InstallerClean 2.1.0

The Move and Delete buttons have swapped places

Delete is now the emphasised button, and it sits on the right of the pair. Move is the quieter one on the left.

Delete is now the default because a great deal of further testing has gone into proving that InstallerClean only ever lists files Windows has finished with. The test suite has grown from 270 tests to 467 this release, and the single largest addition covers exactly the code that decides whether a file is still registered. Move remains an option for anyone who doesn't trust that and would rather keep a backup.

The button order just makes it clearer that deleting the unneeded files is safe to do.

It's even more careful about what it lists

Most of this release went into the situations where Windows can't give a straight answer about a file: records that are damaged, incomplete, or that contradict each other. In every one of them InstallerClean now leaves the file alone rather than putting it on the list. The changelog has each case.

Moving

• The Move button works without a folder typed in first. Press it and a folder browser opens for you to pick one. It used to sit greyed out until the box was filled, which also meant the Tab key skipped straight past it.
• The Browse button opens that same folder browser, and now starts at the folder already in the box rather than at the Windows default every time.
• If you pick a folder on the same drive as C:\Windows\Installer, the confirmation now says so and reminds you that the move won't actually free the space until you delete the copies yourself.
• The known display bug flagged on the 2.0.0 and 2.0.1 release pages is fixed. The completion screen showed a stray "u200B" at every backslash in the destination, so D:\Backup read as D:\u200BBackup. It was only cosmetic (the files always went to the correct folder) and it's fixed now.

Fewer ways to get stuck

The window no longer freezes while a slow or broken Recycle Bin is checked, or while a move destination on a network share that has gone away times out. It no longer hangs on exit if the Windows shell stops responding. Closing the app mid-move now finishes the file it's on and stops cleanly, rather than cutting off part-way through and leaving a half-written copy behind.

A scan that fails at startup now opens the window and tells you why, instead of the app disappearing.

Error messages

Errors now appear in InstallerClean's own themed dialog rather than a stock Windows message box.

Each message names what actually went wrong. Where Windows won't explain itself, the message says so. And each one ends by confirming that nothing has been removed, which is what you want to know when an error appears over a list of your files.

Screen readers and the keyboard

• The globe language menu now reads out the language names. It previously announced only each entry's position in the list. Some names are in scripts a screen reader has no voice for, so each entry now also carries its name in whatever language the app is running in: a reader that can't say 日本語 says "Japanese" instead, and on a French install, "japonais".
• The hint under MOVE LOCATION is now read out as it should be.
• Links are underlined at rest rather than picked out by colour alone. WCAG's use-of-colour rule is that colour can't be the only thing marking a link, and the link colour now measures 4.90:1 against its background, above the 4.5:1 that WCAG AA asks for.

The command line

installerclean-cli no longer gives up before it starts when it's launched with no console attached, which is how some remote-management agents and service wrappers run it. It was abandoning the whole run over its output encoding, every time, in a situation where nothing was reading the output anyway.

Unquoted paths with spaces in them are reported properly now, --help explains that a saved move folder is per-user and so no use to a scheduled task running as SYSTEM, and the README has a worked schtasks example.

Languages

Everything this release adds or rewords is translated into all fourteen non-English languages (plus the extra Arabic README).

The existing translations got yet another going-over too: words that had gone missing, wording that didn't sit in the same register as the rest of the app, and punctuation that didn't follow that language's own conventions.

Five new automated checks now guard all of this on every push. A new or reworded string can't quietly ship in English, a French narrow space can't be lost to an ordinary one, the installer's language list can't drift from the app's, a translated string can't refer to a number its sentence never provides, and the fourteen public review pages can't fall out of step with the app's own text.

Thanks again to @coolvitto and @bovirus, whose Japanese and Italian work this release keeps building on.

Licence

InstallerClean is now under Apache 2.0 rather than MIT. It's still free and open source.

Everything else

The changelog lists every change in this release.

Downloads

• InstallerClean-setup.exe (~92 MB) - Installer. Adds InstallerClean and the command-line tool, with an Add/Remove Programs entry to uninstall.
• InstallerClean-portable.exe (~63 MB) - The app as a single executable. No installation; run it directly.
• installerclean-cli.exe (~37 MB) - The command-line tool as a single executable, for scripting, scheduled tasks and deployment.

The apps are unsigned, so on first run Windows SmartScreen will warn that the publisher is unknown. Click "More info", then "Run anyway".

f5a8a00cea52e3c216124abf059b2b521ebf2cf61153c351a45fd8ec42ca5db7  InstallerClean-setup.exe
02d5ee995699b5698626da1aed6f6e21daef3a20bf629ebdf5751c5ecc7ff9ea  InstallerClean-portable.exe
463b4303d81059c80ce554c356ec5e81aeec60b55c530049c560314fcab8c072  installerclean-cli.exe

(Get-FileHash -Algorithm SHA256 .\InstallerClean-setup.exe).Hash -eq 'f5a8a00cea52e3c216124abf059b2b521ebf2cf61153c351a45fd8ec42ca5db7'

VirusTotal

• InstallerClean-setup.exe: 0/68 ✨
• InstallerClean-portable.exe: 0/68 ✨
• installerclean-cli.exe: 0/70 ✨

All three builds scan clean across every engine on VirusTotal, including Bitdefender, Kaspersky, ESET, Avast, AVG and Malwarebytes.