Sealshot 0.7.4

Performance

• Finishing a screen recording no longer bogs down an Intel Mac. Sealshot
  reads the text out of a handful of frames to describe the recording, and
  that read was running at the same effort it uses when you're sitting there
  waiting for it — on up to 24 frames, for a recording you'd already walked
  away from. It now uses the lighter setting reserved for background work, and
  yields to anything you're actually doing, so capturing or editing stays
  responsive while it finishes.

• Tagging a new capture is quicker. The checks for faces, documents and
  barcodes each re-prepared the image separately; they now share one pass.
  Most noticeable on Intel Macs, where that work has no dedicated hardware.

• Captures are ready much faster on Intel Macs. Reading the text out of a
  screenshot could take anywhere from 15 to 37 seconds on those machines,
  which held up the searchable text, keywords and title for every capture.
  Two things were behind it: the same screenshot could be read twice at once,
  and the pass that double-checks hard-to-read lines was doing far more work
  than it was worth. Text-heavy and blurry captures now finish two to three
  times quicker, and every line of text is still found — only the extra
  double-check of a few blurry lines is skipped.

• Switching to the text tool is far quicker on Intel Macs. Before showing
  selectable text, Sealshot checks whether the picture contains any text at
  all — and that check was doing a full, careful read of the whole image just
  to answer yes or no, which could take half a minute on its own. It now takes
  a fraction of a second.

• On Intel Macs, Sealshot no longer sharpens the image before reading text for
  selection. The sharpening quadrupled how much there was to read and cost far
  more time than the slightly clearer text was worth on those machines. Apple
  Silicon Macs still sharpen as before.

• Background text reading now gives way to whatever you're doing, instead of
  competing with it, so the text tool responds sooner after a capture.

• A new capture is no longer read twice over. Sealshot reads a screenshot once
  for search and keywords and again when you select text — the same picture,
  the same words, twice. The heavy part of that work is now done once and
  shared, so whichever comes second finishes much sooner. Selecting text still
  gets the most careful read; only the duplicated effort is gone.

• Selecting text, Find in Image, and Smart Redaction are unchanged: when you
  ask Sealshot for text yourself, it still does the most thorough read it can.
  Apple Silicon Macs see a smaller share of the same speed-up.

• The capture overlay opens more smoothly. The frozen picture of your screen
  behind the crosshair used to be prepared on the very first frame you saw,
  which made the overlay feel like it caught as it appeared.

• The capture crosshair and magnifier now follow your pointer directly.
  They were only being redrawn when the highlighted window changed, so on
  slower Macs they trailed slightly behind the cursor.

• Selecting text on a capture you have already opened is now instant. Sealshot
  remembers the text it found while the app is running, so switching between
  captures and coming back no longer re-reads the picture from scratch.

• Switching to a capture with Enhance Clarity applied no longer freezes the
  editor. A large enhanced image used to be prepared for display all at once
  before anything appeared — over a second on a big capture. The picture now
  shows immediately and sharpens a moment later, and flicking through captures
  no longer leaves discarded work running in the background.

• Scrolling a tall capture in the editor is much smoother. The light and dark
  chequerboard behind the picture was being redrawn across the whole canvas on
  every scroll, however little of it had actually moved — on a long screenshot
  that was most of a frame's worth of work each time. It now repaints only the
  strip that changed.

• Flicking through captures no longer makes the strip stutter. Opening a
  capture had to unpack its full-size picture before anything could be drawn,
  and that unpacking happened on the same thread the strip scrolls on — so
  each capture you passed through cost a visible pause. Sealshot now shows the
  capture's existing thumbnail for a moment and unpacks the full picture in
  the background. The longest pause when switching dropped from about 75
  thousandths of a second to under 19.

Fixes

• Captures look sharp at every zoom level, not just 100%. The canvas was always
  drawing at your screen's own resolution and then letting the graphics card
  stretch or shrink that picture to whatever zoom you'd chosen — so at 94% or
  125% every pixel you saw came from a compromise. It now draws at the size
  you're actually viewing, which is why 100% always looked right and nothing
  else quite did. Most noticeable on non-Retina displays, where there was no
  spare resolution to hide it.
• Text looks much better when a capture is zoomed to anything other than a
  whole number. Sealshot deliberately keeps zoomed screenshots pixel-sharp
  rather than blurry, but it was doing that at every zoom level — and at
  in-between zooms like 125% or 156% that meant some pixels were doubled and
  others weren't, which chewed up letter shapes. Whole-number zooms (100%,
  200%, 300%) stay pixel-sharp; everything in between now scales smoothly.
  Most noticeable on non-Retina displays.
• Fixed: zooming up to 100% left the picture slightly soft, while zooming
  down to 100% — or getting there with ⌘-scroll — looked right. Sealshot
  animates the zoom, and the animation could stop a whisker short of where it
  was headed, so a capture the editor reported as 100% was really being shown
  at 99% and resampled. Every zoom now lands exactly on the number shown, so
  100% is once again a pixel-for-pixel view of your capture. Most noticeable on
  non-Retina displays.
• The tools are now greyed out while Sealshot is busy reading text, redacting
  or enhancing a capture — matching what extracting data already did. Before,
  the tools stayed clickable underneath the progress card for some of them.
• Fixed: cancelling text selection and then starting a redaction scan showed no
  progress at all. The cancelled read reported itself finished a moment later
  and dismissed the scan's progress card along with it.
• Fixed: the spinner next to a new capture's name could sit there for a long
  time on Intel Macs, waiting for something that was never going to happen.
  That spinner means "this name isn't final yet" — but on those Macs the name
  is already final the moment the capture is saved, and the spinner was really
  tracking the text-reading that happens in the background. It no longer
  appears when the name won't change, and everywhere else it now gives up
  after 8 seconds rather than spinning indefinitely.
• Selecting text in an image can now be cancelled. Reading the text out of a
  capture shows the same progress card as redacting and extracting data — with
  a Cancel button, and Esc works too — instead of a small badge you had to wait
  out. Cancelling puts you back on the pointer and restores the picture you
  were looking at.
• Switching to another capture now stops whatever Sealshot was working on for
  the old one. Enhancing clarity, redacting and extracting data used to keep
  running after you moved on, throwing the result away when they finished — and
  worse, the button stayed dead on the new capture until the abandoned work
  ended. Taking a brand-new screenshot mid-scan had the same problem.
• Fixed: the capture strip along the bottom of the editor could show only the
  capture you had open, as if every other capture had vanished. Your captures
  were never lost — Sealshot keeps a searchable list of them, and when that
  list had to be rebuilt from scratch (the first run after turning encryption
  off, for example) the strip showed nothing until the rebuild happened to
  finish and something else nudged it. Restarting Sealshot was the only way
  out. The strip now reads straight from your captures folder whenever that
  list is empty, and refreshes itself the moment the rebuild finishes.
• Fixed: the capture crosshair and magnifier were missing when the overlay
  first appeared, until you moved the mouse.
• The capture crosshair tracks the pointer more smoothly, especially on Intel
  Macs and on displays running a scaled resolution. The overlay also drops
  about half as many frames as it did, so the whole capture screen feels
  steadier while you pick what to grab.
• Point at empty desktop in the capture overlay and the whole screen
  highlights — click to capture the entire display. Previously nothing was
  highlighted there and clicking did nothing.
• Picking what to capture is steadier. Moving the pointer across the screen no
  longer lights up every window it passes over — a window highlights once you
  settle on it, so the overlay stops flickering on the way to what you wanted.
• Scrolling to widen or narrow the capture selection is smoother. One notch now
  moves one step instead of racing through everything under the pointer, and
  the box grows and shrinks in one continuous motion rather than lurching.
• Fixed: Remove Background sometimes left the editor showing the original
  image. The cutout had actually been made — the thumbnail in the strip showed
  it, and switching to another capture and back revealed it — but the canvas
  itself didn't refresh until something else happened to redraw it.
• You can drag captures out of the Library again — to Finder, to another
  app, or onto a collection in the sidebar. Dragging a Library tile or row had
  stopped doing anything at all, in both grid and list view; only the editor's
  recent strip still worked. Dragging one of several selected captures brings
  the whole selection, as it does in the strip.
• Dragging several captures out of the editor strip at once no longer prepares
  every file twice. Sealshot used to export each capture the moment you picked
  the group up, throw those files away, and export them again when you dropped
  — which also left a decrypted copy of each one behind in the system temp
  folder, even if you never dropped anything. The files are now written once,
  after the drop.

Live Capture

• Right-click a window in a Live Capture and you can now Export This
  Window… straight from that window's menu, instead of selecting it first
  and going to the empty-canvas menu. It always saves the window you clicked.
• The empty-canvas version of the command is now called Export Selected
  Window…, so it's clear which window it writes.

Privacy & Security

• Turning on Enhanced Security now clears the old plain search index straight
  away, instead of leaving it until the first encrypted save. If Sealshot was
  interrupted in between, that file could survive holding text read out of
  your captures — and a locked Sealshot would still search it. It is removed
  up front now, and a locked Sealshot refuses to read one even if it finds it.
• Fixed: with Enhanced Security locked and the trial expired, pressing a
  capture or record shortcut opened Settings over the lock screen. Locked now
  means locked — Settings stays shut until you unlock.
• Instead, Sealshot brings up the lock screen and explains that the trial has
  ended and new captures are paused. Unlock from there and Settings opens on
  the License page, so activating a license is two clicks from the shortcut
  that was blocked.

Welcome tour

• Fixed: dragging the welcome tour card to a second monitor made it disappear.
  It was still there — macOS just stopped drawing it, and nothing would bring
  it back, including Show Now. It now moves between displays normally.
• The tour card also stays in front of the editor window wherever you put it,
  and no longer jumps about when you drag the editor between monitors.