Changes since Phon 4.0.0-beta.12

Session Editor

Validators can now enable validation mode and run auto-validation of blind transcriptions from a new transcript toolbar button; the button appears only when editing as the validator on a session that has blind transcribers (#520).
Removed a non-working validation-mode menu from the transcript gutter's blind-transcription icon; the icon and its hover tooltip are unchanged (#520).
Fixed tier labels intermittently disappearing in the transcript view, leaving a bare ":" until the next full repaint (most visible on Windows).
Fixed a blank transcript and cascading dialog-rendering failures that could occur after enabling validation mode or any full transcript rebuild (#517).
Fixed internal errors and stray text deletion when moving the cursor onto a blind transcriber line with validation mode enabled (#517).
Fixed a silent failure that left a blank or partial transcript when opening a session in single-record mode; such failures are now recorded in the log (#517).

AI Assistant (Schwa)

Schwa now maintains a live task checklist for multi-step requests, shown above the message input and kept with the finished reply.
Schwa asks before acting when a request leaves a meaningful choice open (for example, IPA Target versus IPA Actual), offering clickable options with a recommendation instead of silently guessing (#508).
Capable models re-check their own edits with read-only tools before giving a final answer, correcting anything that does not match the request.
Long conversations are automatically condensed as they approach a model's context limit, so answers no longer degrade over time.
Reasoning effort and context window are now per-model settings, editable in Preferences and from the chat header; reasoning is also requested from Ollama and Groq models.
Failed tool calls are reported back to the model so it can correct and retry, instead of ending the reply with an error.
Documentation lookups are faster: the search index stays open between queries, warms in the background, and accepts several queries in one call.

Reports & HTML Viewing

Analysis reports and other in-app web pages now follow the active light or dark theme instead of always rendering light, and no longer flash white while loading (#503).
Report toolbar and menu icons are now inline SVG that tint with the theme, replacing the mismatched jQuery UI sprite images and shrinking every generated report file (#503).
Web view scroll bars and docked report-panel titles now match the dark theme (#503).

Project Window

Selecting your workspace, home, or a common personal folder (Documents, Desktop, Downloads, and similar) in the open-project dialog is now blocked with an explanation, instead of misreading its subfolders as corpora and writing a stray project file (#515).
Such folders are also dropped from the recent-projects and workspace histories and skipped when reopening projects at startup, so the block cannot recur (#515).

TextGrid Export

The Export TextGrid wizard can now export any record tier — including Orthography, IPA, morphology, and user tiers — not just tiers with their own interval timing; intervals are derived from word alignment, or the full record segment when no alignment exists (#513).
Tier selection moved to its own wizard step, with tiers grouped by timing source and short inline hints matching the import wizard (#513).

CHAT Export

Intra-word pauses now receive a time interval on the phone intervals tier (%xphoint), so their segment boundaries can be seen and adjusted; phone alignment (%xphoaln) is unchanged.

Performance

Closed session editor windows are now released from memory; heap usage previously grew with every editor opened and never came back down (#510).

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