Every build that reaches testers gets a few lines here — what arrived, what was fixed, what you will notice while using it. No implementation detail. What is marked next build is finished but has not gone out yet.
How a new build reaches you
TestFlight tells you by itself. If it does not, open it and tap Update next to SilentBox.
next build
Shared videos arrive, and unlocking says what it is doing
Videos shared from another app arrive. Sharing a batch of 78 items landed 74 of them, and only 7 of the 11 videos — the rest disappeared without a word. Content now travels to the vault in blocks instead of being held in memory whole, so the length of a video no longer decides whether it survives. The share panel also says how many of how many were saved, rather than reporting everything as done.
After Face ID you can see what is going on. Taking in a large batch takes minutes, and until now the lock screen simply stood there while it happened. It now says the vault is opening, and while shared items are coming in it shows how many of how many are done. Each item is saved as it arrives, so an import interrupted halfway keeps what it got and picks up the rest at the next unlock.
Select all. In selection mode, next to the select button — one tap instead of tapping forty photos. It takes exactly what is on screen: in an album only that album, while searching only what was found, in the trash only what is in it.
Search inside an album. The field sits at the bottom on iPhone and looks only in the album you have open. Searching from the album list still looks everywhere, which is the point of it: there you do not know where the thing is.
Videos play with sound, and their tiles say more. Sound plays even with the ringer switched off, tiles carry a play badge and the length, and videos that came in without a preview get one.
Albums can be renamed. It was the one thing the album menu could not do.
version 0.4.0
Albums that sort, a vault you can hear, and empty tiles gone
Albums can be sorted. By name or by how much is in them, in either direction, and the same switch is now inside an album as well — it always sorted newest and largest first and had no way to turn that around. That stays the default, so nothing reorders itself under you. The main album stays at the top whichever way you sort, and Czech letters sort as Czech: an album called “Čeká” lands between C and D, not after Z.
The main album is marked with a star. It behaves differently from the others — it cannot be deleted and it ignores sorting — and until now the only way to find that out was to notice that Delete album was missing from its menu.
Items that could never be opened are gone. Empty tiles that showed nothing and, when tapped, blamed the file type. Their content had never been written: iOS refuses writes to the vault while the screen is locked, and the app was doing exactly that when a silent notification woke it in a pocket. It no longer writes with the screen locked — whatever arrives then is picked up at the next unlock — and the ones already in the vault went to the trash, where they wait 30 days like anything else.
The vault can be read with VoiceOver. Photos in the grid were invisible to it, so the whole vault was a blank surface. Every tile now says what it is and what it is called, and the buttons in the toolbar have spoken names.
The trash behaves like a trash. One trash button instead of two, and what it asks about follows your selection — the whole trash, or just the items you picked. Both ask first; emptying used to happen with no confirmation at all. And after emptying you are looking at an empty trash, not at the main album under a heading that says Trash.
The look follows Apple's design kit rather than our own idea of it. Buttons are capsules, the close button on sheets sits top left where iOS puts Cancel, and the bottom bar in selection is three groups rather than three buttons crammed into the right corner.
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