Release notes

What changed in each version, and why. Every build is on the releases page; the download links always point at the newest one.

v0.5.4 — 2026-09-03

A table can leave the machine now. One share icon, one dialog, and a link that opens the rows — or a model you just trained — in the app at objectexplorer.com/app, on a machine with none of your storage, none of your accounts and nothing installed. What you hand over is decided column by column before anything is sent.

Sharing

• The share icon is where the thing is: in the side toolbar of anything showing rows, and in a cell's own toolbar, before Remove. A folder listing has none — a list of names is not something to hand somebody, and the object under it is.
• Every column goes as it is until you say otherwise. Beside each one: Mask, Hash or FPE. Mask covers a range of characters with * — one slider, a handle at each end, and the range names what is hidden, so dragging over a name covers what you drag over. Hash is SHA-1, so equal values stay equal and a hashed column still joins and still counts. FPE is format-preserving: a digit becomes a digit and a letter a letter of the same case, so a phone number still reads as a phone number and still validates. Its key is made when the dialog opens and never enters the link — Copy key is the only way it leaves your browser.
• The preview is the app's own grid, showing three rows sampled from the start, the middle and the end of the table — each one as it is and then as it goes, so what you are about to send is read rather than imagined.
• A link lives for 1D, 1W, 1M, 3M or 1Y, and Read and burn deletes it the moment somebody opens it. Small shares travel whole inside the link's fragment, which no server ever sees; bigger ones — and every burn — are stored under a name made of their expiry and their own digest, and swept when that expiry passes.
• Copy URL, or Email, which opens your own mail app with the link in it. Nothing pretends to know whether Teams or Slack is installed, because a page cannot.
• A trained model shares as a model. The payload carries LightGBM's own text format, so the receiver can predict with it here, or load it in Python with lgb.Booster(model_str=…) — without a single training row going with it.

The grid

• A column's name sits over its own values. A column of numbers reads down its right edge, and its header is on that edge now; the space every header used to reserve for a sort arrow it was not drawing is gone.
• A coordinate column no longer takes the grid down with it when it holds text rather than a number — a masked latitude, or a csv whose latitudes read as text.

Updating

• Update and Restart are one button that changes as it goes, and the app comes back on the version it just installed rather than the one it was started from.

Fixed

• The caret sits on the character it is on. In the editor and the SQL cell above it, the drawn text and the text you type into are laid out by the same rules — tabs, and the characters html spells its own way, included.

v0.5.3 — 2026-09-02

The explorer can change what it lists. Copy, cut, paste, drag between roots, rename, delete — across local disks and all three clouds, with one Undo that means it. And where a listing used to only show what a provider said, it now says what a folder weighs, how often you read it, and what holding a local copy has spared you.

Copy, move, rename, delete

• ⌘C / ⌘X / ⌘V, and drag. Drop a row on a folder in the same root and it moves; drop it in another root and it copies; ⌥ forces a copy and ⌘ forces a move. Dropping a folder on itself, or a row back into the folder it already sits in, is refused before you let go, so the row never lights up for a drop that would do nothing.
• Delete is a move to .trash, never an unlink. <root>/.trash/<opId>/<original path>, plus a manifest naming what went in — the same layout in a local folder and in a bucket, so Undo is a move back rather than a hope. Listings never show it. Anything older than 30 days is emptied at startup.
• ⌘Z takes back the last operation. A copy is deleted, a move is moved back, and whatever an overwrite wrote over comes back with it. One step, not a stack: a second undo over a folder that has been listed and changed since is a promise nothing can keep.
• Rename, on F2 or the context menu, in the tree, the list and the grid. The dialog opens with the base name selected and the extension left alone. A name that is already taken is refused and said out loud — you typed that name, so being taken is an answer — while pasting into a folder something already sits in walks " copy", " copy 2" silently, because nobody typed those.
• A clash in another folder asks once, before a byte moves: Keep both, Replace, Skip, Cancel. Every destination is settled first, so the count the footer counts down from is the number of objects really going to move.
• Between two providers the bytes stream through, and the destination's size is read back before a move deletes its source. Within one provider they never touch this machine at all — GCS rewriteTo, S3 x-amz-copy-source, Azure x-ms-copy-source, fsp.cp on disk. A transfer answers with its id as soon as it has one and reports progress in the side footer, so an hour-long copy is not an hour-long fetch.
• An edit says which folders it touched, and every listing and tree node showing one of them reads itself again. A rename typed in the tree lands in the pane, and a delete made in the pane lands in the tree.

Selecting

• Shift for a range, ⌘ for one more, ⌘A for all — one selection for the whole app, with a cursor the keyboard sits on and an anchor a shift-range stretches from.
• Drag a band across the empty space of a list or a grid and it picks everything it covers.
• An action runs on what you meant. A right click on a row inside the selection acts on the whole selection; on a row outside it, on that row alone. The footer says which — 2 selected · 2 files — before you press Delete.
• Copy name, a button that appears on hovering any row or card, puts the leaf name on the real clipboard. The click never reaches the listing underneath, so copying a name does not select, open, or start a drag.

What a folder weighs, and what it cost

• Σ in the SIZE cell counts a folder. Nothing is walked until you ask, and one ask counts every folder underneath — the walk had to visit them anyway — so clicking a root fills in the tree and the rows below stop offering. The answer is kept in meta.db and goes stale on a TTL you set (a minute by default); a refused walk leaves a red – that is itself the offer to try again.
• On S3, GCS and Azure the number is what the prefix costs to keep, not what it would weigh on a disk: the walk records the breakdown by storage class, and Glacier's 40 KiB-per-object minimum is priced in. Past 100000 keys the total reads as a lower bound rather than pretending.
• Sorting by SIZE is one comparison for everything, so a 4 GB folder sorts above a 2 GB file.
• The ACTIVITY sparkline works on cloud rows again. A refresh, a second page, or a listing past its TTL used to empty it — the provider's own items came back with no record attached. Now every child of every listing carries one, and a lone measurement is drawn as the arrival it is instead of a flat line.
• A visit is one point, not a mountain range. Measurements are collapsed into five-minute slots, so opening a folder and stepping back out no longer draws a range out of the two different sizes a folder has. Opening a bucket no longer counts as reading a file, either — one Azure container here had accrued 38430 seconds of "dwell" that way.
• Show Cache Savings, in the palette, is every bucket at once: reads, how many the local copy answered, what was pulled over the wire, what that spared you in egress and requests, and what it is worth at the published rates. The same figures for one object are in its info dialog. A cache hit is the absence of work and used to leave nothing behind; now it is a row.

One Settings dialog

• Everything that used to be its own modal is a pane in it — Add a Favorite, the three cloud sign-ins, About, Check for Updates — picked from the list on the left. A pane never opens a dialog, so nothing stacks on top of anything, and a sign-in that fails while Settings is open moves the selection rather than opening a second window.
• The nav says what is connected: a spinner while a cloud is being probed, a tick once something answered, nothing at all when nobody is signed in. A pane you come back to shows what it was showing instead of probing and listing all over again, and one still waiting on a browser tab is called off when you leave it.

The grid

• Zoom, five steps from 64 to 256 px, on the toolbar magnifiers or ⌘⇧= / ⌘⇧-, per folder.
• Previews are documents, scaled — a markdown, an html page or a notebook is laid out on a page and painted at the tile size, and a short one is scaled up until it reaches the bottom rather than stopping half way. A table preview carries 12 sampled rows and a text preview 20 lines, so the bottom of a tile is never empty unless the file is.
• Drag a card and the folder keeps that arrangement; either sort arrow is also the tidy-up, dropping the custom positions and reflowing aligned. A folder nobody dragged, zoomed or sorted writes nothing to storage at all.

Refresh

• A refresh that changes nothing now shows that it happened. The pane is emptied while the request is out and the answer is rendered when it lands, held to a 300 ms floor so a 30 ms reply still reads as a reply. The icon stops turning and the new view appears together.
• A build with no version of its own says so in Check for Updates, instead of claiming an upgrade is waiting.

v0.5.2 — 2026-08-30

Everything the app can do, in one list. Press ⇧⌘P and the whole app answers: turn a cloud on, open the log, check for updates, run what the object under the cursor offers. The clouds themselves moved into that list too — the license file that used to decide which providers you got is gone, and you switch them on yourself.

The command palette

• ⇧⌘P opens every command, in the frame Quick Open already uses: type to narrow, arrows to move, Enter to run. The list is built the moment it opens, so what it offers is what is true right now.
• The object's own commands are in there. Reveal in Finder, Open to the Right Side, Deploy to Cloud Run and the per-provider Create/Delete are read straight out of the context menu rather than written a second time — one place to add a command, two places to reach it.
• Preferences are commands: show deleted objects, show hidden files, and the cloud switches below.
• Open Dev Tools, on all three desktop engines. macOS gets a real click-through to the WKWebView inspector; Windows and Linux, which already have F12 and Ctrl+Shift+I, get told the key.

Clouds you turn on yourself

• The license file is gone. ~/.objectexplorer no longer holds a hand-written file that decided which providers this install offered. What replaced it is two commands per cloud in the palette.
• Two levels, per provider. Enable Google Cloud is the whole provider — one sign-in reaching Cloud Storage, Cloud Logging and BigQuery alike. Enable Cloud Storage only is that one service. The old file could not say this: one wide token made the entire file wide, for every cloud at once.
• What each command says is read off the level it is in, so the palette offers you the change rather than the setting — Disable, or step down to storage alone.
• Turning one on opens the place it is added. A cloud that is on shows nothing until a bucket is added, so the Add Favorite dialog follows the command; if it is already up, it re-reads its sections in place.
• An install upgrading from the license file keeps its side panel. A provider nobody has touched starts at whatever its catalog says — except where you already have favourites under its storage service, which start at storage alone rather than off.

Signing in

• One shape for every cloud. Each provider now hands over the same five endpoints — status, login, cancel, connect, revoke — so AWS, Azure and Google differ only where the clouds themselves differ. Adding a cloud is writing that one object.
• Revoke, in the dialog. The connected panel has a second button that makes the server forget what it saved and drops back to the sign-in choices, both paths open again. What it clears is stated per cloud and stays honest: AWS drops the key this app saved and finds ~/.aws again on the next probe; Azure clears the Microsoft sign-in and every kept account key or SAS, which is the only way to drop a stored key; Google forgets the pasted service account and the token minted from it.
• Google signs in with gcloud auth login --update-adc — one browser trip that both selects the account and writes Application Default Credentials, instead of the ADC-only command that left gcloud auth print-access-token reporting "no active account" forever afterwards.
• The dialog says whether the credentials file is actually there, and where it will be written, read from the server's own stat rather than inferred from a failed token exchange — a missing file and an expired refresh token no longer look the same.
• A refused listing does not empty the pane. 401 and 403 now travel with the cloud they came from, so the right dialog opens; the folder keeps the children it last saw, marked as possibly stale, and the call that failed is replayed past the cache once you are back in.
• The install card no longer shows a command that cannot run. A Windows without curl.exe, or a Mac without Homebrew, gets the vendor's download page and a note saying so, instead of a line that fails when pasted.

Updates and bug reports

• Check for Updates, in the App menu and the palette. It asks the registry when it opens, and downloads only when you say so. The desktop app unpacks the new version beside the one it is serving and picks it up at launch, so it says "restart ObjectExplorer" rather than pretending something swapped underneath you. An npx objectexplorer install gets the one command that replaces it, ready to copy — npm owns those files, not us.
• Open Application Log puts the tail of app.log in a tab, as plain text, with its path, reload and copy — the file a bug report attaches, unreformatted so the copy still matches the file.
• Share Application Log uploads the last 1000 lines and hands back a link to quote in that report. The upload runs in the app's own backend, the endpoint is write-only, and a shared log is deleted after two weeks.

v0.5.1 — 2026-08-25

Every table is a notebook now. Open a Parquet, CSV or JSON object and it opens as a column of cells: the query with its grid, a chart of what came back, and — new in this release — a gradient boosting model over the rows. All of it runs on your machine, against the object where it lives.

Analytics

• Open a table, get a notebook. Two cells are already written when the file opens — a SELECT * over the object you clicked, and a chart of what that query returned. The file is queried and plotted before you have typed anything.
• SQL against the object in its bucket. DuckDB reads the object where it lives, so a WHERE over a multi-gigabyte Parquet file touches the row groups it needs and no more. Nothing is staged into a temporary folder, and nothing is sent anywhere. Readable: parquet csv tsv json jsonl xlsx avro, plus SPSS .sav and SAS .sas7bdat .xpt. ORC, Arrow and HDF5 open as grids and charts; the cell says when SQL over them is what is missing.
• A folder is a table too. Delta, Iceberg and Hudi tables, Hive-partitioned exports and YYYY/MM/DD date prefixes are read as one table rather than as a pile of files.
• Charts that write their own first draft. The column statistics say which column is a date, which is a category, which is a measure and which is an id that counts up once per row. The strip under the code offers the charts those columns actually support, named in plain words — click one and its source is written into the editor and drawn. Then it is source, and yours.
• Five kinds of cell: Table (SQL), Chart, Model, Code (JavaScript, with a pandas-style dataframe already in scope) and Text (markdown).
• Cells are piped. Each one reads the rows produced by the nearest cell above it that produced any, so a query narrows the data and the chart, the model and the next query all see what came back. Nothing re-runs on its own — a cell runs from its run button or Shift+Enter, so what is on screen is always something you asked for.
• Notebooks are kept per object. Reopen the file next week, in another window or after a restart, and your cells are still there.

Machine learning

• A model cell trains gradient boosting in the app — LightGBM, compiled to WebAssembly — over the rows the cell above produced.
• It sets itself up from the data. Pick the label you want predicted and the rest comes from the same column statistics the grid draws: whether the question is which one or how much, which columns are worth training on, and which are row numbers, ids or coordinates that would teach the model the order the file was written in and nothing else.
• The controls hide nothing. Leaves, learning rate and iterations are three sliders, and moving one prints the JavaScript underneath it. That printed source is what trains, so a hand edit and a slider end in the same place.
• What the model learned, as the features ranked by their share of the total gain.
• Why it said that about one row. Pick a row and a waterfall walks from what the model says on average to what it said about that row, feature by feature. The contributions are TreeSHAP — exact and additive, so the steps add up to the prediction instead of approximating it. Both plots show the same features in the same order, so the pair reads across: what a column is worth over the whole file, and what it did to this row.
• The data never moves. Training happens in the page, so a model over a bucket you are not allowed to copy out of is still just a local read.

Earlier versions

Notes before v0.5.1 were generated from the commit log; each version's page has its own.

Version	Date	What it brought
v0.5.0	2026-08-24	the first build carrying the notebook
v0.4.7	2026-08-18	data lake timelines, metadata on the tree
v0.4.6	2026-08-18	Windows smoke-test fix
v0.4.3	2026-08-11	ebook reader, Cloud Logging
v0.4.1	2026-08-05	webview mode no longer opens a browser tab as well
v0.4.0	2026-08-05	npm publishing over trusted publishing (OIDC)
v0.3.11	2026-08-01	signed .msix packages for Windows