USTA v0.1.4 — Global Hotkeys, Temporary Region Capture, and Platform Capabilities

This release improves USTA’s real-time translation workflow with global keyboard shortcuts, temporary capture regions, and better platform-specific behavior.

Highlights
Added global hotkey support so key actions can be triggered even when the main window is not focused.
Added a temporary region selection workflow for active translation sessions.
Temporary regions now automatically restore the original capture area after 10 seconds.
Added a shortcut to toggle the settings window as always-on-top, making it easier to use USTA alongside games, fullscreen apps, and other focused windows.
Introduced platform capability resolution to adjust behavior based on operating system and desktop environment.
Added platform-specific defaults for Linux, GNOME, KDE Plasma.
Improved screenshot engine selection behavior for different desktop environments.
Added configurable default hotkeys for settings topmost mode and temporary region capture.
Added the required dependency for global hotkey handling.
Default shortcuts
Shift + Alt + M: Toggle settings window always-on-top mode.
Shift + Alt + R: Select a temporary translation region during an active session.

Summary
USTA 0.1.4 focuses on smoother real-time usage: users can quickly switch to a temporary OCR area, keep the settings panel accessible when needed, and benefit from cleaner platform-aware defaults across supported environments.

USTA v1.0.3-alpha

USTA — Universal Screen Translator Application

This is the first alpha release of USTA, a real-time screen translation application designed for games, videos, subtitles, and desktop content.

USTA lets you select a region of your screen, continuously extracts text from that area using OCR, translates it, and displays the result in an overlay. The goal is to make untranslated games, foreign videos, and on-screen text easier to understand in real time.

AppImage Download Link

Download USTA AppImage

Note: Since the file size exceeds 2 GB, I couldn't upload it directly as a release package. Therefore, I am providing an external download link.

Key Features

• Real-time OCR-based screen translation
• Screen region selection for focusing on subtitles or specific UI areas
• Translation overlay / HUD for continuous use while watching or playing
• Linux desktop support with Wayland-oriented capture workflows
• KDE Plasma and GNOME support through desktop-environment-aware capture handling
• Multiple OCR backend support, including Tesseract, EasyOCR, PaddleOCR, and RapidOCR
• Translation support through Google Translate and DeepL integration
• Unix socket IPC output for external tools, custom overlays, logging, and integrations
• AppImage packaging support

Current Status

This is an alpha release intended for early testing. Some features may be incomplete, unstable, or desktop-environment dependent.

The current focus is Linux desktop support, including both KDE Plasma and GNOME environments. Compatibility may vary depending on your distribution, desktop environment, Wayland session type, portal implementation, and installed OCR dependencies.

Known Notes

• DeepL support is available.
• OCR quality depends on the selected backend, source text clarity, font, language, and screen resolution.
• Wayland capture behavior may differ between desktop environments and portal implementations.
• Packaging is still experimental and may require system dependencies to be installed manually.

Feedback

Please report issues with your Linux distribution, desktop environment, session type, OCR backend, and reproduction steps so future releases can improve compatibility and stability.