Halo v3.1.3 — the notification sound is no longer cut in half
Your notification sound was being cut in half
If you have had Halo silence a notification banner and heard the chime start and then stop partway, this is that.
Windows starts a toast's sound the moment the toast fires. Halo only learns a new app exists from that toast — it writes the app's "no banner, no sound" setting afterwards, and then has to restart the Windows notification service for the setting to take effect in the current session. That restart was landing about three seconds later, which is inside most notification sounds. The log on my machine had twenty-three of them, every single one three seconds after a toast.
So the sound was neither on nor off. It started at full volume and got guillotined.
The restart now waits until the notifications have gone quiet — twelve seconds since the last one, which clears even the long ringtones — and a notification arriving in the meantime pushes it back out again.
One thing worth being straight about: a sound Windows has already started cannot be muted. The per-app setting only takes effect when that service restarts, and restarting is exactly what was cutting the sound off. So the very first notification from an app Windows has never seen before now plays in full, and every one after it is silent. Apps Windows already knows about — which is almost all of them — were already silent from the first toast and still are.
Also in this build
- The installer wizard carries the Halo mark instead of Inno's blank corner.
- A rewritten README, in English and Persian, that shows the features instead of describing how they were built.
- PRIVACY.md — written out of the source rather than out of good intentions. Every file Halo writes and every network request it can make, all nine of them, with what each one discloses. There is no Halo server, no account and no telemetry, and now you can check that rather than take my word for it.
DynamicWinSetup.exe is the signed installer. DynamicWinPortable.zip needs no install — unzip and run Halo\Halo.App.exe. If you are already on 3.1.x, Halo picks this up on its own within a day.