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What’s New in v1.7.1

Clearer Capture Controls, Timeline Editing, and Project Recovery headlines the latest release. Below is the full history — every feature and fix from the first cut to today.

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v1.7.1FeatureLatest

Clearer Capture Controls, Timeline Editing, and Project Recovery

  • Choose a display, window, or area directly on the desktop with an on-screen capture overlay. Each display has its own overlay, the selected target stays visible, and the recording HUD remains available while you choose. Capture, camera, microphone, and audio menus have more room, with a cancel control beside Record.
  • A tidier timeline keeps unused rows out of the way and gives occupied rows compact previews. Select clips and effects more directly, mark a range with the scissors tool, then choose Speed or Remove. Removed sections appear as seams, while selection, snapping, and clip editing have been refined.
  • Save and reopen local .screenbuddy projects with stronger recovery, media relinking, and durable project copies on Windows. Recording and export writes now handle partial disk writes and report failures instead of silently truncating data.
  • Cursor motion uses a spring-based glide with movement-aware tilt. Unstable native cursor shapes are filtered, click feedback is gentler, and auto-zoom groups activity instead of creating a separate zoom for every click.
  • Adjust the camera directly over the preview, including orbit, roll, distance, and horizontal or vertical film shift. The 3D MacBook frame, lid, lighting, and projected callout placement have been refined, and supported laptop previews now use direct GPU video textures.
  • Recording startup and HUD behavior have been repaired on Windows. Timed-out capture requests now stop late-arriving camera and microphone streams, and recording device cleanup is more reliable.
  • Audio decoding now keeps source data alive until decoding finishes. MP4 and GIF fallback decoding have bounded waits, cancellation wakes stalled export work, and export errors preserve the actual failure. Caption requests also handle overlapping starts and cancellation more reliably.
  • Download the installer for your platform to update. The published release currently contains the three desktop installers; automatic update delivery is not confirmed for this release.
v1.7.0Major

Scenes, a Storyboard, and a Real Lens

  • A project is a storyboard now, not a single clip. Record a second scene into a project you already have, import a video file, or start a blank title card — then drag the scenes into the order that tells the story. Each scene keeps its own backdrop over the project theme, gets a named entrance and exit, and can be duplicated or deleted from a right-click menu.
  • Templates you can actually use: 44 title and media cards across media, text, flashy text, big numbers, and logos — plus motion beats, multi-region shots, and whole-video starters, 74 places to begin in all, browsed on one axis with a live hover preview. They follow your brand instead of copying it — the brand kit now carries named text styles, a logo pair, and saved themes, so editing the Title style restyles every title already on the timeline, in the preview and the export alike.
  • The lens is a real depth of field, modelled physically and rendered in both the preview and the export rather than approximated in one of them. Point it with a focus anchor, size its sharp area directly, and watch the backdrop step back with it. The gather runs at a fixed resolution on purpose, so a 1400px preview predicts a 5120px export.
  • Camera moves got keyframes. A shot can hold several poses instead of one, you can drag a pose to re-time it, and inserting one splits the easing rather than resetting it. Setting the angle got direct too: a perspective pad in the Camera panel draws your recording as a tilted plane you drag, with a live yaw and pitch readout, and six named resting poses — Square, Lean left, Lean right, Three-quarter, Low hero, Top down — set where the camera sits in one click.
  • Callouts: an authored lightbox that composes with the layout — 3D popout, borders, backdrop blur, highlights, reveals, glow, and a shadow you can author. The Motion tab became Shots, with one home per gesture.
  • Captions finally work everywhere ScreenBuddy runs. Windows and Intel Macs never had the Whisper binary — the feature reported itself unavailable and nothing caught it through v1.6.0. Both are now built and verified against a transcription smoke test before they can ship. Transcripts also split into readable cues, and the Highlight preset does karaoke-style word timing with font, weight, and case controls.
  • Record a voiceover against a scene without leaving the editor, take by take. A failed chunk write now ends the take with an error rather than losing the audio quietly.
  • Auto-update genuinely works from this release. v1.6.0 was announced as the fix and was not — it shipped three bare installers and none of the manifest files electron-updater actually reads, so every v1.6.0 copy is still stranded and has to be updated by hand this once. This build carries the full payload for both platforms, and update failures now write to a diagnostics log instead of a console nobody can open.
  • The Windows installer is code-signed, so the install prompt names the publisher instead of saying “Unknown publisher”. SmartScreen still shows a warning until the download builds reputation — signing changes who it says you are, not whether it appears.
  • Sound: keyboard and cursor sound packs, auditioned before you commit, plus click and keystroke sounds baked from the recording itself when a project opens. A beat grid draws the track’s beats onto the timeline with every fourth tick as a bar line, so zooms, cuts, title cards, callouts, and annotations land on the beat; it is computed in the recording’s own time, so it stays honest after a trim. Eleven of the fourteen bundled tracks have a tempo that reproduces — the three ambient and acoustic beds get no grid rather than a guessed one. And in Effects › Cut, a Dead time panel finds silence and long typing runs: silence can be sped up or cut out, typing only sped up, because the viewer should still see the text appear.
  • Cuts live in Effects › Cut and leave nothing behind on the timeline. Touching cuts merge, which is how you extend one; restoring a cut brings back every effect it swallowed, untouched. Every row now shares one clock, so a region lands where the ruler says it does.
  • Windows parity, in earnest: Windows-shaped pointing-hand and I-beam cursors routed through one resolver so the preview and the export always agree, the editor chrome macOS already had, a fix for window recording capturing the whole desktop, a shortcut badge that no longer reaches for a macOS-only font, and license activation on machines without PowerShell.
  • The whole app was regraded onto a cinematic design language — one neutral, one accent, one radius scale, and a chrome that stays out of the way of your footage. Installers also lost about 126 MB of unreachable duplicates.
  • Removed: Instant (Live) mode. Two capture paths meant every feature was built, tested, and explained twice, and the editor path is the one that got the storyboard, the lens, and the templates. Record & Edit is now the single workflow, on both platforms.
v1.6.0Feature

A Gradient That Designs Itself, and an Auto-Update Fix That Missed

  • Correction (September 1, 2026): this entry originally said auto-update was repaired in v1.6.0. It was not. The release carried the three installers and none of the manifest files electron-updater reads, so a v1.6.0 copy still cannot see a new version and has to be updated by hand once. The genuine fix ships in v1.7.0, whose release carries the full update payload for both platforms.
  • Surprise me: the backdrop’s Gradient tab can now generate a gradient for you. It draws a random hue, pairs it with a harmonious partner, and holds saturation and lightness in ranges that flatter a recording sitting on top, so every result is usable. Recent draws stay as swatches.
  • The cursor no longer flickers when you click. With native cursor styling, an OS cursor-type change landing mid-click used to swap the drawn cursor — and because cursors have different hotspots, it jumped rather than just re-skinned. The shape is now held for the length of the click animation.
  • Update failures are no longer invisible: they are recorded in diagnostics.log instead of a console the production build strips.
  • For AI and MCP users: apply_edits gained the backdrop value vocabulary it never had, so an assistant can set wallpapers, colours, and gradients correctly. Captions gained a polish loop — generate_captions {apply: false} transcribes without touching your document, and get_transcript {format: "json"} round-trips cues losslessly. Several settings that silently reset their siblings when patched now merge properly.
  • Known limitation: caption generation runs on Apple-silicon Macs only, because the bundled Whisper binary ships for darwin-arm64. On Windows and Intel Macs the feature reports that it is unavailable rather than failing oddly. Writing captions still works everywhere.
v1.5.2Feature

Whole-Video Crop & a Much Faster Export

  • Crop your whole video non-destructively — drag and resize in the preview with 16:9 / 9:16 / 1:1 / 4:3 aspect presets, re-edit any time, and every effect (auto-zoom, 3D frame, lightbox, spotlight, edge-snap) follows the cropped frame.
  • Export speed repaired for narrated recordings: the WebCodecs fast path now kicks in from the first sample (~0.5 fps → 65–108 fps measured), with VP9 preferred when recording with audio.
  • Click effects land exactly on the cursor tip while zoomed, and auto-zoom regions now generate from your clicks automatically when a recording loads.
  • Sharper 3D device-frame preview and a fix for background music failing to load in some sessions.
v1.5.1Major

Real macOS Cursors, Elastic Click Effects & the 3D Camera

  • Real macOS cursors: the native cursor style now renders your OS’s actual cursor artwork, extracted at runtime and rasterized at 8× — razor sharp at any zoom level, with faithful replicas on Windows and Linux.
  • New elastic press click effect replaces the old ripple — a physical dent anchored to the exact cursor tip at the moment of the click, on by default.
  • Full 3D camera control: orbit widget, depth of field, camera motion blur, per-layer 3D tilt, and shots.so-style camera-path presets with buttery quintic easing.
  • Redesigned cursor presets with path smoothing and a soft 3D-raised shadow look.
  • 8 new background music tracks across corporate, epic, lofi, and tech-house moods; auto-transcription now filters out Whisper hallucinations.
  • Performance pass: the idle editor no longer renders on the GPU, and exports got faster via annotation decode caching and a ~radius× faster box blur.
v1.5.0Major

Instant (Live) Mode & the 3D MacBook Frame

  • Instant (Live) capture mode — a real-time recording experience with High / Max / Source bitrate tiers, live AnalyserNode audio meters, and focus-scoped global shortcuts.
  • Real 3D MacBook device frame built with three.js — silver or midnight models, animated 3D tilt regions, and a None / 2D bezel / 3D selector with Retina-sharp screen rendering.
  • Editor ⇄ Instant parity: shared backgrounds, canvas-rendered gradient previews, and matched webcam PiP behaviour (shrinks during zoom).
  • Major performance pass: playhead store, memoized panels, idle-gated preview ticker, decode-ahead export pipeline, and GIF decoding via mediabunny.
  • Exported audio re-encoded to AAC so MP4s upload cleanly to X / Twitter; hardened app quit/shutdown and a batch of crash/hang fixes.
v1.4.7Feature

Export HUD, Trim/Speed & Captions

  • Local Whisper captions transcribed entirely on-device (asset-gated).
  • Direct timeline trim and speed editing via a dedicated Cut / Speed tab.
  • Background music with real CC0 tracks and audio mixing on export.
  • Export HUD that always stays out of the recording, plus a faster export path and smoother webcam overlay.
v1.4.6Feature

Webcam & Playback Speed

  • Webcam preview during recording, with hover explanations.
  • Fast-play (speed-up) for selected sections of the timeline.
  • Automatic cursor-shape switching and audio included in exported MP4s.
v1.4.5Feature

License at Export & Edge Snapping

  • License activation moved to export time for a smoother trial-to-buy flow.
  • Edge-snapping algorithm that prefers continuous lines.
  • Windows timeline zoom-slider compatibility and refreshed typography.
v1.4.3 – 1.4.4Feature

Auto-Lightbox & Signed Builds

  • Auto lightbox generation and snap-to-edge in the editor.
  • macOS code signing and notarization wired into CI builds.
  • Public auto-update releases and enhanced UI typography.
v1.4.0 – 1.4.1Major

Spotlight, Lightbox, Permissions & Audio

  • Spotlight and lightbox attention effects join auto-zoom — the full attention stack.
  • Setup wizard for macOS permissions management.
  • Microphone capture and audio features for screen recording.
  • Content protection to keep sensitive windows out of recordings.
  • Area selection and recording-border windows.
v1.3.0 – 1.3.31Feature

Cross-Platform & Cursor-Free Capture

  • First Windows and Linux builds alongside macOS.
  • Cursor-free screen recording via the Windows WGC API and Linux X11 SHM.
  • Auto-zoom transition feature with keyframe interpolation.
  • A long run of crash-recovery, GPU-fallback, and cursor-tracking fixes.
v1.0 – beginningsMilestone

The First Cut

  • Initial ScreenBuddy release: screen recording with native macOS capture.
  • Smooth cursor tracking that replaces the system cursor for clean zooms.
  • Webcam overlay recording and the recording HUD.
  • Auto-zoom on clicks (1.25×–5×) and LemonSqueezy one-time-purchase licensing.
All downloads & release notes on GitHub →