crmne/zapfast v0.18.1

ZapFast v0.18.1

on GitHub

ZapFast 0.18 can lock itself behind a password, opens videos over the whole window, and draws its text in your system's own font with your platform's colour emoji. You can select several messages by dragging across them, see a chat's draft in the chat list, walk search results with the keyboard, and copy a picture from its menu. ZapFast now also comes as an AppImage and has a refreshed logo. Videos you send arrive with a preview, reactions and reads from your phone are no longer lost after a long time offline, and links keep their brackets.

Download ZapFast: Mac · Windows · Windows ARM · Linux · Linux ARM · AppImage · AppImage ARM · Flatpak · Debian/Ubuntu · Fedora

On a Mac, brew install --cask crmne/tap/zapfast. On Arch, yay -S zapfast-bin.

ZapFast in under a minute. Download the film in full quality.

The film and all screenshots use ZapFast's built-in demo content.

New

• Lock ZapFast with a password. Settings → Privacy → App lock sets a password of at least six characters. ZapFast then starts locked and locks again after 1 minute, 15 minutes or 1 hour without input, also while it sits in the tray. Ctrl+Shift+L and Lock ZapFast in the tray lock it at once. Locked, the window shows only the lock screen, notifications say only "New message", and nothing is marked read. It keeps people at your computer out of your chats; it encrypts nothing more than the archive already is. A forgotten password means unlinking this computer. By @crmne; thanks @sreeaksharas. (#201)
• Videos open over the whole window. The expand button on a playing video, or a double-click, fills the window with it. Esc goes back to the message, Space pauses and the arrows seek. The picture and the sound carry on without a gap when it opens and closes, and videos are larger in their message too. By @crmne.
• Your system's font and emoji. ZapFast draws text in your platform's interface font (San Francisco on macOS, Segoe UI on Windows, your desktop's font on Linux) and emoji as your other apps draw them, everywhere: messages, text fields, menus and tooltips. Settings → Appearance → Font goes back to Inter. By @crmne, following the pull requests of @pulgueta (#229) and @thisisgm (#279).
• Select several messages by dragging. Drag down the space beside the bubbles and every message you pass joins the selection; holding the pointer at the top or bottom scrolls. Once you are selecting, a click anywhere on a message's row adds or removes it. A drag over a message's text still selects the text. By @crmne; thanks @itszux. (#246, #241)
• Drafts show in the chat list. A chat with unsent text shows Draft: and the text, as in WhatsApp. By @crmne; thanks @itszux. (#245)
• Walk search results with the keyboard. In a chat's search, ↑ and ↓ move through the results and Enter jumps to one. By @eternalwaitt. (#282)
• Copy image from a message's menu. A downloaded picture can be copied without opening its preview. By @crmne; thanks @edmooredop. (#272)
• ZapFast as an AppImage. Each release now includes zapfast-X.Y.Z-x86_64.AppImage and zapfast-X.Y.Z-aarch64.AppImage: one file, make it executable and run it, no installation. By @crmne.
• A refreshed logo. The teal disc gains a rim and a lit face, and the bubble is drawn in ink. The Mac icon is the same mark on a dark rounded tile. By @crmne.
• View-once messages say what they are. A view-once photo, video or voice message shows as "opens only on your phone" instead of a download that fails. By @crmne; thanks @ProgramGeek02. (#289)
• Meta AI answers show up. Replies from Meta AI appear as text, with code and tables. Earlier replies were never kept, so only new ones show. By @crmne; thanks @Star-knight-code. (#253)
• Channels show their pictures instead of initials. By @crmne; thanks @itszux. (#243)
• Last seen says the day and the time, as the phone does: "last seen yesterday at 12:04". By @crmne; thanks @fedalc. (#263)
• Smaller touches:
  • A right-click opens a message's menu from the empty space beside it too (@itszux, #240).
  • A click on the conversation's empty space puts the cursor back in the message box (@eternalwaitt, #283).
  • Delivery ticks are two ticks of equal height, as on the phone (@itszux, #249).
  • A picture without a caption shows its time over its corner, and Forwarded sits at the start of its bubble, closer to the message (@itszux, #251, #250).
  • Settings sit in the middle of a wide window (@itszux, #242).
  • The chat list ends in a line and a soft shadow, like the header, and the two headers line up.
  • Suggestion lists, staged attachments, reaction pills and the buttons that float over messages lift off the chat like bubbles.
  • The Windows taskbar badge counts unread chats, as WhatsApp does, not messages (@caumeira, #287).
  • Mentions are named in quotes, notifications and search results in groups that hide phone numbers.

Fixed

• Videos you send arrive with a preview. They went out without a thumbnail, size or length, so phones showed no preview and ZapFast showed its own copy as a file to open elsewhere. Videos sent before this now play from the file on your computer. By @crmne.
• Reactions and reads from your phone are no longer lost after a long time offline. A reaction or a read that arrived before its message was dropped; they now wait for it. A chat your phone shows as unread no longer looks read. By @crmne; thanks @fgrehm. (#276)
• Links keep their brackets. https://example.com/page_(more) opened without its last part. By @crmne; thanks @tizoras. (#273)
• Pasting copied files pastes the files. Copying a PDF in the file manager and pasting it sent the file's icon as a picture. By @crmne; thanks @sdbruder. (#285)
• The shortcuts dialog fits the window. It had grown taller than the default window. It now takes two columns in a wide window and scrolls in a short one. By @crmne.
• A trackpad scroll stays with the pane it began over instead of moving the chat list when the pointer drifts onto it. By @crmne; thanks @Siddhj2206. (#274)
• The chat list's edge can be dragged back from its widest. By @crmne; thanks @itszux. (#239)
• Open log does something on every desktop. On Hyprland it could start an editor without a terminal and show nothing; it now opens the log, or shows it in its folder, or says where it is. By @crmne; thanks @fgrehm. (#278)
• Group members show their whole saved first name, so "My Dih" is no longer "My". By @crmne; thanks @fedalc. (#237)
• Replying to an old message keeps your place in the chat instead of jumping to the newest message. By @eternalwaitt. (#280)
• Deleting a message after switching chats deletes it in its own chat. By @tobymarks. (#275)
• Start over works with a damaged archive key. Once the unreadable archive is moved aside, an empty or malformed key is replaced instead of failing again. By @OmarGonD. (#266)
• Simplified Chinese beside a Traditional region is respected. zh-Hans-TW and zh-Hans-HK no longer fall back to English. By @LisandroNahuelH. (#254)
• Selecting message text no longer drops while the chat scrolls. By @yaoxinghuo. (#258)
• One-line Arabic and Hebrew text is cut at its end, not in the middle, when it does not fit. By @crmne; thanks @BruceUK. (#72)
• Windows says when Credential Manager is full instead of "error code 8" when linking cannot save its key. By @crmne; thanks @ColorfulCookie. (#257)
• The log names why connecting failed, and why a video's sound did not open, without private details. By @crmne; thanks @ExQueueSee and @joaogks. (#271, #265)
• The tests pass on desktops with Noto's Arabic fonts, which the AUR build checks. By @crmne; thanks @kevinbsr. (#259)

Known limitations

• There is no 0.18.0 download: its macOS build could not create the disk image on GitHub's runner, so it was never published, and 0.18.1 is the same release with that fixed.

• The AppImage bundles no libraries: it needs glibc 2.39 or newer and your desktop's own libraries, like the DEB and RPM. It does not update itself; download the new file when ZapFast says a release is out. Running it needs FUSE, or --appimage-extract-and-run.

• The app lock is a screen lock, not encryption: it does not protect the files on your disk beyond what the archive already does.

• The new icons, the macOS menu-bar icon and the font setting were built and tested on Linux only, and sending a video with its preview was not tried against a real chat before this release. Please report anything that looks wrong on macOS or Windows.

• A video whose sound ZapFast cannot decode, such as HE-AAC, still plays silently (#265), and #271 stays open until someone confirms what the log now says.

• The new strings in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Chinese were not reviewed by native speakers.

Thanks

@eternalwaitt, @tobymarks, @OmarGonD, @LisandroNahuelH, @yaoxinghuo and @caumeira for the pull requests in this release, @pulgueta and @thisisgm for the system font and emoji work, @itszux for a long list of careful reports, @fedalc, @fgrehm, @edmooredop, @sreeaksharas, @ProgramGeek02, @Star-knight-code, @tizoras, @sdbruder, @Siddhj2206, @kevinbsr, @ColorfulCookie, @ExQueueSee, @joaogks and @BruceUK for theirs, and everyone who tried the new look.

Full changelog: v0.17.0...v0.18.1