§ RELEASE NOTES
Changelog
Every version of Blackbar, newest first. Updates are checked manually — the app never phones home.
1.1.1
2026-09-18 · Redaction and export reliability
- Opaque redactions remain opaque when overlapping blur or pixelation. Overlapping protection areas preserve their combined area.
- Supported private-key blocks receive multiline coverage, and missing substring geometry falls back to the detected line. Automatic detection still needs review.
- Rescans preserve manual regions, edited detections and dismissals. Stale scan results cannot change a newer image.
- Export and clipboard copy use a frozen snapshot; pending scans block export, and failed OCR requires explicit manual review.
- Linux retains clipboard ownership after copying. Save, copy and activation-storage failures are reported accurately.
1.1.0
2026-09-17 · No more trial clock · redesigned burn · nine languages
- The 14-day trial is gone. Blackbar is now free to open, detect and redact with no time
limit; a licence unlocks export — saving and copying the redacted image. Evaluating it
properly should not be a race against a countdown, least of all for a tool whose whole claim is
that the pixels are really destroyed.
- Blackbar no longer stores anything in your keychain. The one item it used to keep was
the trial start date; with no trial there is nothing to anchor. Upgrading deletes the old item
on first launch, and the keychain prompt some users saw after a signing-certificate change is
gone with it.
- Same change on all three platforms — macOS, Windows and Linux behave identically.
- Licences activate per device. One licence covers up to three of your devices, on any
mix of macOS, Windows and Linux. Paste your key in Enter License, choose Activate this device, and
paste back the code from getblackbar.com/activate. Blackbar itself still never
goes online. Replacing a machine? Free its slot at getblackbar.com/devices.
- Upgrading from 1.0 keeps your saved key; Blackbar asks you to activate the device once.
- Export is now something you can watch. A light sweep passes across the image and
the detected regions collapse into solid black in its wake. What it leaves behind is the file
you send — the pixels are already gone. Skipped automatically if you use Reduce Motion.
- Two states, nothing else: dashed amber means found and still there, solid black means
gone. Severity moved into the sidebar as SECRET / ID / CTX / KEEP chips.
- Windows and Linux get the same editor as macOS — the burn sweep, the two-state
canvas and the new sidebar, plus hold Space to preview the burned result, 1–4
to switch style, and Alt-drag to draw a keep box.
- Nine languages on all three platforms: Deutsch, Español (México), Français, Italiano,
Nederlands, Português (Brasil), 日本語, 한국어 and 繁體中文. Blackbar follows your system
language; a picker overrides it. Detector names such as “JWT” stay in English on purpose.
- Open an image straight from the file manager: Finder or
open -a Blackbar shot.png
on macOS, Open With in Explorer and on Linux desktops. A .blackbarlicense file
activates the same way.
- macOS: ⇧⌘2 now uses Blackbar’s own region picker — drag to select, live pixel size,
Esc to cancel — instead of the system screenshot tool.
- Fixed: on Windows and Linux, dropping an image on the window did nothing, despite the hint
asking you to.
NOTICE
2026-08-24 · Release signing key rotated
- The release signing key was rotated to
7ABA D5C3 DC9D A715 8635 459C EDAA EF2F C716 4A46. The 1.0.0 downloads and their signed SHA-256 manifest were re-published under the new key.
- If you previously imported the old key (
69DF BA36 …CF58 7E79), signature verification will now fail until you re-import the current key from dl.getblackbar.com. This is expected, not a sign of tampering.
- The old key's private half was lost from the release keyring and no revocation certificate had been kept, so it is retired rather than revoked. It must not be trusted for releases from this date onward.
- Fixed: the download links in the license email were malformed and did not resolve.
1.0.0
2026-08-24 · macOS, Windows & Linux · x64 and ARM64
- Windows. Blackbar runs natively on Windows 10 and 11 — installer or MSI for fleet deployment. Capture hands off to the Windows snip overlay (Ctrl+Shift+2) and the region lands straight in the editor.
- ARM64 everywhere. Native builds for Windows on ARM (Snapdragon, Surface) and Linux ARM64 alongside x64 — no emulation. macOS is Apple silicon.
- System tray / menu bar. Blackbar sits in the tray on Windows and Linux and the menu bar on macOS, so you can capture without the editor open. Closing the window parks it there instead of quitting; Quit moved into that menu.
- The app icon is now the Blackbar mark — earlier builds shipped a placeholder.
- Fixed: on Windows, Capture opened a stream of console windows. That path no longer spawns any process.
- Fixed: the download links in the license email were malformed and did not resolve.
- Documented what Blackbar asks your system for — Screen Recording on macOS, and the single keychain item holding your trial start date. See Security & Privacy.
- Built-in screen capture on both platforms — grab a region and it loads straight into the editor. Capture + redact in one tool, no separate screenshot step.
- macOS: toolbar Capture button and ⇧⌘2, using the system region selector; macOS asks once for Screen Recording permission, which it requires for any app-initiated capture.
- Linux: Capture button and Ctrl+Shift+2, auto-detecting the desktop's region tool (grim+slurp, spectacle, gnome-screenshot, flameshot, maim, or scrot).
- The app window hides during the grab, capture stays local (Windows and Linux use a temporary file).
- Blackbar now runs natively on Linux (x86_64) — a single-file AppImage for any distribution, plus a .deb for Debian/Ubuntu 22.04+.
- 1:1 with macOS: identical detectors, redaction burn, metadata-free export and session pseudonyms, verified against the same test corpus.
- One offline Ed25519 license activates both platforms — the same emailed code works everywhere.
- Offline by design on Linux too: OCR models and fonts ship inside the package; the app opens no sockets.
- Editor parity: undo/redo, multi-select, move/resize, protect boxes, chrome scrub, clipboard copy/paste, and the reversible-style safety confirmation.
0.1.0
2026-08-21 · First release (macOS)
- Destructive redaction: exports overwrite pixels in a fresh bitmap and strip all metadata.
- 27 detectors — secrets (keys, JWTs, hashes, passwords), identifiers (IPs, hostnames, emails), and contextual paths.
- Consistent session pseudonyms: the same value becomes the same label across every screenshot.
- Four redaction styles; solid fill default, blur/pixelate flagged reversible.
- Three themes: Midnight, Daylight, Hacker.
- Offline Ed25519 licensing, 14-day trial, no network entitlement in the binary. (The trial was removed in 1.1.0 — see above.)