Thank you, Flavortown and HackClub

This is going to be my last devlog ever on ft.
I know, nobody is going to read this because I’ll ship a bit earlier and then all the people trying to be “famous” will be shipping really late so that they can have their message on the top, but wtv.

§

I’m so glad that I discovered this organization called Hack Club where I can win prizes for doing what I love, programming useful and fun software, in C++.

I’ve participated Flavortown on Christmas day , with all the experiences and fails I had from previous big ysws events such as High Seas, with the fails being that I discovered this event too late and I’d just discover HackClub as whole

and then SoM, which I was able to win many Digikey credits and from there buy a RPi5 with IFixIt kits

In I started to put my focus on making good and usable out-of-box software, with one of them being indeed oshot. This was my first program ever that involved GUI primarly and being user-friendly first.
I managed to get so so many cookies, prizes and a cooking achivement cuz I switched my focus from complex to good programs demos.

§

While flavortown had some, tremendous, starts and especailly vote/payout issues that was affecting everyone, me included, the devs always listened and were always trying to fix the issues in the vote algorithm. It wasn’t perfect obv, but it was good enough.

I hope that the successor of being stardance will have a good start and learned lessons from ft regarding votes.

Thank you so much Hack Club for all these opportunities you are giving to teens so that they can cultivate their passion with rewards

See you in the next ysws event, hackclubers!

fixed the render order.
rendering in order:

1. The background screenshot/image
2. Annotations
3. Dark overlay with selection borders
4. Annotations toolbar
5. The text tools window

Changelog

• tool: fix render order of annotations and selection border
• workflow: add osd model in package
• tool(misc): remove duplicated variables and code + fix annotation toolbar buttons
• fix windows compile

Added counter bubble annotation

You can see from the background how many make took to test the annotation

and running python3 scripts/icon_generator.py && cat tool_icons.h >> include/tool_icons.h && touch src/screenshot_tool.cpp && make for just fixing the icon logo+size

Changelog

• annotation: counter bubble: fix count
• misc: move from static_cast() to type()
• annotation: add counter bubble + refactor switch case in GetFinalImage
• cache: fix crash on release build

added cache, so that you can store things such as previous session color from annotation color picker.
it auto saves when exiting, and please do not edit these if you don’t know what you doing. maybe remove the files/directory if you wish

Changelog

• core: introduce cache
• clip: make g_clipboard live globally on stack
• libs: update fmt, clip and imgui
• build: improve Makefile builds
• libs: clip: remove x11

Changelog

• tool: add CTRL+A shortcut to select the whole in-bound image
• annotation: make toolbar position more robust

There has been many changes that should be noted, though some of them are worth mentioning:

• oshot can now save/copy the whole screenshot if you don’t make a selection
• added option to use CTRL+C instead of CTRL+SHIFT+C – now it won’t copy the image if the cursor is focused on the text tools window
• BREAKING: removed socket implementation from linux since we are now using xclip on X11 instead for preserving the clipboard lifetime without having the systray launched.

Changelog

• tool: save/copy whole screenshot if no selections
• config: add option to use CTRL+C to copy selections
• tool: prefs: update “Output filename format” example text only when edited
• FUUHHH
• fix compile on windows and mac
• core: remove socket and ipc stuff
• clip: use xclip on linux
• fix appimage build

Added wordle status keyboard

Changelog

• games: wordle: add keyboard letter status
• games: wordle: improve the code a bit more
• fix windows build
• games: create game.hpp and refactor
• Update README.md

added image output format option

so that you can save a selected region as you’d like

Also did you know this is devlog #60

I didn’t do much work on the usage, though I did some refactor of the codebase to use the new rgba_t struct instead of several r/g/b/a ints, with all the shifting confusion because mfs couldn’t make a bare standard all across platforms…

Welp something I did add and fixed is the hot loading of some settings, and the addition of the theme style and filepath settings.

Changelog

• tool: prefs: add theme style and path settings + fix hotloading
• tool: prefs: sync most changes at runtime
• refactor: introduce rgba_t to replace repetitive r/g/b/a byte unpacking

Oshot ricing!!!!

I have read some of your votes suggestions, and decided to listen to them. introducing:

Theme customizations!

Now oshot is no longer just a boring black and blue window, you can finally rice it however you like it! And also be able to match your rice setup, and sharing it on a famous subreddit with a name (I think) violates the CoC of hackclub…

Introducing Preferences window!!

Back from a VACatation indeed. Time to get working on my projects till the end of the event, though no lockin sidequest becuase I have missed week 1

Shipping now :)

More soundtracks and SFX!

Shotout to this playlist for 2048, wordle and menus

Changelog

• music/sfx: bring more!!
• some fixes

Introducing Game SFX/Soundtracks!

Please if you want to suggest in the comments any soundtrack or better sfx, please let me know

Introducing 2048!

It was pretty simple really, with still some of the code being taken by snake and tetris. By the way I was trying to loose and I have reached 256 lmao

Changelog

• games(2048): remove pause since it’s a blocking game
• games: add 2048

Introducing Tetris!

Rock Paper Scissors was boring af and honestly was just a test subject that should’ve been replaced since long ago.

To speed up development, I’ve recycled code from snake.
Btw sorry for long gameplay lol, it was really fun to play

Changelog

• games: add tetris
• games: remove rock paper scissors

Improved UI and decorations, with customizable colors too!

Yeah it looked kind of ugly before and I kinda regret shipping it before, so I have decided to rewrite and improve the general UI with some more decorations and colors customizations!

Things you can notice in the video:

• The main menu has a colored logo and tagline below it, with also a thin separator line. Also now the selections have a marked yellow color for more accessibility. also a version watermark in bottom-right corner.
• The settings now have the option to edit the classic terminal colors across the program
• The items in the games menu now have their own distinct color, along side a small description of the game underneat them.

added setting menu scrolling for window sizes that are too small

Changelog

• add settings menu scrolling + other stuff
• wordle: correctly handle duplicate letters in get_states
• games: rewrite static variable/functions to class members
• workflow: use ubuntu-22.04 for better compatibility

Flip the annotation toolbar when is almost outside of the window capture (screen)

Changelog

• tool: flip annotation toolbar when almost outside of screen
• chore: kind of more optimization

I’ve decided to participate to the optimization sidequest, and thus I have gone to the lookup of redundant code and memory allocations that were silently slowing up the program. You can see the fixes in b9651a4 (3rd changelog entry), with the addition of the Optimization section in the readme. Since i’m not actually super great with english, some parts have been reworded with claude for a clearer explaination without too many wordplays.

Releasing v0.4.3 soon and ready for the ship!

Changelog

• fix windows build
• Update README.md
• perf: reduce redundant work and memory allocations across capture pipeline
• workflow: refactor
• misc: fix inconcistency of drawn annotations

Added snake game, with a new UTF-8 (optional) style

I have decided to change a bit the gaming style to support UTF-8 characters along side ASCII (normal) ones, instead of setting a big and almost no colors. I’ll update the “Rock Paper Scissors vs CPU” and “Tic-Tac-Toe” games soon.

Thanks to claude for making the apple spawn in a proximated near position instead of far away like my code did

Changelog

• settings: make utf8 gameplay optional + add some other snake settings
• introduce snake
• screw iostream
• workflow: refactor
• chore: use TB_KEY_ESC (same thing as 27)
• settings: add general settings with custom assets path
• render: improve dynamical position rendering for all items

Released v0.4.2 as a patch release for stabilizing OCR text extraction, with an addition to multiple fonts usage (you can checkout the 2 previous devlogs for more)

Changelog

• Release v0.4.2
• misc: avoid using namespace spdlog;
• args: add –override + font: add default if empty string
• config: improve fonts acquiring
• misc: some coding stuff

Included support for multiple fonts usage, which can be necessary if the default one doesn’t support the extracted language

Changelog

• Add support for multiple fonts (#6)
• misc: just check if font path exists

Fixed detection of some special characters, and also improved a bit the UX (the font in the video isn’t be the default one).

Changelog

• ocr: offload more guesswork to tesseract (#5)
• tool: improve error view + add details tree on ocr
• misc: forgot to remove from translation purge
• ocr: return grayscale from preprocess_pix instead of 1bpp

oshot v0.4.0 has been released!

Will soon make ship, I just wanna test if things works just fine as a first impression

fixed bogus transparent background, and also fixed error sets when capturing from systray

Changelog

• tool: ocr: fix refresh of models for retriving potential errors
• idk
• render: fix bogus transparent image background
• annotation: add CTRL+Z undo annotation shortcut

made text annotation input color the same as when placing it. This can be useful if typing in certain backgrounds colors, for example entirely white ones and you can’t see what you typed

This devlog is used for reporting every bug fixes I have fixed since v0.4.0-rc1 release.

Changelog

• appimage: try to fix linking error from some missing libraries in bundle
• windows: fix auto-quit after capturing from systray
• log: use our own fmt bundle
• log: complete implementation with oshot.log + fix compile
• workflow: continue other OSes build even 1 fails
• clipboard+socket: remove htonl() and ntohl() + fix threading and guard clipboard sender on connection state
• log: implement spdlog (WIP)
• tool: fix stale when opening a new image while having an ann. active
• Release v0.4.0-rc1
• glfw: put the RAII guard in util.hpp
• glfw: glfwTerminate() everywhere

added option to not render annotations in Image scans (OCR, QR/Barcodes text extractions)
modifiable in the config.toml file too

Changelog

• config: add option for optionally rendering anns. in image scans
• metal: remove some OpenGL only functions
• capture: fix multi-capture on macos and windows
• capture: make KDE a separate session
• menu: about: add copy text button

Improved the Help->About window, with logo, centered text and a “More Details” for giving informations when reporting bugs/issues

I wanted to put in this devlog the changes I have done which are mostly fixes on mutli-monitor setup captures, new PRs being created and merged (thanks for the interest!) and other fixes for the new upcoming v0.4.0 release.

Stay tuned!
the image below was taken when there was an issue with multi-monitor setup capture, that’s now been fixed!

Changelog

• capture: try to fix on KDE plasma
• capture: remove portal capture + fix (hopefully) multi-monitor capture
• build: fix
• socket: remove lock at exit
• tool: capture only the focused monitor + other things
• glfw: fix ignored hints
• systray + socket: use AF_UNIX (#3)
• wayland: fix hanging with every text/image copy (#2)
• windows: trying to fix exit lag issue on some machines
• annotation: settings: make the loupe crosshair centered
• chore: rename main_tool_glfw.cpp -> main_tool_opengl3.cpp
• chore: some variables re-names
• Update README.md

Translation has been purged from oshot.
It was a PITA trying to make it work and stable without API keys and subscriptions. The only solution would be to use libretranslate, but I doubt anyone would host a kinda heavy server for just making a screenshot tool translation work.

But as William Afton says: I always come back

Changelog

• text tools: purge translation and anything related

Scale the input text based on its font size

Though the default font (ProggyClean) won’t work since it’s not meant to scale all

MacOS support has arrived

Oh my God. What a journey.
Having to refactor from GLFW to Metal just for macOS was a great PIA. I’m glad the results has shown off though.

It is on a separate branch and will be merged to main after some issues have been fixed. Soon will post the video demo too.

Shootout to @Hridya for testing my program on his mac and allowing me to post a devlog using his screenshot as a preview.

btw I think this took MORE than just 5h

Now you can open/close the text tools window

changeble by config too

Changelog

• config: make text tool window closable/openable

Fixed dragging selection

Fixed text and other annotation rendering with colors

In the image from the previous devlog, the compression algorithm made the text rendering super dirty

Implement text annotation

Changelog

• tool: make shortcuts work outside of the text tool window
• annotations: text: fix not rendering in image
• chore: implement error_v() and get_v() in Result<>
• annotations: text: implement custom font settings + some codebase changes
• annotations: add text

Upgraded the color picker to next level

Changelog

• annotations: refactor color picker to next level
• args: integrate back –tray for more control
• tray: fix socket lock
• chore: rename std::filesystem -> fs
• windows: fix compilation and crash
• main: switch –tray to –gui

Image 1: Implement color picker

Image 2 (now) and 3 (old): Fix PSM autodetect + improve preprocess for a better OCR result

Changelog

• annotations: implement color picker
• annotations: forgot to implement filled rectangle and circle in GetFinalImage()
• ocr: improve preprocessing for dark-bg and RGBA images
• fix incredibly stupid bug

Shipped first bug fix release!

Changelog

• refactor render logic
• Release v0.1.0
• introduce settings
• silence some warnings
• Update README.md

Introduce settings

fixed font path search

Changelog

• fix font path search
• remove socket logic on windows since it’s useless
• re-integrate back the socket sender

finalized wordle game (sorry for non-centered recording)

Changelog

• make every scene/game render() blocking by default
• finalize wordle
• fix colors on windows and wordle
• release beta2

implementing wordle, still needs to add scores and errors and such

cliboy has been ultra debloated

we did it

I see….. rewritting from scratch by hand without AI fixed the issue….. Imma removethe AI usage tag soon maybe
(yes I know the blue thing, fixing it)

wanna be honest, the hours I have logged in this devlog has been just a waste of time for trying to rewritte the TerminalDisplay API (the one that is used for rendering fonts, texts and colors) from notcurses to termbox2.h, which it was giving MASSIVE issues when trying to set a terminal font. No amount of usage from ChatGPT, v0.app and deepseek has helped me at all.

this meme summarizes what I did in this hour.
I’m sorry windows users but I’ve gone through hell with cmd.exe

Refactored codebase to be more modular and easier to add games

time to get back to work on this

Changelog

• add filled rectangle and circle
• improve annotations render + some perfomances

made thickness variable per tool, also added some new options such as the alpha ones

Introduced annotations

now my program can be an alternative to bloated flameshot

Changelog

• refactor icons
• introduce annotations
• make window actually fullscreen
• fix displaying multiple errors

Added delay (ms) for capturing screen

program so fast that they told me to slow it down lol

dev stuff: added better result return in functions. instead of unknown failed errors, let’s actually be a bit more precise (a bit buggy ik, fixing it when I want. edit: fixed)
also added the —debug flag in releases build too for reporting issues

oshot v0.3.0 finally released!

Added manual folder selection, with drag-n-drop too

also fixed various crashes related to keybinds and others

Refactored the system tray in native format

Thus python is no longer required

added result details

such as confidence score, and symbology of detected barcode
shootout to https://qr.bgtulk.dev/

Fixed the window hovering incosistency

Add Open Image option

I wanna also thank everyone who voted for my project, the next ship will happen soon.

decided to make a bunch of code cleaning and reformatting, along side adding the portal screenshot capture as fallback on linux. Overall, these changes have been just some fixes such as the refactor of DXGI capture on windows, and code style reformatting. Once the payouts are developed, i’ll add some features and release with a new ship

Added QR/Bar code support

most of the time was spent on some bugfixes and releases, this implementation took like 30mins if not less thanks to zbar

Add option to override PSM auto detection

Also made lots of improvements and fixes to the perfomance and security of the app

Improved OCR quality based on the image size

Resizing/Moving selection added

background song is elite ball knowledge

Now you can open oshot with other images

Even from stdin

added shortcuts + copy image
also reworked the network listener

added mini launcher and copy text

Should’ve been here since before

fixed multi-line translation + add option to edit OCR output

New Menu bar

Improved error handling + continuos checks

Thus improved a bit the perfomances too

Better Translation support + Custom Font based on language

ditched the bash script for better perfomance and support on both windows and linux

Custom fonts support added

Windows Support on the way

Misc: configuration for default settings + cli –arguments

Added Translations

(todo: different languages font support to be added)

added custom settings (implementing saving these soon)

fixed window padding

Local OCR with Tesseract

has flameshot finally come to wayland?

managed to aquire x11 fullscreen screenshot, testing to wayland later. The PPM saving is just a test.

still learning glfw+opengl3+imgui