What's new with WhatPulse?

🎉 Breaking records: 6th beta 🏆

That’s right—this is the record-breaking 6th beta release! At this rate, we might need a beta for our betas. But hey, more polish, more stability, and more WhatPulse goodness for you!

🚀 Improvements

• Added a monitor to ensure the stats collector is always running. Collection can be interrupted by online backups, computer sleep, and other processes. If one of these takes too long, the collector might not have restarted properly—until now!
• Reworked auto-pulsing to handle (internet) failures better. It now backs off exponentially (retrying after 2 minutes, then 4, then 8, etc.) and continues trying every hour, rather than disabling auto-pulse until a manual pulse succeeds.
• Improved the download process for the GeoIP.dat file—it now updates only when necessary. Previously, some users saw a new download every time the app started.
• Added an advanced setting to toggle the raw input method in favor of the low-level input method. Raw input caused latency on older computers, so you can now disable it. If you do, WhatPulse will fall back to the older, less precise counting method.

🎉 New Features

• You can now close the main window with Cmd + W (macOS) or Ctrl + W (Windows & Linux).
• We've added a more functional titlebar that displays additional information alongside standard window buttons. We're going to have some fun with this in the future.
• The new titlebar now shows your WhatPulse Premium status.

🚀 Improvements

• If you opted not to install NPCAP, updates won't nag you about it anymore.
• Auto-updates are now disabled for WhatPulse Professional, giving you full control over when to update your deployment.
• We streamlined how WhatPulse detects your Windows version for better accuracy.
• WhatPulse now grabs higher-resolution application icons to upload to the website.
• Improved backend efficiency by gradually reducing the frequency of authorization checks over time when logging into the app.

🖥️ macOS Enhancements

• WhatPulse now tracks applications installed in /Library, where many modern helper apps live.
• We added a new way to better identify vendors of macOS apps, which will be used in the website.
• Fixed a crash when restarting gamepad support 2+ times by toggling the Input stats.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Some application paths were getting cut off after 129 characters. This is now resolved, and we ensure the real application name is used.
• If there's an issue with the WhatPulseMaintenanceTool (missing files, admin permissions, etc.), you'll now see an error instead of silent failure.
• Temporary fix for negative scroll counts caused by threshold miscalculations in previous beta versions.

🐞 Fixes

• Taming scrolls is what we do, all day all night, hey ho, hey ho. ⛏️

✨ New

• The navigation menu and submenus have been redesigned, making navigation easier and clearer.
• Added support for the latest Apple computers (2024 releases), i.e., the Mac Mini M4.
• The processor details on the Overview tab now include more information about your computer's architecture.

🛠️ Improved

• Smooth scrolling is now better handled to avoid counting too many scrolls.
• Improved how the app uses network stats for the dashboard (and Discord leaderboards) to provide more accurate results, especially on faster network cards.
• Improved the Windows watchdog service to ensure smoother and more consistent performance across different Windows versions.
• Safari stats on macOS are now supported on the website.

🐞 Fixes

• Fixed a rare issue where the app could crash if you navigated too quickly after starting it.
• Fixed a scenario where the app could stop collecting stats after performing an online backup.

Known issues ⚠️

• Mouse activity on trackpads on a Windows computer aren't counted yet.

🛠️ Improvements

• Better Gamepad support for macOS. The previous version did not count globally on all macOS versions. 🎮
• Add a "Resync time series" in the advanced settings that triggers adding the previous 2 weeks of data in the next pulse. Time series are mostly used in the dashboard and reports.
• Manage sleep and wake up events on Windows better, to make sure the collection engine is running smoothly after your computer wakes up.
• Prevent smooth scrolling to accumulate 100s of scrolls.

🎉 New Features

• Gamepad support for macOS
• Show the gamepad button names (A, B, L1, etc.)

🛠️ Fixes

• Fix mouse distance for a subset of mice
• Delay the settings save on Geek Window changes so the settings don't save every time you move a label
• Be nicer when pcap or npcap is missing and not incessently try to restart the networking counters

🏎️ Improvements

We had a visit from Speedy Gonzales and gave the WhatPulse app a serious speed boost. After some intense optimization, the interface runs about 1200% faster, eliminating lag when opening the app or interacting with it. It’s a major upgrade in app responsiveness that we think you’ll appreciate.

Other improvements:

• Lowered the default auto-pulse settings to 2 hours or 10,000 keys (new installs only).

🎉 New Features

Gamepad Support for Windows

Gaming clicks just leveled up! Button presses on gamepads now count toward your click stats. We've tested several Bluetooth controllers, and we’re eager to hear how your setup works.

Additionally, WhatPulse now distinguishes between multiple mouse buttons. Left, Middle, Right, and Other are still tracked, but you'll also see "Button x" labels for additional buttons we can identify.

This also should fix WhatPulse losing the input events when a resource hog application or game starts (i.e., GTA V, and others). I'll be looking for your feedback on this!

Other New Features:

• Total Column for Network Tables: Instantly see how much data you’ve sent and received.
• macOS Sequoia Recognition: Support for Apple’s latest OS.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fixed a crash that could occur when a computer woke up too quickly—especially when docking laptops.
• macOS: Corrected app icons for certain applications.
• macOS: Improved network interface detection, preventing Wi-Fi adapters from being misidentified as Ethernet.
• Translated the tooltip when hovering over the tray icon.
• Removed the profiles toggle from the tray menu for non-Premium users.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Some of the updates in v5.8.1 didn't get into the release. This is a re-spin, with the actual changes mentioned for v5.8.1. 😅

🎉 New Features

• Added filtering on Profiles when exporting data via the Export Wizard.

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix not updating the mouse details page button clicks and distance (issue started in v5.8).
• Fix showing old text in the Geek Window. On macOS this looked like a shadow of the text, on Windows it was clearer.
• Fix possible crash on malformed network traffic, only found in a virtual machines under certain situations.
• Fix the floating 'Start backup' button that could appear when Premium was being activated.

🎉 New Features

• Introducing Profiles! You can create profiles to group and keep track of stats during a specific time. For example, keep track of how much you're gaming, how many keys you pressed on a project, or working for a client.

• Create & manage profiles under the Settings tab and Profiles section.
• Activate and deactivate profiles in the tray menu.
• Filter profile stats when analyzing stats by selecting the profile in the top-right dropdown.
• Setting to automatically deactivate an active profile when your computer shuts down or goes to sleep.
• Setting to change the color of the WhatPulse menu icon to show that a profile is active.
• Integrate automation to activate and deactivate profiles using the client API to enable our Stream Deck plugin to physically turn profiles on and off. (Stream Deck plugin update coming soon!)
• Show the current active profile in the Geek Window using the %CurrentProfile% variable.

Note: Profiles is a WhatPulse Premium feature.

• To improve developer experience, we added an OpenAPI specification to the Client API, and http://127.0.0.1:3490/ is now using Swagger UI.
• Windows: Add an option to install for all users on the computer.

📈 Improvements

• Added a feedback notification when settings are saved, so you're 💯 sure they are saved.
• macOS: Improve network interface detection. Sometimes with computers with multiple interfaces, the last interface wasn't detected properly.
• macOS: Updated the Apple computers model database to recognize the newer models.
• Be more verbose about why connections are rejected from the client API in the HTTP responses. Also, add the dual stack localhost address by default (::ffff:127.0.0.1).

🐛 Bug Fixes

• Fix translating dates inside the facts.
• Make sure all updating the Geek Window transparency has immediate effect on all Windows versions, there were some versions where this didn't work and you had to restart WhatPulse for the transparency to take effect.
• Prevent the real-time network traffic graph to draw funky backtracking lines by clearing the data when it's not being updated, or the chart united (bits vs bytes) are changed.
• Windows: Fixed application metadata discovery (version, vendor, etc.) on some Windows versions.
• When ignoring an application in the uptime tab, the client asked whether you wanted to reset the Geek Window to its defaults. This fixes that misplaced message.
• Skip npcap installation when WhatPulse is being installed via the command-line. Otherwise it would still pop up a GUI for the NPcap installer.