What's changed.

0.1.21

Changed

• Changelog in the popover, after an update, opens the notes for the version you are now on rather than the top of the list. About's link opens the Mac releases on their own.
• Share to iPhone shows a code the iPhone's Camera app recognises: scanning it opens Hostbeam for iPhone with the host filled in, rather than having to find the app's own scanner first. Copy link puts the same link on the clipboard, to AirDrop or message to the phone. The iPhone app is still in testing — this is ready for the day it ships.
• Removing a host in Preferences → Hosts is a bin, not a minus. A minus next to a row that also expands reads as a collapse control, and got clicked expecting the drawer. Forgetting a paired device matches it.

0.1.20

Added

• Install updates automatically, in Preferences → General → Updates. Off unless you turn it on. Hostbeam downloads the update in the background and relaunches into it when you are not using it — never with the popover or Preferences open, while a beam is on its way, or while automatic beaming is on. A version past your year of updates is never installed.
• Check for updates automatically can be turned off, for a Mac that should not ask download.hostbeam.app anything. About → Check for updates still works.
• After an update, the popover says which version you are on now, with a link to what changed.
• Request a feature and Share Hostbeam, in About. The first writes to support the way Send feedback does, so a request lands in the same inbox. The second shares hostbeam.app on X, Bluesky, LinkedIn, Reddit or Hacker News, copies the link, or opens the macOS share menu for AirDrop and Messages.
• iPhone: Settings → About has Rate Hostbeam and Request a feature. After a few beams, the app asks for a rating through Apple's own prompt — only right after a beam from inside the app succeeds, and at most once per version.
• Send Feedback… in the menu bar menu, right above Quit.
• iPhone: long-press the app icon for Beam last screenshot and Send feedback.

Changed

• Skip for now skips an update everywhere, the dot on the gear included, until a newer version comes out. It is still there to install from About.
• Screenshots are scaled to 2000 px on their longest side by default, down from 2048, and the 2048 choice in Preferences → General is now 2000. Once a conversation holds more than 20 images, Claude refuses any image larger than that, which could end a long session with an agent in an error.
• Hostbeam no longer beams into a remote folder that belongs to another user. On a shared server, someone else can create `/tmp/hostbeam` before you do; beams would have landed where they could read them. You get a clear error and nothing is sent. A folder Hostbeam creates is now private to your account.

Fixed

• The Remote folder writable check in a host's diagnostics reported a failure for every folder, even ones beams were landing in. It now checks the folder for real.

0.1.19

Added

• Beam several screenshots at once. Drop a handful on the popover, or select them in Finder and choose Open With — they all go, and the whole thing counts as one beam, because the free tier counts gestures rather than files. The pasted line carries one path per screenshot. More than 25 at a time is refused outright rather than quietly trimmed.
• Recent gives every screenshot its own entry and folds a single drop into one row with a count on it. Click that row's thumbnail to step through the whole drop with the arrows or the ← → keys; its copy button takes every path. Preferences still lists them one by one.
• A beam of several shows how far it has got, in the popover and in the floating overlay, with a bar that fills to the count instead of sweeping back and forth.
• If a beam stops part-way — the connection drops, the host stops accepting — it says so instead of calling the whole thing a failure. What arrived is listed, copied and in Recent, and Hostbeam offers to send just the rest. That retry costs no extra beam: it is the same drop continuing.

Fixed

• Preferences could open as a blank window once Recent had built up enough thumbnails. They live in the settings file, which outgrew what the app can cache, and the window waiting on that gave up before drawing anything. Recent now keeps its newest thumbnails within a budget and drops older pictures rather than whole entries — and the window opens either way.
• "Try again" after a failed drop retries the files you dropped. It used to quietly beam your clipboard instead.
• Recent shows a thumbnail for a dropped JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP or TIFF, not just a PNG. Those used to beam fine and then sit in the list as a grey square with a file name. Pulled images get the same treatment. HEIC, HEIF and AVIF still show the placeholder — decoding them would mean shipping C libraries for a 38-pixel picture.
• Clean up on a host now removes the JPEGs, HEICs and other images it beamed, and the Storage figure counts them. Only PNGs were matched before, so anything else you dropped was sent and then left behind, with the size readout saying it was not there.

Changed

• A beamed file keeps the name it had. Drop `shot-2.png` and it lands as `hostbeam-<timestamp>-shot-2.png`, so you can tell screenshots apart in Recent, in the line you paste, and in the folder on your host. Awkward characters are replaced and long names trimmed, since the name has to be safe on the other end. A screenshot beamed from the clipboard has no file name and is unchanged.

0.1.18

Added

• Screenshots are scaled down before they are sent, to 2048px on the longest edge by default. A vision model downsamples on arrival anyway — Claude's limit is about 1568px — so the extra pixels of a 5K capture cost upload time, disk on your host, and tokens without ever being seen. Preferences → General sets the size, or turns it off. Files you drop are still sent exactly as they are.
• Beam screenshots automatically, whichever tool took them. Switch it on in the popover and every screenshot you take goes straight to your host — no second keystroke — whether you capture with ⌃⌘⇧4, CleanShot, Shottr, or anything else that leaves an image on the clipboard. It starts off every launch and switches itself off after an hour by default; Preferences → General changes that. The menu-bar icon carries a dot while it is on, so it is never running unnoticed. Nothing new is asked of macOS: Hostbeam watches a counter that tells it *something* was copied, and only looks at what once it is going to send it.
• An optional shortcut for that switch, so you can start and stop automatic beaming from any app without opening the popover. Off until you record one in Preferences → Shortcuts — three global combos claimed by default would be greedy on a machine that already runs a launcher and a screenshot tool.
• Bring back images your agent left on the host. Turn it on in Preferences → General and the popover gets a Check button: press it and any images written into that host's beam folder — a browser test's screenshot, a chart a script made — come back to your Mac, where a click opens them. Hostbeam's own uploads are skipped, so a check never re-downloads what you just sent. Nothing is fetched unless you ask, and images only: Hostbeam is a screenshot bridge, and whether it carries anything else is a decision for another day.

0.1.17

Added

• Beam a screenshot that is already a file: drop it on the popover, drop it on the Dock icon, or right-click it in Finder and choose Open With → Hostbeam. Images up to 50 MB, sent as they are.

0.1.16

Changed

• The QR code you point your iPhone at now has the Hostbeam icon in the middle, so it is recognisably ours rather than an anonymous square.

0.1.15

Fixed

• The popover no longer sits in a grey rectangle. Its drop shadow was wider than the window holding it, so macOS cut the shadow off square at the window's edge. Invisible over a dark desktop, plain over anything light.
• With "Show in the Dock and ⌘⇥" on, switching to Hostbeam with ⌘⇥ now opens the popover. It brought nothing forward before, since the app has no ordinary window.

0.1.14

Fixed

• "Launch Hostbeam at login" now lists Hostbeam under System Settings → General → Login Items → Open at Login, with its icon, like any other app. 0.1.13 had registered it as a background item under "Allow in the Background" instead; that entry is removed the first time this version starts.

0.1.13

Added

• "Show in the Dock and ⌘⇥" in Preferences → General → Startup. Off by default; when on, Hostbeam has a Dock icon and an entry in the app switcher, and a click on the Dock icon opens the popover. One of the two icons, menu bar or Dock, always stays on.
• A second global shortcut shows or hides the popover from any app. Record it in Preferences → Hotkey; it stays off until you do, and Clear turns it off again.
• Hostbeam can be installed with Homebrew: `brew install --cask punkabeat/tap/hostbeam`. It is the same signed build the download button serves, and the app keeps updating itself.

Changed

• The update panel in About lists what changed in every version since the one you are running, not only the newest.

Fixed

• "Launch Hostbeam at login" and "Show icon in the menu bar" now do what they say. They had been switches with nothing behind them. Launch at login registers a login item that System Settings lists under Login Items; if the switch was on in your settings, Hostbeam registers itself at its next start.
• A long host address (an EC2 hostname, say) no longer wraps onto several lines inside the popover's "Beam to" picker; it is cut with an ellipsis and the host name keeps its place. Hovering a cut address shows the whole of it, in the picker and in its dropdown.

0.1.12

Fixed

• iPhone: a freshly installed app could reach a host it was perfectly able to reach, and report it as unreachable. The phone's own SSH identity is created once, on first launch, instead of waiting for you to open the screen that happened to create it — so beaming works from the first host you add, however you got there.

0.1.11

Added

• Both: adding a host that isn't your default now asks whether it should be. Adding a host is usually the prelude to beaming to it, but the hotkey on the Mac, and the widget, shortcut and share sheet on iPhone, all kept beaming to the previous one — silently, which is how a screenshot ends up on the wrong server. Asked, never switched for you.
• Mac: adding a host from the SSH-config list now opens it, the way adding one by hand always did. Its settings — including which host is the default — were behind a row you had to know to click.

Fixed

• Mac: searching your SSH config for a host and adding it no longer answers with "no matching hosts" — it says you have added everything matching, and offers to clear the search. The host had simply left the list by being added.
• Mac: the pairing sheet fits the window again. Sharing a host to your iPhone meant scrolling to reach the part that authorizes it — the QR and the authorize step were stacked in a narrow column while half the window's width sat empty. They sit side by side now.

0.1.10

Added

• Mac: Hostbeam remembers an iPhone you have authorized, so putting it on another host is one click — you no longer need the phone in your hand or a key to copy across. Offered per host, never automatic: which servers your phone can reach stays your decision.
• Mac: each host says whether your iPhone is already on it, and offers to authorize it right there if it isn't — in the host's own row, next to Diagnostics and Open Terminal.
• Mac: Preferences → Hosts lists the devices you have paired, when each was last used, and lets you remove one.
• iPhone: adding a host offers the key that host needs, there and then.

Fixed

• Both: a host you have just added is checked straight away, instead of sitting grey until you think to press Test.
• iPhone: the authorize step asks the host before it tells you anything. If your Mac has already installed the key, the step no longer appears at all; if the host can't be reached, it says so, rather than telling you to add a key that may well be there already.

0.1.9

Fixed

• Mac: pairing your iPhone to a host on a non-standard SSH port now sends the right port. The QR always claimed 22, so the phone was set up with a port that couldn't connect — and the failure looked like the host being unreachable, which sent you looking at your network instead of the one field that was wrong.

Added

• Mac: the SSH port is shown next to a host when it isn't the usual 22, in Hosts and on the pairing sheet, so you can check what your iPhone will receive against what it actually got.

0.1.8

Added

• Both: a "What's new" link in About, for the full history rather than just the pending update.
• Mac: an update is announced in the popover itself now — one quiet line you can dismiss — instead of only a dot on the gear you had to notice and then go looking for. Dismissing it hides that version, not the next one.

Fixed

• Mac: the update dot on the menu-bar gear actually appears. The popover is a non-activating panel, so it never received the event it was waiting for, and the dot stayed stuck at whatever was known when the app started — which was nothing, since the first check runs shortly after launch.

0.1.7

Added

• iPhone: a home-screen widget and an iOS 18 Control that beam your latest screenshot in one tap, without opening the app first.
• Mac: see what an update contains before installing it — the release notes now appear in About, next to the Install button.

Fixed

• Both: a refunded or suspended licence can be removed from the app again. It previously reported "Couldn't reach the license server" — about a server that had answered immediately — and left the dead key in place, with no way to enter a new one.
• Both: a licence is described as covering 3 devices, Macs and iPhones together, rather than 3 Macs. Corrected everywhere, in all eight languages.
• iPhone: widget and Control taps reliably open the app and beam.
• iPhone: the Hostbeam action shows its icon in the share sheet.

0.1.6

Added

• iPhone: beam an image straight from the clipboard — the row appears only when there is actually an image to send.
• Both: Website, Privacy and Terms links, plus Send feedback, in About.

Fixed

• iPhone: result cards now anchor inside the action section instead of drifting out of place.

0.1.5

Added

• Both: see how much space Hostbeam's own screenshots use on a remote host, and clean them up — owner-invoked, confirmation-gated, and never touching anything Hostbeam did not upload.
• iPhone: appearance switcher (System / Light / Dark), matching the Mac.

Fixed

• iPhone: the appearance setting now applies to sheets as well as the main screens, and changes take effect immediately rather than on next launch.

0.1.4

Added

• iPhone: add hosts by scanning a QR code from the Mac at any time, not only during first-run setup.
• iPhone: beam from the share sheet in any app, via a Hostbeam action.
• Both: a friction-free way to get your SSH key onto the iPhone, authorised from the Mac.

Fixed

• iPhone: the uploading animation actually animates.

0.1.3

Added

• Mac: an update indicator — a dot on the popover gear and in About when a newer version is available.

0.1.2

Fixed

• Mac: "Open Terminal" opens Terminal rather than handing the connection to whatever claimed the `ssh://` URL scheme.

0.1.1

Added

• Mac: working About links, Send feedback, and Open Terminal.

0.1.0

• Beam the screenshot on your clipboard to your own server over your existing SSH config, and get the paste-ready URL back on your clipboard.
• Menu-bar app with a global hotkey and a floating beam HUD.
• Host discovery from your SSH config, per-host remote folders, reachability checks and diagnostics.
• Recent history, and a diagnostic log you can read and copy.
• Eight languages: English, French, Japanese, Spanish, German, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and Korean.
• Free tier of 5 beams a day, metered entirely on your own machine — no account, and no network calls for free users.