Beta: desktop port grouping, tunnel paths, and a probing compatibility switch

This is a beta build for testers ahead of the 1.2.0 release. Nothing about
your Pro licence or how the app works changes. Please run your usual setup
and flag anything that looks off, especially around Thunderbolt docks and
the Connected devices view.

What to test

• Desktop built-in USB ports no longer group under a Thunderbolt dock.
  On a Mac mini or Mac Studio, the machine's own front USB-C ports were being
  drawn as if they hung off a connected dock. They now show separately.
  Thanks @toofishes for the report (#417).
• Connected devices tree now roots under the Thunderbolt link. For Pro
  users, the device tree shows the downstream Thunderbolt device with its
  live link speed at the top, plus tunnel-path attribution: which display or
  data tunnel each device is riding (#411).
• New "Skip deep USB probing" compatibility switch. If deep USB probing
  ever stalls or misbehaves on your Mac, Settings now has a switch to turn it
  off. Everything else keeps working (#413).

Also in this build

• Test-kit probe hardening and a correction to how hardware identifiers are
  captured (#401, #405).
• Internal correctness fixes to port join keys.

USB-C charging now shows on M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros

Two solid fixes this time. If you have an M1 Pro or M1 Max MacBook Pro,
WhatCable finally shows your USB-C charger: macOS never publishes the
per-port power data on that generation, so the app now derives it from the
battery controller instead. And Saved Cables got a durability overhaul, so
your cable collection and its recorded history are written to disk far more
robustly.

Fixed

• USB-C charging on M1 Pro and M1 Max MacBook Pros. These Macs never
  publish the per-port power source that the charging display reads (0 of 61
  machines in our community data), so a USB-C charger showed nothing at all.
  WhatCable now reconstructs the charge contract from the battery
  controller's own per-port data, on any MacBook where the usual source is
  missing. Desktop Macs are unaffected. Thanks @grtm77 for the report
  (#401).
• Saved cables and their history are now much harder to lose. Every
  change to your saved cables is written straight into the main database
  file, and recorded history is flushed on quit. Previously everything could
  sit indefinitely in a sidecar file that backup and cleanup tools sometimes
  mishandle, and a damaged database could silently reset to empty. It now
  refuses to touch your data rather than guess, and logs what happened so we
  can diagnose any report.

Improved

• Italian translation refreshed. Thanks @bovirus.
• Traditional Chinese translation refreshed. Thanks @jimmyorz.

Fast cables no longer get short-changed by slower devices

WhatCable had the logic backwards on one thing: it treated the live Thunderbolt
link speed as the most a cable could do. It's actually a floor, not a ceiling.
Plug an 80 Gbps cable into a 40 Gbps drive and the cable now still reads
80 Gbps, with a separate line describing the live link, and Negotiation
Diagnostics points at the device as the limit. Thanks @cannotcollide for the
report (#393).

Fixed

• 80 Gbps cables no longer read as 40 Gbps when the device is the
  bottleneck. The negotiated link speed is now treated as proof of what the
  cable can carry, never as a cap on it. When the e-marker claims more than the
  current link uses, you'll see a "Thunderbolt link active at N Gbps" line
  about the connection instead of a wrong claim about the cable. Thanks
  @cannotcollide (#393).
• Device brands no longer doubled. A Thunderbolt device whose model name
  already includes its brand used to show up as "Ugreen Ugreen Storage
  Device". Now it's just the once. Thanks @ebondfrancisco (#392).
• Buttons respond across the whole button. The header buttons only
  registered clicks over the exact icon shape, so near-misses did nothing.
  The full button area is clickable now. Thanks @jckirton (#386).
• Port card titles no longer get squashed when the Pro "Track as...?"
  chip is showing.

Heads up

• Some cables' trust tier moves from green to amber. If your cable claims
  a speed nothing in your setup can actually test (an 80 Gbps cable where the
  Mac and every device top out at 40, say), it now shows amber, "not yet seen
  to perform at its claim", instead of green. The old green was circular: it
  trusted the very reading this release fixes. Plug the cable into hardware
  that can use its full speed and it earns the green properly.
• One conflict banner has gone quiet on purpose. A registered-brand cable
  claiming a speed tier nothing in the chain can test no longer gets a
  "conflicting speed" banner. Untestable is not evidence of lying. Cables with
  blanked-out vendor IDs are still flagged by the trust signals.

Improved

• Display Diagnostics now uses macOS's own DisplayPort link description
  instead of a number we derived ourselves, so the link-rate line always
  matches what the system believes.

Under the hood

• Test Kit hardening for contributors: long probe output no longer gets cut
  off mid-dump, probes that fail are reported instead of silently skipped, and
  two probes capture extra port-mapping data that helps us line up multi-port
  machines.
• More cables in the built-in database, several straight from community
  reports.
• A large batch of internal regression tests that replay real community
  diagnostic data through the parsers, so this class of bug is harder to
  reintroduce.

A new opacity slider lets you make WhatCable see-through

Settings has a new Opacity slider. Drag it down and WhatCable's windows go
translucent, from the menu bar popover to the Pro screens, so you can see what's
behind them. Leave it at 100% and nothing changes.

New

• Opacity slider. Settings > Display now has an Opacity control (50% to
  100%). It dims every WhatCable surface together: the menu bar popover, the
  separate Pro windows, the welcome and licence screens, and the pop-up dialogs.

Improved

• The updater checks for the newest version right before it installs. When
  you hit install, WhatCable re-checks for the latest release first, and the
  update panel refreshes itself when you open it, so you always get the current
  version. Thanks to the report behind this one.
• Contributing diagnostic data no longer pops up a "removable disk" warning.
  The Test Kit used to nudge macOS into showing its USB-storage prompt while it
  ran. It now skips storage devices, so the run stays quiet.

Under the hood

• Italian and Traditional Chinese wording refinements.
• More cables added to the built-in cable database.

Devices behind a dock or hub now show where they're plugged in

This release is about your dock. If you connect through a dock, a hub, or a
monitor with USB ports, the devices hanging off it now appear nested under what
they're actually plugged into, instead of as a flat list or not at all.

Fixed

• Devices behind a dock or hub are listed, and nested correctly. WhatCable
  now shows everything behind a dock or hub with each device under the hub it
  sits on, so a trackpad behind a hub behind your dock reads as exactly that.
  Before, those devices could appear as a flat list with no hierarchy, or be
  counted but never listed. Thanks to @jesserobbins and @tomjn for the reports.

Under the hood

• Improved diagnostic data. The Contribute Diagnostic Data feature now
  collects more accurate USB, Thunderbolt, and display information, which helps
  us improve cable, port, and display detection across more Macs.

A power-bar option for the menu bar, plus a steadier icon

This release is all about the menu bar: a new way to show charging power, a menu bar icon that no longer jumps when you change it, and a lighter-touch readout that uses less energy.

New

• Show charging power as a bar. If you have the charging-watts readout turned on (Settings > Display > "Show charging watts in the menu bar"), you can now show it as a small bar instead of a number. The bar is quantised so it sits still rather than twitching every second. A new "Watts display" setting picks Number or Bar; Number stays the default.

Fixed

• The menu bar icon no longer jumps or blinks when you change it. Picking a different menu bar icon used to shift the icon's width and briefly close and reopen the popover to re-centre it, and the watts label could vanish until the wattage next changed. Every icon now renders at a fixed width, so a swap leaves everything in place, and the icon is crisper on Retina displays.
• The Settings icon picker no longer needs a double-click. While Settings was open, the live-data poll kept re-rendering the screen underneath and could swallow a click. WhatCable now pauses that poll while Settings is up, since nothing there is live, so a single click lands.

Under the hood

• The menu bar charging-watts readout is lighter on energy. It used to do its own battery and power-chip read every second on the main thread, even with the popover closed. That read now rides the shared once-a-second poll (and backs off to every 30 seconds when nothing is on screen), so it uses less energy and contends less with the rest of the app. Unplugging, and a real charging change like the battery topping off, still update the number promptly.

USB devices behind a Thunderbolt 3 dock now show up

Two fixes to how USB devices are listed, a clearer display-resolution line, and a translation update.

Fixed

• USB devices behind a Thunderbolt 3 dock now appear. If you use a Thunderbolt 3 dock like the CalDigit TS3+, the keyboards, drives and other USB gear plugged into it were counted but never listed. A TB3 dock carries USB through its own controller chips, which WhatCable wasn't looking for, so those devices fell through. They now show up under "Other USB devices". Thanks to a support report for the detail that pinned this down.

• External-hub devices are no longer shown as "Built-in USB ports". On desktop Macs, a keyboard or mouse plugged into an external USB hub could be listed under "Built-in USB ports", which reads as if they were on the Mac's own internal ports. WhatCable now tells an external hub apart from the Mac's internal one, so only genuinely built-in devices appear there. Thanks to @jimmyorz on issue #373.

• Clearer display-resolution wording. When a display runs a scaled "looks like" mode, macOS reports a render resolution that can be larger than the panel's actual one. The diagnostic now says "macOS reports the current mode as ..." rather than stating it as the display's fixed resolution, so a scaled 4K panel isn't described as 5K. Thanks to @jimmyorz for catching it.

Also

• Updated translations. Traditional Chinese (@jimmyorz).

Wireless mice no longer freeze on launch, and more desktop front-port devices show up

One important bug fix, a new feature for desktop Macs, plus cable-database and translation updates.

Fixed

• Launching WhatCable no longer freezes a wireless USB mouse. On launch, WhatCable reads a small descriptor from every USB device to spot DisplayPort and other Alt Modes. For a device the system's input driver is holding, like a 2.4 GHz wireless mouse or keyboard receiver, the old code force-opened the device to read it, which knocked the input driver off and froze the pointer until replug. It now reads that descriptor without ever taking the device over, so input devices are left alone. Thanks to @ideaweb on issue #370 for an unusually precise report.

New

• Desktop Macs now show devices on the front USB-C ports. On the Mac mini and Mac Studio, the front USB-C ports sit behind an internal hub and don't expose cable, power, or Thunderbolt data, so they were previously invisible. Anything plugged into them now appears under a "Built-in USB ports" section, named, so you can see what's connected even though there's no cable detail to show. Thanks to @dev-xiligroup on issue #348.

Also

• Cable database. Added a vendor mapping for CalDigit, a mirror fallback for the community usb.ids vendor list so vendor names keep resolving if the primary source is down, and three new community cable reports.
• Updated translations. Traditional Chinese (@jimmyorz), Italian (@bovirus), Ukrainian (@yurii-shcherbiuk).

Display Diagnostics calls compressed (DSC) modes "running at full quality", and the built-in HDMI port label matches the main view

Two display-side fixes from real reports.

Fixed

• Display Diagnostics no longer reads compressed (DSC) modes as a refresh-rate fault. On displays that genuinely need compression to reach their best mode, like 4K120 over DisplayPort 1.4 or 5K60 on a Studio Display, the diagnostic was warning "monitor can do more than the link is carrying" and pointing at the resolution or refresh rate setting. It now recognises when the picture is reaching the display through compression and calls it out as a positive verdict, "running compressed (DSC) to fit through the link", with no warning. Driven by the live on-screen mode and the link's actual bandwidth, and accounts for 10-bit / HDR colour modes so an HDR display isn't mistaken for DSC. Behind the scenes, this is the empirical case (DSC provably active right now); the existing "at the DisplayPort ceiling" carve-out from v0.21 still handles the inferred case.

• Built-in HDMI port label matches across the app. On Macs with a native HDMI port (M3 Pro/Max, M4, M5 MacBook Pros and the Mac mini / Studio), the main view and Display Diagnostics were showing different port numbers for the same physical connection: the main view called it "Built-in HDMI port 1", while Display Diagnostics called it "HDMI port 2". Two different IOKit fields, neither path knew about the other. Now both surfaces agree. Thanks to @jimmyorz on issue #362.

Also

• The --json output now includes the live bits-per-channel value the display diagnostic used (8 for standard colour, 10 for HDR / 10-bit), so a whatcable --json consumer can see exactly which arithmetic produced the DSC verdict.

Built-in HDMI port shows up properly, and the font slider works app-wide

Two fixes from real reports, plus new translations from contributors.

Fixed

• Built-in HDMI port now shows up properly. On Macs with a native HDMI port (M3/M4 Max MacBook Pros, the Mac mini, the Studio), plugging in a monitor would show as "USB-C to HDMI adapter / rate limited" because WhatCable was treating the port like a USB-C adapter chain. It now shows the port as a separate card, labelled correctly, with a clean verdict that doesn't claim a rate limit that doesn't exist. Thanks to the reporter on issue #352.

• The Font Size slider in Settings now affects the entire app. Previously it only resized text in the main popover, while detached Pro windows, the licence panel, the welcome window, the menu-bar dock window, and most Pro screens stayed at the default size. Now every SwiftUI surface tracks the slider live. Includes a popover-edge cap so the largest setting can't push the popover off the right of a smaller display.

Also

• Updated translations. Traditional Chinese (@jimmyorz), Simplified Chinese (@Rivbla, first contribution), Italian (@bovirus).