Gryt 1.6.43

Two things in here started as requests on Discord. Looking at where the first one would go turned up something worse than the thing that was asked for.

Push to talk had no key

Somebody asked to bind hotkeys to mouse buttons. Checking where that would fit found that push to talk had not worked at all since 1.6.33 — holding the key did nothing, and had done nothing for ten releases.

A refactor had moved half of it into the voice package and deleted the other half, which happened to be the only thing listening for the key. Nothing was left to notice the key going down, so the app never registered the shortcut. It failed silently, which is why it lasted.

Push to talk, mute, deafen and disconnect are one thing now instead of four half-wired ones. And you can bind any of them to a mouse button, which is what was being asked for in the first place.

A screen share sends the applications you picked

Sharing your screen while sitting in another app's voice chat sent that app's audio out with it. Everyone in the Gryt call heard the other call.

You choose which applications a share carries audio from. On Windows that means capturing each one separately and mixing them before they leave, so picking two applications is genuinely two, not a screen's worth of sound with the rest hoped away.

Two people don't have to be two sizes

A call with exactly two people put one of you full size and the other in a corner. That's the right default for a conversation, and the wrong one when you're both doing something, or watching a share, or just sitting together.

There's a setting for it now. It stays on the old behaviour unless you change it, so nobody's layout moves under them.

Reporting a bug happens inside Gryt

Give feedback and Report a bug used to open a browser and ask you to sign in somewhere else before you could say anything. They also couldn't carry the things that make a voice bug diagnosable: which versions you're running, whether your own machine is hosting the server you're on, and the tail of the log.

Both open a form inside the app now. The report is signed with your identity key, so a server owner reading it can tell it came from who it says.

Clicking a tile stops taking over the app

Clicking a webcam closed both sidebars, stopped them opening on hover, and grew the call to two thirds of the window. That was never fullscreen but there was no telling the difference. A click now focuses the stream and leaves the rest of Gryt where it was.

The identity card is on messages

Hovering somebody in the member list showed when they joined, whether there's an account behind the name, how many times they've been renamed, and a fingerprint for this server. None of it reached the chat, which is the one place it matters: a message is where somebody pretending to be a moderator is most convincing, and nobody reads one and then opens the member list to compare fingerprints.

For people running servers

A server hosted from the app keeps the ports it was given. It used to re-probe on every start and quietly move to the next free one — sensible when something else has grabbed the port, and wrong for anyone who forwarded 5000 on a router, because the server comes back up looking healthy while nobody outside can reach it.

LAN discovery stops collapsing servers into each other. Both lists deduplicated on a field that isn't an identity and that almost nobody sets, so several servers on one network showed up as one entry. On the network this was found on, five were advertising and four looked identical.

Smaller things

Reopening the app after your sign-in expired says so instead of sitting on placeholders forever. The camera preview shows the resolution actually being sent rather than the one requested. A video tile that fails says so rather than connecting forever.

Gryt has a new mark: a violet owl on dark indigo, where it used to be a dark owl on a violet disc. The owls people have as avatars are untouched — that's a different drawing.

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The short version

Voice

• Push to talk works. It had done nothing since 1.6.33
• Push to talk, mute, deafen and disconnect can all be bound to mouse buttons
• A screen share sends audio only from the applications you pick, instead of everything the machine is playing
• A two-person call can have equal tiles instead of one large and one small. Off by default
• Clicking a stream focuses it without hiding the rest of Gryt
• The camera preview shows the resolution being sent
• A video tile that fails says so instead of connecting forever

Reports

• Give feedback and Report a bug open a form inside Gryt instead of a browser and a sign-in somewhere else
• A report carries the versions and the log tail, and is signed with your identity key

Trust

• The identity card — join date, whether there's an account, renames, fingerprint — is on messages, not only in the member list

Hosting

• A server hosted from the app keeps its ports instead of quietly moving to a free one
• LAN discovery lists every server on the network rather than collapsing them onto one entry

Under the hood

• Reopening after an expired sign-in says so rather than loading forever
• A new Gryt mark. Avatar owls are unaffected