V-Notch 2.2.0 release

[w0otdev]

V-Notch 2.2.0 Changelog

V-Notch 2.2.0 migrates core services to a native C++26 engine with AVX2 SIMD acceleration, introduces a real-time White Noise player, a 40-tick Volume HUD with overscroll physics, interaction sound effects, custom File Tray labels with drag-and-drop reordering, and local multi-drive Spotlight file search.

New Features

• Added a real-time White Noise strip to the Clock and Timer view with 8 synthesized ambient sounds: White, Pink, Brown, Fan, Rain, Ocean, Wind, and Stream.
• Added a Sync with timer option that fades out White Noise over 3 seconds and stops playback when the countdown ends.
• Added UI interaction sound effects for buttons, switches, navigation, sliders, menus, confirmations, deletions, and media transport, with a toggle and volume slider in Settings.
• Redesigned the Volume HUD with a 40-tick segmented bar tinted by the active media artwork, overscroll spring physics at 0% and 100%, and a morph-and-blur transition between Media and Volume views.
• Added custom File Tray labels with unlimited item capacity.
• Added drag-and-drop category tab reordering in the File Tray with live ghost previews and Alt + Left and Right keyboard shortcuts.
• Added lasso selection, Shift and Ctrl range selection, Select All, bulk deletion of selected cards, and an Empty Tray action that clears unpinned items while keeping Pinned, Private, and Archived cards.
• Added a native local filesystem search fallback in Spotlight that scans fixed and removable drives for files outside Windows Search and Everything indexes.
• Added an Ultimate GPU mode in Settings to run Liquid Glass on a discrete GPU while keeping frame rendering capped to Target FPS.

Improvements

• Added a progressive blur-and-slide entrance animation for Settings sidebar items and cards.
• Docked the shared Settings button directly into the File Tray toolbar when the secondary view is open.
• Increased Clock calendar row spacing to prevent date circles from crowding.
• Updated the auto-updater to w0otdev/V-Notch with a native Atom feed fallback when GitHub API requests are rate-limited, persistent ETag caching, and immediate download cancellation when closing the progress window.

Fixes

• Fixed the camera failing to reopen after repeated toggles by serializing device teardown.
• Fixed the live camera preview dimming when notch opacity is reduced by isolating sibling opacity masks.
• Fixed the Weather widget failing to refresh after toggling settings or changing cities, and added click-to-retry when weather data is unavailable.
• Fixed per-app volume control for browsers and packaged media apps by matching both executable paths and SMTC app IDs on word boundaries.
• Fixed File Tray visual glitches during card selection, category scrolling, and action backdrop transitions.
• Fixed repeated failed requests when a YouTube Data API key reaches its daily limit by adding automatic quota cooldown tracking.

Under the Hood

• Migrated core services, audio DSP, string and JSON parsing, DPAPI encryption, CoreAudio session matching, and Win32, DWM, and GDI integrations to a native C++26 engine.
• Added runtime CPUID detection and AVX2 SIMD kernels for glass box blur, album art blur, webcam pixel conversion, and visualizer FFT spectrum calculation.
• Integrated a single-pass 9-tap Gaussian blur directly into the Liquid Glass pixel shader and collapsed CPU rim layers when GPU refraction is active.
• Replaced NAudio and managed HTTP sockets with native WASAPI loopback capture, a Hamming-windowed FFT visualizer pipeline, and a native WinHTTP transport with instant cancellation and automatic decompression.
• Reduced managed GC allocations from 84 MB to 8.33 MB by removing per-tick allocations across privacy polling, hover detection, clipboard storage, localization lookup, and Spotlight ranking.
• Moved the Spotlight low-level keyboard hook onto a dedicated background thread and message pump so shortcuts never block on UI layout work.
• Added a generation-tagged native handle registry to prevent use-after-free and handle leaks when asynchronous searches or network requests are canceled.

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This discussion was created from the release V-Notch 2.2.0 release.