I suspect that that really does count as v10 related: you can see that the lion’s share of the work happened in a bolus last November and December. And that there are commits about changing the specific colors of UI elements and reducing images’ size… a lot of detail that doesn’t seem like someone scratching their own itch. Almost exactly what it would look like if someone in mid-2021 aspired to release a new version of Inform at the end of April and sought out someone to update the Mac IDE in the appropriate time frame.
I knew about the end of April being Inform’s birthday and Dr. Nelson’s predilection to release Inform’s milestones then – Inform 7’s original announcement:
“The Inform design system for interactive fiction made its first appearance […] with the release of Inform 1 on 30 April 1993. Three years of rapid development followed until, with a
top-to-bottom code rewrite, the release of Inform 6 on 30 April 1996 became definitive. […] The Public Beta of Inform7 is released today.”
And in mid-March, the Linux IDE release candidate came out after a year of quiet. So at the end of March I went snooping around github regarding the other IDEs and saw this Mac IDE work and saw that the Windows IDE had also had some highly specific UI changes in November that seemed to parallel some of the Mac changes. So I knew it was coming. And it was killing me to keep my yap shut during April. I tweet about Inform 7 every weekday, fer cripes sake!