Halo v3.1.4 - the progress bar on the pill tells the truth now
The progress bar on the collapsed pill was lying to you
The pill fills its own background with how far into the track you are. Depending on which player you use, that bar had four different ways of being wrong — and every one of them looked like a drawing bug rather than what it was, which is the pill believing something the player told it.
A new song started somewhere else entirely. A track change and its timeline do not arrive together: for about a second the player is still handing out the outgoing track's position and length. So the bar leapt to wherever the last song ended, sat there, and then fell back to the start. Halo now recognises the leftover — it still carries the old track's duration — and waits it out, briefly enough that a playlist of same-length tracks can't stall it.
A video in a background tab showed a bar once and never again. Chrome reports a real timeline when the video starts and then, once the tab is in the background, comes back with everything at zero. Taken literally that erased a duration Halo already knew, so the bar vanished. A blank answer about a track already measured is not news, and is ignored. A live stream with genuinely no duration reports zero from the very first update, and still correctly gets no bar.
The bar sat frozen while the video played on. The same players repeat an identical position, poll after poll. Halo was restarting its clock against each repeat, so the bar could never advance past one poll's worth.
A dark album cover gave no bar at all. The whole bar is coloured from the album art, and every shade is derived by taking brightness away — on a black-ish cover that is black paint on black glass. The colour now has a floor, with the hue kept, so a dark red cover still gives a red bar.
The bar's leading edge looked like a separate object
Reported first as a line between the head and the body, then as two bars — a pale one ahead of a solid one. Four things, all of them real: a glow centred on the leading edge put half of itself past it; the "it's playing" pulse was a separate band twice as bright as the bar it rode on; the highlight brightened and then fell back to nothing inside two pixels; and a helper was replacing the clip it had been handed instead of intersecting with it, so the halo spilled past the edge and lay under the bar as a second, paler one. The pulse is now the whole bar breathing together rather than a stripe added on top.
Also in this build
- Seeking is quicker to answer. A single tap on the seek bar goes out immediately instead of always paying a debounce meant for rapid tapping, and a seek the player ignores is retried once rather than seven times over five seconds — a second seek of a player that simply isn't reporting itself is not a correction, it's another yank of the picture.
- Ring colours fade between states instead of repainting between two frames, which read as a glitch rather than as the thing changing.
- The "bad internet" banner drops its emoticon.
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.