. If you've turned off smooth transitions, the startup animation is skipped too.

Ascend shows placeholders shaped like each section while it loads, and it loads your overview ahead of time so it's ready sooner. Big Picture mode also got transitions between pages, game details and selections.

The menu bar has two new options. You can choose icons or traffic lights for the minimize, fullscreen and close buttons, and put the logo on the left or the right.

Downloads that fix themselves

When unpacking a game fails, Ascendara now tries again by itself. If part of the download arrived damaged, it downloads that part again. If it still can't finish, it tells you why in plain words. It might be damaged files, a full drive, a password-locked archive or another program blocking the files, and it tells you what to do next. When antivirus blocks a game, Ascendara explains that it's usually a false positive.

• Keep a game even when some of its files fail verification, for example when the game's own updater replaced them
• Your installed version stays in place until a game update has been verified
• Finished downloads are recovered when unpacking is retried
• Torrents of portable releases now install correctly
• qBittorrent 5.1 and newer work again
• Ascendara no longer picks an installer or redist file as the game's executable
• Temp cleaners can no longer delete files Ascendara needs during a download

Updates and Public Testing

Public Testing is now its own release instead of following every development build. It moves forward only when a build is ready for more people to try. Experimental now gets the newest testing builds. The App Branch picker in Settings was redesigned too, so you can see which branch you're on and how stable each one is before you switch.

When an update arrives, the changelog now opens with a release banner, and you can filter changes by category. Ascendara also won't get stuck on the updating screen anymore.

Also in 12.0

• A cleaner, flatter layout for Settings
• Find a game's save folder by its Steam App ID, to help the achievement watcher
• Cloud saves can't be restored on a different operating system, so Windows saves won't overwrite a Mac or Linux game
• Cloud save restores use the backup's own game title, so they land in the right place
• Online-Fix removal is checked in each download folder, not only when you change folders
• Issue and game reports now ask for a few sentences, so we have enough detail to fix the problem
• Games return to the front faster after you close them

The full list of changes is in the 12.0.0 changelog.