SnapDown 0.5.0

Everything in this release is the subtitle editor. Two things in it were losing work; the rest is the Cues and Style tabs growing up.

Fixed — these were losing your edits

• Cue times no longer discard their milliseconds. The list showed 1:23 and wrote back whole seconds, so nudging any cue silently rounded it and the subtitle drifted off the speech. Times now carry milliseconds, use H:MM:SS past the hour, reject unreadable input instead of treating it as zero, and refuse to let a start pass its own end.
• Escape no longer closes the whole editor from inside a text field. Abandoning one mistyped timecode used to throw away every subtitle edit in the session.
• ↑↓, ⌘Z and ⌘Y actually work. The keyboard handler was being torn down and re-added on every render, so keystrokes fell through the gap — the shortcuts had never fired, while the hint row advertised them.

New — editing, not just correcting

You could change a subtitle's words and timing, but not which subtitles exist. Now, on hover:

• Add a line the transcription missed. It takes the silence after the cue you clicked; where there is none, the cue above lends its tail. Nothing else on the track moves.
• Delete a hallucinated line.
• Merge two fragments that each flash past unreadably.
• Split a cue at the playhead — park it where the line should break. Words divide at the boundary nearest the same point, so a midpoint cut gets roughly half the words.

Cues that go past faster than they can be read are marked Too fast, with the measurement on hover.

The Cues tab

• Toolbar down from ten unlabelled icons to four, with the occasional actions in a labelled menu. Transcript stats are just printed now.
• Row heights are measured rather than guessed from character count.
• Search marks what matched instead of only filtering.
• Undo and Redo moved to the shortcut row, where they light as they fire and go dashed when there is nothing left to undo.
• Long transcripts skip the layout and paint of rows you cannot see.

The Style tab

• Neon preset — bright text ringed by a glow of its own hue, with a Glow control that only it needs.
• Preset, Font and Animation are single-line scrolling rows instead of grids of tall cells, so the whole tab fits without scrolling. Icons throughout; no emoji.
• TikTok and Reveal now show the animation they own. Selecting either left the Animation row with nothing selected, and clicking any option silently threw away the preset's defining behaviour — TikTok's yellow word-box would vanish while the preset still read as chosen.
• Every colour uses the same palette, and the text shadow has a colour of its own for the first time.
• Sliders match the export quality slider, and move in 0.1 steps instead of 0.5.
• The style panel floats on request from the Style tab itself, handing its space to the cue list — without ever squeezing the preview down to a sliver.

SnapDown 0.4.9

Decide where the subtitle style panel goes

The floating Subtitle Style panel used to appear on its own and could only be dismissed until something summoned it again. Now it is yours to place:

• A Style button in the editor header opens and closes it. It starts closed.
• The button shows up in Trim and Crop whenever the video has subtitles the export will burn in — turn subtitles off and it goes away with them.
• Drag the bottom-right grip to resize it, 240–520 wide and 200px to whatever the window can show. Your size is remembered.
• It still snaps to the nearest corner when you drag it by its handle, and it can't be dragged or resized off-screen.

Fixes

• Collapsed sidebar: the update download spinner sat off to the left instead of centred on the icon column with Collapse and Appearance.
• Subtitle panel width: resizing the window while the Subtitles tab was open could leave the Style and Cues panel stuck at its sidebar width — roughly half the space available — instead of spanning the window once it stacked under the preview. A second bug in the same place left the panel short with dead space under it at in-between window sizes.

v0.4.8 — selection duration, draggable range, inline volume

Trimming

The selection's length is shown above it, following the middle of the range as you adjust it. No more subtracting two timecodes to work out how long your clip will be.

Drag the middle to move the whole selection. Previously you could only drag the two ends, so repositioning a clip meant moving one edge, then the other, and hoping the length came out the same. Now the duration stays fixed and both ends slide together. The handles still resize as before.

Volume

The slider now expands along the control row instead of floating over the video. Same icon, same place — it just slides open next to it rather than popping up a panel to hold one control.

v0.4.7 — updates no longer restart when you use the app

Updates survive you using the app

Downloading an update and then clicking the Dock icon — or minimising and reopening — reset the progress and showed "Update available" again. A finished update lost its Restart button the same way. You had to sit and watch it.

No, that wasn't how it was meant to work. Two causes:

Focusing the app reloaded it. Clicking the Dock icon reloaded the whole page, throwing away everything on screen — including the download's progress. Bringing a window forward now just brings it forward.

And the progress couldn't survive a reload anyway. The download itself always ran safely in the background and was never actually interrupted; only the display of it was lost. The app now picks the download back up wherever it had got to, so a refresh — however it happens — no longer costs you the 180 MB.

A download that fails now clears itself properly too, instead of leaving the bar frozen at whatever percentage it stopped at.

v0.4.6 — slider design, simpler volume, dismissible panel

A better slider

Quality now uses a stepped slider — a recessed track with a marker at each position and a raised thumb that lands on them, rather than a thin line with a dot. The trim handles on the timeline take the same shape, which also makes them easier to grab.

Volume is just a volume slider

No heading, no separate mute link, no explanation. The speaker icon already says what it is.

Dragging to zero mutes, and the icon changes to show it. Double-clicking the icon mutes and unmutes, restoring the level you were at.

The subtitle style panel can be closed

It floats over the video, and styling is optional — so there's now an × to put it away. It comes back whenever the thing that summoned it happens again: switching tabs, or turning subtitles back on.

Export says Export

The button no longer changes between "Export Trim", "Export Crop" and "Export with Subtitles". It just says Export — what's being exported is shown in the options dialog, where there's room for it.

v0.4.5 — format, resolution, and precise cuts by default

Format and resolution

The export options now include:

• Resolution — Original · 1080p · 720p · 480p
• Format — Same · MP4 · MOV · MKV
• Include audio — export with or without the sound
• Burn in subtitles — when the video has them
• Quality — Fast · Balanced · Maximum

Resolution only ever scales down. Asking for 1080p on a 720p video leaves it alone rather than stretching it into a larger, blurrier file.

Cuts always land where you put them

Trims now always cut exactly where the handles are, and the "Precise cut" option is gone — it was asking you to understand keyframes just to get the cut you'd already asked for.

Previously a fast trim could only cut at certain points in the video, sometimes seconds away from where you set it. Now it re-encodes every time, which the hardware encoder makes quick enough not to notice. The trim handles also stop snapping, since there's nothing left to snap to.

Volume is for editing, audio is for exporting

The volume button is now purely a preview control — it changes what you hear while working and says so. Whether the exported file keeps its audio moved to the export options, where it belongs.

Gain and loudness controls are gone from the video editor. Those belong to the audio editor, and having them here turned a simple export into an audio workstation.

v0.4.4 — one-click export, filmstrip restored

Export is one click again

Export now exports straight away, using sensible defaults. The arrow beside it opens the options when you want to change something.

Defaults are what you'd expect without being asked:

• Subtitles included when the video has them
• Audio untouched
• Quality matching the source — nothing downgraded

Subtitles defaulting to off was the notable one: every captioned export needed a checkbox found and ticked first, and quietly produced a bare video if you missed it.

Behind the arrow: quality as a three-step slider, include or exclude subtitles, and precise cut for a plain trim. More will be added there over time.

The filmstrip is back

Removing it last release took out more than was asked for — the vertical tick marks were the noise in the timeline, not the thumbnails. The ticks stay gone (cuts still snap to valid points, it just isn't drawn) and the thumbnails and waveform are both back.

Also

The subtitle style panel no longer opens itself over the video. It appeared because subtitles are now on by default, so it now waits until you actively turn them on.

v0.4.3 — working audio controls, export dialog, cleaner timeline

The audio button actually works now

It never opened, and the cause wasn't what I'd assumed. Overlays like popovers and dialogs sat below the full-screen editor in stacking order — so anything opened from inside the editor rendered behind it. Present, correctly positioned, fully opaque, and completely invisible.

That's fixed for every menu, select and dialog in the app, not just this one.

Export options in one place

Pressing Export now opens a dialog with everything you choose at the end:

• Burn in subtitles — when the file has subtitles
• Quality — a three-step slider: Fast · Balanced · Maximum
• Precise cut — for a plain trim

These used to be scattered across the editor, each holding permanent space for a decision made once. Quality is hidden entirely when the export copies the video without re-encoding, where choosing it would change nothing.

A calmer timeline

The keyframe tick marks and thumbnail strip are gone — at this size they read as noise rather than information. Cuts still snap to valid points; that just isn't drawn any more.

The waveform stays, since it's legible and genuinely useful for finding speech.

Aspect ratio

The word "Original" is gone. The rectangle icon is that option, and it's highlighted when selected — which is what the icon sitting beside the word already meant.

v0.4.2 — filmstrip, waveform, working audio button

The audio button works now

The audio control added in 0.4.1 didn't open — it rendered and took clicks but nothing happened. Fixed, and verified with a real click this time rather than a scripted one, which is how it slipped through.

A timeline you can read

The scrubber was a blank bar. It now shows:

• Thumbnails across the track, so you can find a scene by eye instead of scrubbing blind
• A waveform along the bottom, so speech and silence are visible without playing through
• Keyframe markers, showing where a fast cut can land

All three line up exactly with the slider, so what you see above a point is what's at that point.

"Quality" now says so

The Fast / Balanced / Maximum control had no label, so it wasn't obvious what it did. It's now labelled Quality, and controls how the export is encoded:

Fast	Smaller files, quickest export
Balanced	Matches the source — recommended
Maximum	Highest quality, largest files

All three use your Mac's hardware encoder, so none of them will heat the machine — the difference is file size, not speed.

It only appears when the export actually re-encodes. A plain trim copies the video across untouched, so there's nothing to choose.

v0.4.1 — video audio controls

Audio controls for video

A video's audio was previously untouchable — every export copied it across as-is, and the preview had no volume or mute at all.

There's now a speaker button beside the transport controls, with two clearly separate halves:

Preview volume — a slider and mute for what you hear while editing. Changes nothing about the export.

In the exported file

• Remove audio entirely — drops the track
• Volume — −20 dB to +12 dB
• Even out loudness — levels out a clip that swings between quiet and loud

The button shows a dot only when the export is affected, so muting the preview can't be mistaken for muting the file.

Leaving these alone keeps the audio copied untouched, so a plain trim is still instant and lossless.

Timeline fixes

The slider sat noticeably high in its track — its rail was pinned to the top of the control rather than centred, leaving it 16px above centre. It's now exactly centred.

Keyframe markers now run the full height of the track as guide lines, instead of a band clamped to the top edge.