excuse me. v0.2.1 — calls actually connect

Private video calling over your own network.

This release fixes calls not connecting. If you are on 0.2.0 or earlier, please update — and so should anyone you call.

Downloads

• macOS (Apple Silicon): excuse me-0.2.1-arm64.dmg
• Windows 10/11 (x64): excuse me Setup 0.2.1.exe

Fixed — calls never actually connected

Two bugs meant a call could reach the meeting screen and still never establish a real peer connection: no video, no chat, and sometimes a room showing only yourself.

• Offer collision. Both ends began negotiating at the same instant on every call, deadlocking the handshake. Recovering from that collision also tore down the transport carrying chat and file transfer, so the data channel never opened. One side now opens the negotiation and the other answers.
• Media race. Peer connections were held up waiting for the camera/microphone. On a first launch, where the OS is still asking for permission, that blocked the connection entirely — the room sat at "1 / 5" with nothing connecting — and any connection formed during the wait never sent video. Peers now connect immediately and media attaches when it is ready.
• Virtual LANs (ZeroTier, Tailscale, Hamachi). The app no longer lets the browser engine hide local addresses behind .local names that peers on a virtual network cannot resolve — previously this discarded the only usable route between them.
• Connections that fail or stall now retry automatically, and tiles show Connecting… / Reconnecting… instead of failing silently.

Fixed — room password security

• Room passwords are now key-stretched (PBKDF2-SHA256, 150k iterations, per-room salt) before anything goes on the wire. Previously someone sniffing your network could capture the exchange and brute-force the password offline at high speed.
• The "Password protect" toggle no longer defaults to a fixed password baked into the public source — it generates a random one.
• Removed a shared fallback secret, and password comparison is now constant-time.

First-run notes

• Unsigned builds: on macOS, if you see "Apple could not verify…", open System Settings → Privacy & Security and click Open Anyway. On Windows, choose More info → Run anyway.
• macOS asks for Camera, Microphone and (for hosts) Local Network permission — allow all three, then reopen the app. Without camera permission the app still connects, but your video will be blank.
• Intel Mac build available on request (npx electron-builder --mac dmg --x64).