🎨 Design

• Removed the ugly outer red aura ring around the pill — it looked like
  a 2004 Winamp skin, not liquid glass.
• Removed the pulsing halo around the status dot. It's now a single
  small solid dot, like the record indicator on Voice Memos.
• Replaced the continuous bezier waveform line (which read as "one flat
  red stripe") with mirrored discrete bars — the Voice-Memos /
  Siri-bars style. Each bar independently tracks an audio-level sample
  so the whole row actually moves as you talk.
• Slimmer proportions (186 ×ばつ 30) and a lighter timer (9 pt, non-bold).
• Kept the 1-px top shine for subtle glass depth. That's it.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🐛 Fixed

• Overlay indicator was invisible because of a bug in our click-through
  setup, not the Tk root state. Confirmed by probing the actual HWND
  state with ctypes — no more guessing:
  • Overlay._build's ctypes call used top.winfo_id() as the target,
    which returns the inner Tk frame HWND, not the Win32 top-level.
  • We then OR-ed WS_EX_LAYERED onto that inner frame.
  • A layered window with no SetLayeredWindowAttributes or
    UpdateLayeredWindow call is rendered as fully transparent by
    the DWM compositor — everything we drew on the canvas was silently
    dropped, even though Tk reported mapped=True.
  • Meanwhile, Tk's own -alpha attribute correctly set layered
    attributes on the root HWND (alpha=235, topmost, etc.) — so the
    wrapper behaved correctly, it was just invisible.
• Fix: apply click-through flags (WS_EX_TRANSPARENT,
  WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW, WS_EX_NOACTIVATE) to the root HWND via
  GetAncestor(hwnd, GA_ROOT), and stop adding WS_EX_LAYERED
  ourselves. Verified via a Win32 API probe that the inner frame is no
  longer layered and the root keeps alpha=235, topmost=True.
• This was the bug all the way back from v0.3.0. Several "fixes" before
  this one (dropping -transparentcolor, un-withdrawing the root,
  adding the lift() dance) turned out to treat symptoms rather than
  the real cause.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🐛 Fixed

• Real root cause of the invisible overlay and invisible "Open full
  history" window. Since v0.3.0 the shared Tk interpreter root was
  withdraw()-n — totally hidden. On Windows, Toplevels of a withdrawn
  root (especially overrideredirect + layered -alpha windows) get
  their HWND created and Tk reports them as mapped, but DWM never
  actually composites them. The main window worked only because it
  was a simple non-layered non-overrideredirect Toplevel.
• Fix: stop withdrawing the root. Instead, size it 1 ×ばつ 1, position it
  at -32000, -32000 (far off any reasonable screen), set -alpha 0.0
  and overrideredirect True. It's invisible to the user but
  "visible" to Win32 so owned Toplevels render correctly.
• Overlay indicator is back. History window now opens where the user
  can actually see it.

🔭 Better diagnostics

• show_history_window() and the tray "History..." click now log
  breadcrumbs. Every history open path is traceable in stt.log.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🎨 Design

• Overlay now has the Apple-ish liquid-glass look: a slightly-lighter
  pill on the dark canvas (so the pill shape is actually visible), a
  1-px top-half highlight for the glass shine, a soft outer edge ring,
  and a faint red aura around the pill rim while recording.
• Overlay alpha lowered to 0.92 for a touch of real transparency.
• Pill grown by a hair (210 ×ばつ 36) to make room for the new layering.

🐛 Fixed

• "Open full history ..." button did nothing. It was firing correctly,
  but the new history window opened behind the main window. Now
  lift() + focus_force() + a 300 ms topmost flash guarantee it
  surfaces. Same fix applied to the Set-Hotkey dialog.
• Settings drawer drifting into view when you dragged the window.
  The drawer's off-screen position was pinned to the initial window
  width; resizing wider revealed it. Now the drawer always repositions
  to the current right edge on every <Configure> event, whether it's
  open or closed.
• Overlay topmost kept dropping after the layered-window attribute
  was set while withdrawn. Now re-asserted on every show transition.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🐛 Fixed

• Bottom-centre overlay indicator is back. v0.3.0 converted the
  overlay from its own Tk() root to a Toplevel of the shared UI
  root — which silently broke -transparentcolor (Windows' transparent
  key attribute is only reliable on top-level Tk() windows, not on
  Toplevel children). On affected machines the pill rendered as a
  hot-pink rectangle that didn't look like an indicator at all; on
  others it just didn't show. Dropped the transparent-corner trick in
  favour of a solid dark background — the pill still looks clean, just
  with a tight rectangular boundary indistinguishable from the pill at
  96 % alpha.
• Overlay now logs every show/hide transition and its initial geometry
  to stt.log so future overlay bugs can be diagnosed from the log.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

This release fixes the two bugs that plagued v0.2.x — "Show window" that
didn't open the window, and random crashes when opening the UI — by
rewriting the Tkinter architecture from the ground up.

🐛 Fixed

• Show window reliably works. The tray menu's "Show window" (and
  double-clicking the icon) now always restores the main window, no
  matter how it was hidden.
• No more random UI crashes. Opening history / update / what's-new
  dialogs while the main window is alive no longer destabilises Tk.

✨ Changed (under the hood)

• All Tk work now runs on a single dedicated UI thread owned by a new
  UIManager. Every window (overlay, main window, hotkey dialog,
  history, update, what's-new) is a Toplevel of the shared hidden
  root. Cross-thread work goes through a dispatch queue.
• Dropped the custom dark title bar on the main window — it was the
  source of the iconify / restore / taskbar-visibility flakiness. The
  main window now uses the native Windows title bar, darkened on
  Windows 11 via DWM. White on Windows 10 — acceptable tradeoff for
  everything actually working reliably.
• Removed ~150 lines of Win32 ctypes gymnastics (SW_RESTORE,
  SW_MINIMIZE, WS_EX_APPWINDOW, topmost-flash, SetForegroundWindow,
  manual maximize toggle, custom drag handlers) that existed only to
  paper over the multi-threaded Tk issues.
• use_native_titlebar config key removed (the native bar is always used now).

🐛 Also fixed along the way

• Preview pane's tk.Text(pady=(6, 10)) was an invalid argument (tuples
  aren't accepted as internal padding on Text widgets). Previously
  silently swallowed by the broken threading; now a proper int.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🐛 Fixed

• Clicking Show window in the tray menu now reliably restores the
  main window from every hidden state (withdrawn, iconified, or
  minimised via the Win32 API) — 5-step restore: deiconify →
  ShowWindow(SW_RESTORE/SW_SHOW) → recentre if off-screen →
  topmost-flash → SetForegroundWindow.
• Debug log now records every show / restore attempt so any remaining
  edge case can be diagnosed from stt.log.
• Reverted the minimise button to Tk's iconify() — the restore path
  handles every entry state, no need for a bespoke minimise flavour.

✨ New

• use_native_titlebar config option as an escape hatch. Set it to
  true in config.json to fall back to the native Windows title bar
  (dark on Windows 11 via DWM, white on Windows 10). The custom
  title bar remains the default.

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

🐛 Fixed

• Main window wouldn't come back after minimizing or closing — "Show window"
  (tray right-click) and double-clicking the tray icon now reliably restore
  it via the Win32 API. The custom-title-bar − minimise button also
  uses SW_MINIMIZE directly so it's consistent with the restore path.

💡 Heads-up

• Windows tray icons respond to right-click for the menu and
  double-click to open the main window. A single left-click does
  nothing (OS convention; can't be changed).

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

✨ New

• Real changelog: every release now ships hand-written user-facing notes
• "What's new" dialog on first launch after you update to a new version
• "What's new in this version..." entry added to the tray menu
• Current version now visible in the Settings drawer (under About)

🎨 Design

• Redesigned update dialog — custom dark title bar, version diff pill
  (v0.1.5 → v0.2.0), relative release time ("released 2d ago"),
  section-coloured bullets (mint = new, amber = design, red = fixed)
• Tertiary "See on GitHub" link added alongside the primary buttons

Downloads

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB).

STT (Speech to text) — held-key push-to-talk voice-to-text, fully offline.

First launch downloads the Whisper base model (~150 MB) into your HuggingFace cache.

See the README for configuration and troubleshooting.

Full Changelog: v0.1.5...v0.2.0