KartikLabhshetwar/better-shot v0.4.2

BetterShot v0.4.2

on GitHub

What's New

The Recording Studio learns to hide things: masks blur or pixelate any region of a recording, and a mask lane on the timeline gives each one its own start and end. The image editor's two buttons finally mean two different things: Save keeps the edit inside BetterShot and the app's library shows it, Export is the one that writes a file to your Mac, and reopening an edited shot brings its annotations back. Three community performance passes move the heavy image and JSON decoding that sat on the main thread into the background, so the preview card, the Recording Studio and long recordings all stop stuttering.

Added

• Mask video in the Recording Studio: A Mask button in the toolbar drops a blur over the recording, positioned and resized on the canvas the way a crop box is, with a blur or pixelate effect and a strength slider per mask. Several masks can stack, Cmd Z steps every edit back, and the same masks render in the preview, the export and the shared copy, staying with the project across reopens
• Masks live on the timeline: A mask lane under the zoom lane shows every mask as a block. Click an empty spot to add a mask at that moment, drag a block to move it to a different part of the video, drag its edges to trim, so a mask covers exactly the seconds it needs and every scene can carry its own. Masks added from the toolbar keep covering the whole recording

Changed

• The studio wallpaper decodes once, not sixty times a second: With a custom wallpaper set, the Recording Studio preview re-read the file from disk and re-decoded it on every frame of playback and every scrub tick, on the main thread, in the same tick that had to draw the video. The wallpaper now renders through the image editor's cached preview component, so the decode happens once, off the main thread, and both editors share the cached copy (#113, thanks @zergzorg)
• The preview card decodes its thumbnail in the background: The after-capture card decoded the full screenshot on the main thread, tens of megabytes for a 5K shot, just to draw a card a couple of centimeters wide, right while the capture pipeline was still writing the file. Screenshots now go through the same off-main thumbnail decoder recordings already used (#115, thanks @zergzorg)
• Long recordings open faster in the studio: The pointer sidecar, sixty samples a second for the whole recording, so megabytes of JSON on a long take, was read, decoded and thinned on the main thread while the studio window sat unresponsive. All of it now runs in the background before the window fills in (#117, thanks @zergzorg)

Fixed

• Save and Export stopped doing the same job: Save behaved like a second Export, rewriting the file in your save folder. Save now keeps the edit inside BetterShot only, and the Settings library, the preview and the menu bar recents show the edited image instead of the plain capture; Export stays the one action that writes the finished file to your Mac, and the file in your save folder is never touched by a save
• Reopening an edited screenshot brings its annotations back: The editable annotation document lived beside the internal History copy under a fresh name, with nothing linking it to the original capture, so pressing Edit again on the same shot opened the plain image and a second save could wipe the earlier annotations from the saved file. History now remembers which capture an edit came from, and every route into the editor (the preview card, the Library, a drop on the menu bar icon) resolves back to the copy that owns the annotations. Applies to edits made from this version on
• Export works after a save: Saving or sharing an annotated screenshot left the editor pointing at a base image that was never written to disk, so the next Export, Copy or Save failed with "The file couldn't be opened because it isn't in the correct format", whether the edit was an annotation or a background effect. The first save now stores the untouched base and the editable document next to the History copy and repoints the editor at it, so every later export renders, and repeated saves stop stacking duplicate copies in History (#118, thanks @erickhun)
• Copy on a recording copies the video: The preview card's hover Copy put a still frame on the clipboard for recordings. It now copies the video file itself, so the paste lands in Finder or Slack as a movie (#115, thanks @zergzorg)

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