RinaAssistant v2.0.0 — First Global Update

[2.0.0] — 2026-08

Rina now knows what is installed on your computer. Launching a program no
longer requires adding it by hand: say its name and she finds it, asks which
one you meant when several match, and remembers your answer.

Added

• Program discovery. Rina indexes what is installed on the machine —
  Start Menu shortcuts, Microsoft Store apps, desktop shortcuts, and
  executables on PATH — so "запусти телеграм" works without any setup.
  Names spoken in Russian resolve to Latin-named programs through
  transliteration and a table of common spoken names ("стим" → Steam,
  "ворд" → Word, "обс" → OBS Studio). "Запусти браузер" launches whichever
  browser is actually installed. The index is cached (a full scan takes about
  a second, a cached read four milliseconds) and refreshes in the background.
• Folders with portable programs (Settings → Программы). Programs that are
  simply unpacked into a folder have no Start Menu entry and no registry
  record — point Rina at the folder and she will find them. Bundled runtimes
  and helper executables are filtered out, so a Ren'Py SDK folder contributes
  renpy.exe and not the five other .exe files shipped inside it.
• Teaching Rina a program. When nothing matches, Rina offers to be shown
  the file once and remembers it permanently. Remembered programs are listed
  in the Commands tab and can be removed individually.
• Clarifying questions. When several programs match, Rina asks instead of
  guessing — "Нашла несколько: Visual Studio 2022, Visual Studio Code…" — and
  accepts "второй", a name, or "отмена". The answer is remembered, so the
  same phrase launches straight away next time.
• System and media control: volume, mute, play/pause, next/previous track,
  screenshot, lock. Shutdown, restart and sleep are available too, but always
  require confirmation.
• Sequence step "Пауза" — a delay between steps, so a scenario can wait for
  a program to start before the next step runs.
• Plugin API v3: declarative pages. A plugin now describes its tab as data
  (Title, Text, Note, Items, Button, Divider) and the application
  renders it. Plugins no longer import Qt, so they will survive a change of UI
  framework, and a page can be serialized to JSON for a non-Python shell.
  The bundled Notes plugin was rewritten as the reference implementation.
• Config schema versioning with automatic migration, including a one-time
  backup of the previous configuration before the first migration.

Changed

• Creating a command no longer asks for a file path. The "Программа" type
  offers autocomplete over the programs Rina found; browsing for a file is
  still available for anything not in the index. Store apps are supported as
  command targets, and editing a command shows the program's name rather than
  its application identifier.
• Sequences were reworked the same way: program steps use the picker, and
  the action step grew from five window-only actions to sixteen, covering
  volume, playback, screenshot, lock and power.
• Duplicate trigger phrases are now refused with an explanation. Previously
  two commands could share a phrase, only the first ever ran, and there was no
  way to tell why the second was silent.
• Commands containing shutdown, restart or sleep — directly or in a step —
  ask for confirmation before running.
• Sequences run in a background thread, so a pause no longer freezes the window.
• The hard-coded catalogue of five launchable programs is gone; it remains only
  as a fallback on systems without an index.
• The Commands tab now also shows what Rina found, with a refresh button.

Fixed

• Programs with Russian names could not be launched at all. PowerShell
  returns its output in the console codepage, not UTF-8, so 62 system apps —
  "Блокнот", "Диспетчер задач", "Калькулятор" — were read as mangled text and
  never matched anything.
• Window actions were executed from the wrong thread. Commands run in the
  speech-recognition thread and called window methods directly; they are now
  routed to the GUI thread through a signal.
• Enabling any plugin that declares settings crashed the application — the
  plugin settings panel still used the old row signature after the 1.2.0
  interface rework.

Notes for plugin authors

create_page() returning a QWidget still works, but it is deprecated: it ties
a plugin to Qt. Implement page() (see plugins/page_spec.py) and handle
button presses in on_action(). If both are defined, page() wins.

Upgrading

Configuration is migrated automatically on first launch. Custom commands,
history, plugins and their settings are preserved, and a copy of the previous
configuration is written to backup-v0/ next to the config files
(%APPDATA%\RinaAssistant\) in case you need to go back.