After more than an year after, Boatswain 5.0 is finally out. It took me a long time to push it to the finish line, but I’m relatively happy with how it turned out, and it brings some nice features.
Let’s take a quick look at what’s new in this release!
New Devices
Boatswain 5.0 comes with support for 2 new device models from Elgado: Stream Deck Plus, and Stream Deck Neo.
Support for Elgato Stream Deck Plus came after the massively successful fundraising campaign from last year. A huge thanks to everyone that contributed to it!
As for Elgato Stream Deck Neo, I tentatively introduced support for it without actually having a device to test, so if there’s anyone out there that can test it, that’d be absolutely appreciated.
Support for Stream Deck Plus was probably the main reason it took so long to release Boatswain 5.0. The entirety of the app was originally written under the assumption that all devices were simply a grid of buttons. Introducing a touchscreen, and dials that act as buttons, required basically rewriting most of the app.
I used this opportunity to make Boatswain able to handle any kind of device, with any kind of layout. Everything is represented as regions in a grid layout. Simple Stream Deck devices just contain a button grid; Stream Deck Plus contains a button grid, a touchscreen, and a dial grid.
Keyboard Shortcuts
The new Keyboard Shortcut action allows executing any keyboard shortcut – or any keyboard event in general – on the desktop. This seems to work better than I could have anticipated!
Under the hood, this action uses the Remote Desktop portal be able to inject input on the desktop. Locally controlling the desktop was probably not on the original goals of the portal, but alas, it fit the use case perfectly!
Paired with folders, Keyboard Shortcuts are very powerful, especially for large and complex software with a large number of shortcuts.
Next Steps
This release might be a little disappointing as it took so long, and yet didn’t come as packed with new features. And yet, this was the largest release of Boatswain, perhaps larger than the initial release even.
I’ve reached a point where I’m mostly satisfied with how the internals work now. So much so that, right after the Boatswain 5.0 release, I was able to split the core logic of the app into an internal library, and hide device-specific details from the rest of the app. This paved the way for adding a testing framework using umockdev, and also will allow adding support for devices from other brands such as Loupedeck. If you have any Stream Deck-like device and wish to see it supported in Boatswain, now’s your chance!
For Boatswain 6, I personally want to focus on 2 major features:
- Make Boatswain use the new USB portal. One of my goals with Boatswain is to make it a reference app, using the most modern platform features available – and adding missing features if necessary. The USB portal is an obvious choice!
- Remove X11 support. This might come as a controversial decision, but I don’t personally use X11 anymore, do not support it, and will not work on fixing bugs that only exist there. As such, I think it’s fair to just remove X11 support from the apps that I maintain. Practically speaking, this just means removing
--socket=fallback-x11, and users can add back this permission using Flatseal; but please do not expect any kind of support anymore.
Some features that would be lovely to have, but we currently don’t have either because we lack platform support (i.e. portals), or simply because nobody sat down and wrote it:
- Tracking the current desktop state, such as the focused app, the session idle state, etc. This will be useful for contextual actions.
- Clipboard integration. In theory people can simulate this using the Keyboard Shortcuts action, but proper clipboard integration will work better and in more cases.
- Picking and launching apps from the host system. This needs to happen through portals which currently don’t exist.
- A fancy visual icon editor so that people can create their pretty icons in the app! If any UI designer is reading, please consider yourself assigned to this little project.
- Support for custom backgrounds in the touchscreen. I did not have time to finish it before the 5.0 release, but it shouldn’t be too hard to add it.
- A proper testing framework!
Finally, I’d like to thank my Ko-Fi and YouTube supporters for all the patience and for enabling me to do this work. The fundraiser campaign last year was a massive success, and I’m happy to see the all this progress! You all are awesome and I truly appreciate the support.
Keep an eye on this space as there may be more good news in the near future!
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