LinwoodButterfly Dreamy Duskywing (2.6.2) released
🎨 Powerful, minimalistic, cross-platform, opensource note-taking app
Butterfly 2.6.2 is here!
This release is a little different from the previous updates. While there are several new features and improvements, the main reason for releasing 2.6.2 now is an important security vulnerability discovered in Flutter.
I wanted to make sure that Butterfly users receive the fix as quickly as possible, especially those relying on WebDAV or Nextcloud to synchronize their notes.
Most of these changes were already explained in the 2.6.2-rc.0 release post.
Highlights
🔒 Important security fixes
🤝 More control over collaboration
💾 More flexible backups and thumbnails
🪟 A more customizable workflow
🐛 Stability and selection fixes
Important security fixes
This is the most important reason to update to Butterfly 2.6.2.
A critical vulnerability involving compromised certificate authority keys could allow attackers to intercept HTTPS connections under certain conditions.
For Butterfly, this potentially affects synchronization with WebDAV and Nextcloud servers on Android, Windows and certain Linux environments.
The vulnerability was not specific to Butterfly, but affected applications using Flutter’s networking implementation.
Butterfly 2.6.2 has been rebuilt with Flutter 3.47.8, which includes the necessary security fix.
If you are using Butterfly on one of the affected platforms, I strongly recommend updating, particularly if you synchronize documents over the internet.
Operating system security updates alone may not be enough to protect older Flutter application builds.
The web, iOS and macOS versions are unaffected by this particular vulnerability.
There is also a separate fix for WebDAV connection icon requests that could previously expose credentials to other origins.
For more technical details, you can read the release candidate announcement.
More control over collaboration
Collaboration continues to improve in this release.
Instead of automatically sharing every part of the editor experience, you now have more control over what gets synchronized between participants.
This includes settings for pages, areas, cursors, toolbars and live previews. You can configure defaults and adjust them for individual sessions.
An important issue has also been fixed where edits could end up on the wrong page or layer when participants navigated independently.
These changes make collaboration more practical when people want to work together without necessarily looking at exactly the same thing all the time.
More flexible backups and thumbnails
Backups can now be stored in local connections too, instead of requiring a remote destination.
Whether you prefer a local folder, another drive or a remote server, you have more options for where to keep your backups.
Automatic thumbnails have also become more configurable. You can choose whether a thumbnail should show the whole page or the last viewport.
This is especially helpful for large documents where showing the entire canvas would make the actual content almost impossible to recognize.
A few small changes, but useful ones if you regularly work with larger documents.
A more customizable workflow
If you enjoy trying new interface ideas, there is something new under Experiments.
A floating editor layout is now available for wide screens, offering a different way to arrange the editing interface.
It is still experimental, so feedback is very welcome.
Document search has also received improvements to make finding content more reliable, including Markdown matches and better navigation to results.
PDF handling is more consistent with document dimensions too, with canvas units corresponding to millimeters on export and original page sizes being preserved during import.
None of these changes completely reinvent Butterfly, but they should make everyday tasks a little more comfortable.
Stability and selection fixes
One additional issue has been fixed since the release candidate.
Perfectly horizontal or vertical lines could sometimes not be selected, particularly when using snapping.
This should now work correctly.
Apparently, drawing a perfectly straight line was enough to confuse the selection system.
The release also includes several fixes introduced in rc.0, including crashes on Windows and Android, improved pen-only input handling and corrections for stamps on rotated canvases.
Reproducible builds and an offline build script have also been added, helping make Butterfly builds easier to verify and reproduce.
What’s next?
With 2.6.2 released, the immediate security issue has been addressed and development can continue with the next improvements.
I want to keep the smaller release cycle introduced with 2.6.1, rather than saving every improvement for one enormous release.
Of course, security fixes will continue to take priority whenever necessary.
Thanks to everyone who tested the release candidate, reported issues and helped improve Butterfly! 💚
If you experience any problems, please report them on GitHub.
Full changelog
Changes since 2.6.2-rc.0:
- Fix selecting perfectly horizontal and vertical lines (#1323)
This is a stable release. It includes all changes from the Butterfly 2.6.2-rc.0 release.