Theme Drops, and ninety-six moving finishes for your controller
The animated finishes for your controller go from thirty-eight to ninety-six, and thirty-two of them are not in the app's gallery: they arrive as Theme Drops, finishes that live on the website and land in your app through a link. The gallery itself gains twenty-six new animated finishes and thirty-five new plain colour themes, leads with the animated ones instead of burying them under a scroller, and gains a labelled Download beside Save current. A drop is saved into your own themes before it is applied, so it is editable, keepable and does not vanish if you stop paying, and any Pro licence takes one however you paid for it. This release also carries a fix worth knowing about: every animated theme shared as a code was coming back with the wrong three colours.
Highlights
- Twenty-six new animated finishes in the Themes gallery, taking it from thirty-eight to sixty-four: Rainfall, Snowfall, Sandstorm, Shallows, Meadow Wind, Marble, Figured Wood, Brushed Steel, Nacre, Craquelure, Phoenix, St Elmo's Fire, Ion Drive, Prism Cast, Sonar Sweep, Projection, Reactor Core, Hyperdrive, Deflector, Suminagashi, Kaleidoscope, Contour, Moire, Chevron Rush, Race Livery and Impact Map.
- Thirty-five new plain colour themes, taking those from twenty-six to sixty-one and weighted toward what the set was short of, which was anything that was not dark: real hardware finishes, jewel and metal, and era pieces like Vaporwave, Blueprint, Phosphor and Newsprint.
- The gallery now leads with the animated ones. They used to sit under the static presets, below the fold of a capped scroller, which is where nobody found them. That group is now labelled Static rather than Presets.
- Theme Drops: finishes that live on the website, released in seasons, and land in your app through a link. Thirty-five so far, thirty-two of them effects the app's own gallery does not offer.
- The first season, 2026-Autumn, is all thirty-five: Ironstone free to everybody and the other thirty-four for Pro.
- A drop is saved into your own themes before it is applied. It is editable like anything else you own, and it does not disappear if you stop paying.
- Any Pro licence takes a drop, whether you bought a key, Founders Lifetime or a monthly subscription. The free one does not need an account at all.
- The gallery toolbar has a labelled Download beside Save current, in place of an unlabelled icon that only appeared while you hovered a tile. It exports the design you are looking at, it is never greyed out, and the tile you have selected now keeps its actions on screen.
Fixes
- Every animated theme shared as a code arrived with the wrong three animation colours. Sixty-four of the hundred and twenty-five shipped themes were affected. A code already sitting in a chat window decodes correctly the moment you update, so nothing needs resharing.
- Only the first theme link of a session arrived. Opening a second drop from the website while you were already on the Themes page did nothing at all, with no error and nothing on screen to tell you.
- Owners with a paid licence but no monthly subscription were told they were not entitled and were refused every drop, which is most of the people paying for this product.
- The animated finish on your controller switched off and back on as you paged through the guided tour. It survived nine of the twenty-two scenes and died on the thirteen that light the pad with a spotlight.
From thirty-eight moving finishes to ninety-six
The gallery gains twenty-six animated finishes, taking the ones you can pick inside the app from thirty-eight to sixty-four. Weather and open air, with Rainfall, Snowfall, Sandstorm, Shallows and Meadow Wind. Materials, with Marble, Figured Wood, Brushed Steel, Nacre and Craquelure. Energy and science fiction, with Phoenix, St Elmo's Fire, Ion Drive, Reactor Core, Hyperdrive and Deflector. Light and signal, with Prism Cast, Sonar Sweep and Projection. Abstract, with Suminagashi, Kaleidoscope, Contour and Moire. And three for people who want the pad to look like it belongs on a grid: Chevron Rush, Race Livery and Impact Map.
Thirty-five new plain colour themes go with them, from twenty-six to sixty-one, chosen against the gap in the existing set, which skewed dark. Real hardware finishes, jewel and metal, places and moods, and era pieces like Vaporwave, Blueprint, Phosphor, Newsprint, Deco and Coyote.
The gallery now leads with the animated ones. The static presets came first and the moving finishes sat below the fold of a capped scroller, which put the newest and most persuasive half of the feature where nobody found it. The static group is still all there and unchanged, just underneath now, and it is labelled Static rather than Presets, because with the animated ones above it "Presets" no longer told you anything.
Then there are thirty-two more, and the app's gallery does not offer them. Your build knows how to draw them, and that is the point: a finish has to exist in the app before anything can hand you one. What the gallery does not carry is a way to pick one. From here on, the sixty-four in the gallery stay free and every animated effect added after them is website content.
Those thirty-two were chosen deliberately away from the space, fire and technology weighting the library had drifted into: metals, optics, growth, structural colour, earth, machine, print and mood. Eight of them respond to what you are doing rather than only running, one in each batch.
Every one of them was compiled, rendered and measured before it was allowed to ship. Compiling is not the bar, because the real failure modes here are renders black, renders flat and sits still, and all three compile perfectly. Each effect was drawn over a controller-shaped surface and measured for brightness, for how much structure it actually has, and for how much it moves, with the pass mark taken from the effects already shipping rather than from anyone's taste. All ninety-six compile, not one produces a broken pixel, and the weakest of the new set still measures ahead of the weakest thing already shipping on all three counts: 0.145 against 0.055 for brightness, 0.052 against 0.030 for structure, 0.035 against 0.010 for movement. Five came back near-still and were fixed at the source rather than by leaning on the speed slider, and the lesson was that motion is area as much as rate: speeding up a few bright points barely moved the number, while rippling the surface between them fixed it at once.
Nineteen effects that already shipped measure below that same bar, and they were left alone on purpose. Retuning a finish somebody has already chosen is a different decision from tuning one nobody has seen yet, and it is not one to make quietly inside a release about adding more.
Theme Drops
A drop is a finish that lives on the website rather than in the app. You take it there, and it opens in OmniControl through a link.
A drop carries a code, not artwork. That code names an effect your installed build already knows how to draw, and gives it colours and pacing no built-in preset uses, which is a real difference: all sixty-four of the shipped animated presets use their effect's own defaults. It also means a drop can never add a finish your app does not have, which is exactly why the thirty-two new effects had to ship inside this release before any of them could be sold.
The first season, 2026-Autumn, is thirty-five drops: Ironstone free as the taster and thirty-four for Pro. Three of them, Ironstone, Harvest Gold and Frostglass, are retunes of effects you already had. The other thirty-two are the new effects, and the website is the only place to get them.
A drop is saved into your library before it is applied. It becomes an ordinary theme of yours the moment it lands, editable and renameable like any other, which means someone who subscribes for a month and leaves keeps what they took. That is the honest reading of what they paid for.
There is no drop store inside the app and no padlocked tile, and that is on purpose. A padlock in the app advertises something you cannot then get from that screen, and the only honest next step it could offer is "go to the website", which is where the tile would have sent you anyway. One place sells them, one place delivers them.
The gate asks the right question, too: not whether you have a monthly subscription, but whether you hold a Pro licence right now. Most people paying for this product bought a licence key or Founders Lifetime and have no subscription row anywhere, so asking the narrower question locked the large majority of paying customers out of a store built for them. A locked drop's code never leaves the server either way, and a free drop needs no account at all.
The shared codes that came back with the wrong colours
If you have ever pasted an animated theme code from a friend and thought the colours looked off, you were right, and this is the release that fixes it.
The colour list inside a code is numbered from one, with zero reserved for "no colour set". Everything in the format read it that way except the animation block, which counted from zero, so every animated theme shared as a code picked up the colour one place early, and a code pointing at the last colour in its list ran off the end and quietly fell back to the effect's default.
All hundred and twenty-five shipped themes were put through encode and decode and compared field by field. Sixty-four came back wrong, which is exactly the animated ones, and the only fields that ever differed were the three animation colours. After the fix, none of them differ.
Nothing needs resharing. The codes themselves were always written correctly and only the reader was wrong, so a code already sitting in a chat window decodes properly the moment you update. Built-in presets and your own saved themes never pass through this at all, so only themes shared between people were ever affected. The one thing this cannot repair is a theme somebody imported with shifted colours and then saved as their own: those colours are baked in now, and there is no way to tell them apart from a deliberate choice.
That round trip now runs over all hundred and fifty-seven themes, the thirty-two website-only ones included. It matters most for those, because a code is their only way of reaching you and there is no gallery tile to fall back on.