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Another update with mainly bug fixes, translation updates but also some smaller tweaks. Unfortunately I did not tackle the big issue of ImageMagick having too strict resource limits on some systems (Ubuntu and Debian mainly), but I did not want to delay this release further.

The changes in this release:

• feat: Finish saving file when closing window while rendering (#142)
• feat: Highlight file when launching Dolphin file manager
• recording: Use raw video for recording GIF with GNOME Shell recorder (this is identical to how FFmpeg recorder works) (#116)
• fix: Failed to record MP4 when dimensions where not divisible by 2 (#141)
• fix: Make sure recording starts after countdown is hidden (#146)
• fix: Closing window while recording could leave temp files behind
• fix: KDE Plasma and XFCE were showing an empty button in notification
• fix: Place close button on the left on all desktops configured this way (#129)
• fix: Cinammon showing notification with icon
• i18n: Indonesian and Serbian translation
• i18n: Updated translations for Basque, Esperanto, French, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian and Ukrainian
• docs: Added man page (#136)
• package: Removed dark theme hack for Flatpak (proper theme support is part of Flatpak now)
• package: Updated dependencies for Flatpak and Snap packages

A small update to Peek with a couple of fixes and minor improvements and updated documentation. There is now experimental Snappy support, too. Changes:

• recording: Use H.264 baseline profile for MP4 for increased browser compatibility (#111)
• recording: For WebM GNOME Shell recorder use same quality settings as with FFmpeg encoder
• ui: Show only the most recent "file saved" notification to avoid spamming the desktop with notifications.
• fix: Set temporary directory for ImageMagick
• fix: Always launch with GDK_BACKEND=x11 for Wayland
• fix: Detect if global menus are disabled in Unity when running as Flatpak / Snap package
• i18n: Updated translations for Arabic, Czech, Russian and Spanish
• i18n: New translations for Basque and Esperanto
• docs: Added Debian instructions to build custom package
• docs: Added Snappy install instructions (development builds only)

This is the 1.0 release of Peek, the simple screen recorder for animated GIFs and now also WebM and MP4.

The highlights of this release are:

• Wayland! Peek now works in a GNOME Shell Wayland session
• WebM and MP4 are supported as output formats in addition to animated GIFs
• Keyboard shortcut to start / stop recording
• Use built-in GNOME Shell recording functionality instead of FFmpeg when running in GNOME Shell
• Various resource usage optimizations, which should avoid most of the issues people ran into while recording
• Peek can now easily be installed with Flatpak on all distributions supporting it.

Thanks again to all contributors who provided pull requests, reported bugs and feature requests and translated Peek in 19 languages.

Installation

See the installation instructions for details on how to get and install Peek. I maintain the Ubuntu PPA, Arch AUR packages and Flatpak repository myself, so they are already up-to-date. Other package repositories might take a while until they get updated, but you can always install from source, too.

What comes next?

Peek has now all the features I originally imagined for a complete release, hence the 1.0 version number. But this does not mean it is finished, there are many great ideas how to improve Peek. As I stated earlier and want to keep Peek focused on its main task of creating short screencasts of screen areas.

My immediate plan going forward is as follows:

1. Make a small follow up release with updated translations and, if necessary, bug fixes soon. I need your help here, so if you use Peek please report all issues you find. And if you speak a language other than English, consider to help translate Peek.
2. Improve the UI of Peek to give better feedback on progress and errors and allow easy access to recorded files (see https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/21, https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/49, and https://github.com/phw/peek/issues/58)

After that I would like to evaluate more advanced feature requests and see if and how they could be implemented. But development will likely slow down a bit at that point, as I have to focus more on other projects.

Full changelog

• recording: Support GNOME Shell screencast DBus service. Allows recording under GNOME Shell with XWayland (#33)
• recording: Support WebM and MP4 as output format (#73)
• recording: Added option to not record mouse cursor
• recording: Default frame rate is now 10fps
• ui: Recording can be started / stopped via configurable keyboard shortcut (#23)
• ui: Add --start, --stop and --toggle command line parameters to control the recording
• ui: Add --backend command line parameter to manually choose recording backend (gnome-shell, ffmpeg or avcodec for now)
• ui: Hide button label on small window width. Allows for smaller recording area.
• misc: Use org.freedesktop.FileManager1 DBus service for launching file manager.
• fix: Fixed a possible race condition that could lead to empty or broken files (#1)
• fix: Moving Peek partially outside the visible area does no longer break the recording. Instead the recording area is clipped to the visible part (#64)
• fix: Starting recording in maximized window relocated the window on Ubuntu Unity (#74)
• fix: When canceling the file chooser also stop the background processing of the image (#96)
• i18n: Many updated translations, with Czech, Dutch, German, Lithuanian, Polish and Swedish 100% completed
• package: Peek is available from a Flatpak repository (#85)
• package: Provide AppStream data
• docs: Much improved README

Just a small hotfix since I forgot to add all the new translations to the installation.

Changes

• i18n: Fixed Czech, Croatian, Korean, Dutch and Chinese (Simplified) not getting installed

The Peek GIF screen recorder has a new release 0.9. The highlights of this release are the reduced temporary file size, improvements for Ubuntu users and many new translations. Peek can now be easily installed on Ubuntu using the Peek PPA on Launchpad. See the README for details on this. Also there have been some important fixes to integrate Peek better into the Unity desktop.

Thanks to everybody who contributed to Peek by providing patches, translating and reporting bugs and feature request.

Changes

• ui: Fix problem of app menu not available on certain desktop configurations (#6)
• ui: Fix display of desktop notifications on Ubuntu Unity (#55)
• ui: Close button is displayed left on Ubuntu Unity (#67)
• ui: Workaround for gray borders under unity (#11)
• ui: Smaller border around recording area
• recording: Add resolution downsampling option (#32)
• recording: Minimal frame rate is now 1fps
• recording: Smaller temporary files by using libx264rgb instead of huffyuv (#2)
• recording: Support for avconf, if ffmpeg is unavailable (#56)
• i18n: Chinese (Simplified) translation
• i18n: Croatian translation
• i18n: Czech translation
• i18n: Dutch translation
• i18n: Italian translation
• i18n: Korean translation
• i18n: Norwegian Bokmål translation
• i18n: Portuguese (Brazil) translation
• i18n: Swedish translation
• fix: Fix possible crash when loading schema from local folder
• fix: Fix temp file deletion warning
• package: Peek is installable via Ubuntu PPA (#15)
• docs: Update installation instructions
• docs: Added FAQs

The new release of Peek, the simple screen recorder for animated GIFs, improves the user experience when finishing the recording and brings some important fixes if Peek was installed into locations other than /usr. Also Peek is now translated into 11 languages.

Changes

• ui: Change button text while rendering (#24)
• ui: Add a --version command line argument
• ui: Show file choose directly after recording stops. This way rendering and choosing the file take place in parallel (#30)
• recording: Correctly scale recording area on HiDPI screens (#20)
• i18n: Arabic translation
• i18n: Catalan translation
• i18n: French translation
• i18n: Lithuanian translation
• i18n: Polish translation
• i18n: Portuguese (Portugal) translation
• i18n: Russian translation
• i18n: Spanish translation
• i18n: Ukrainian translation
• misc: Added generic name and sub category to desktop file
• misc: Added uninstall target, so source installations can be uninstalled with make uninstall (#28)
• fix: Fix DBUS service file if installed to location other than /usr (#13)
• fix: Locales not loaded if not installed to /usr due to missing locale path

Contributors

This is the first release of Peek including contributions by multiple developers and translators. People who contributed to this release in no particular order:

• Matthias Mailänder
• Mohamed Sakhri
• Victor Kropp
• Stefan Adams
• Dawid Dziurla
• Adolfo Jayme-Barrientos
• Alexander Wunschik
• Holman Calderón
• Yoan Malié
• Moo
• Steeven Lopes
• Boris Sikora

Thanks a lot to everybody who contributed and also to all the people reporting issues and feature requests.

• ui: Fixed window size not saved properly in Gtk 3.20 (#5)

• build: Fixed building with Gtk 3.14
• build: Allow building with Gettext < 0.19 (disables localized .desktop file)

• ui: Moved record / stop button to header
• ui: Show desktop notification after saving, with ability to open the file manager from there
• ui: Use custom styling for recording area overlay
• i18n: .desktop file gets translated

• ui: Removed unused auto save option from preferences dialog
• fix: Try to always open the file manager, not the image viewer
• general: Changed app id to com.uploadedlobster.peek due to the previous using the wrong domain name by default. This also resets existing settings.
• i18n: Updated German translation