Wallper 1.0.2: Faster Cold Start and Smoother Multi-Display Switching
Faster first launch, less stutter when switching wallpapers across multiple displays, more predictable caching, and clearer errors when a download is interrupted.
Cold start is the least glamorous performance metric and one of the most telling.
It is the time between opening an app and the app being genuinely usable, on a machine that has not run it recently and has none of it warm in memory. It is also the moment most people form their opinion, because it is the only launch they experience with full attention.
1.0.2 is mostly about that moment, and about the other one where Wallper was still visibly working harder than it should.
Cold Start
First launch and the first launch after an update both got faster.
Those two cases share a problem: nothing is cached, nothing is warm, and everything the app needs has to be found rather than recalled. Post-update launches are worse still, because the previous version's caches are stale and have to be discarded exactly when you are least patient, having just waited for an update to install.
The paths behind both were reworked. The visible result is that Wallper becomes useful sooner in the two situations where it used to take longest.
Multi-Display Switching
If you run more than one screen, changing wallpapers used to stutter.
The cause was straightforward once found. Each display is a separate rendering target, and switching wallpapers meant tearing down and rebuilding all of them at once. On a single screen that is fast enough to be invisible. On three, the work stacked up and you saw it happen.
Switching is now smoother across multi-display setups. Per-monitor control over scale, position and enablement arrived later in 1.1 with the Display Manager, and there is more in multi-monitor setup.
Caching and Downloads
Cache invalidation is now more predictable when a creator updates a wallpaper. Previously the app could hold a stale copy and show you an older version of a file that had since changed, which is a confusing thing to debug from the outside because there is no visible symptom beyond being subtly wrong.
Prefetch hints for upcoming thumbnails are smarter, so scrolling the library has fewer moments of waiting for images that could have been fetched a second earlier.
Error messages when a network hiccup interrupts a download now say what happened. A failed download that reports itself as failed is a minor inconvenience. A failed download that reports nothing is a bug hunt.
Progress animation was also retuned so it reads as continuous rather than arriving in visible jumps. That one is pure perception: the download is not faster, it just stops looking stalled when it is not.
