chore: bump version to 0.6.0 and prepare release notes

[jatinkrmalik]

VocaMac v0.6.0 — Release Preparation

This PR bumps the version to 0.6.0 and adds release notes. Once merged, tag v0.6.0 to trigger the release workflow.

Version changes

• scripts/build.sh — default APP_VERSION updated to 0.6.0
• web/layouts/index.html — softwareVersion JSON-LD field and hero version badge updated to v0.6.0
• docs/RELEASE_NOTES_v0.6.0.md — new release notes document

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Zero-Download First Launch 🚀

VocaMac now ships with the Whisper Tiny model bundled inside the app. On first launch, it's automatically installed into Application Support so you can start dictating immediately — no internet connection required, no waiting for a model download.

Previously, every fresh install would fail to load a model until the user manually triggered a download. This eliminates that friction entirely.

Note: The bundled Tiny model is optimised for speed on all Apple Silicon devices. You can switch to a larger model any time via Settings.

Nightly Builds — Now Signed & Notarized ✅

Nightly builds now go through the same Developer ID signing and notarization pipeline as stable releases. Every nightly DMG:

• Is signed with Apple Developer ID — no Gatekeeper warnings
• Is notarized and stapled — validates offline
• Embeds a proper SemVer pre-release version string (e.g. 0.6.0-nightly.20260414+abc1234) so you always know exactly which nightly you're running

Nightly builds also now have an on-demand /build trigger — comment /build on any PR and a signed, notarized DMG is built from that branch and posted as a comment within ~10–20 minutes.

Bug Fixes

Fixed: Stale Paste After Transcription

After injecting transcribed text, pressing Cmd+V within ~2 seconds would paste the transcribed text instead of the user's original clipboard contents. The clipboard restore had a race condition — it was scheduled after the simulated Cmd+V keypress instead of running before it.

Reported by Dinç Ciftci (via #104). Fixed in #106 by @jatinkrmalik.

Fixed: Tokenizer Asset Crash on First-Run Download

Fresh installs showed "No model loaded" with [ERROR] Tokenizer assets are missing immediately after the model downloaded successfully. Two separate issues were fixed:

1. ensureTokenizerAssets was pre-validating tokenizer files before passing the folder to WhisperKit — but WhisperKit fetches tokenizers itself during load. Removed the redundant pre-validation entirely. (#113 by @jatinkrmalik)
2. An incorrect path construction caused the validation to look for tokenizer files in the wrong directory anyway. (#112 by @jatinkrmalik)

Fixed: Double Startup / Duplicate Model Loading

Every launch showed duplicate startup sequences in the logs, meaning the model was being loaded 2–3× unnecessarily. SwiftUI was instantiating multiple AppState objects and performStartup was called on all of them. Fixed by guarding startup with a Task-based once-flag keyed to the specific instance. (#114 by @jatinkrmalik)

Fixed: GitHub Update Checker Rate Limiting (HTTP 403)

The update checker was consuming one of GitHub's 60 unauthenticated API requests/hour per IP on every check — easily exhausting the pool on shared networks (office NAT, VPN). Fixed by:

• ETag caching — persisting the ETag response header and sending If-None-Match on subsequent requests. GitHub returns 304 Not Modified (rate-limit free, served from CDN edge) when the release hasn't changed.
• Versioned User-Agent — sending VocaMac/<version> instead of bare VocaMac as recommended by GitHub.

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What's Changed

PR	Description	Author
#110	feat: support bundled tiny model installs	@jatinkrmalik
#101	feat: sign, notarize, and version nightly builds	@jatinkrmalik
#106	fix: eliminate clipboard restore race condition — closes #104 (reported by Dinç Ciftci)	@jatinkrmalik
#112	fix: resolve tokenizer asset crash on first-run download	@jatinkrmalik
#113	fix: let WhisperKit handle tokenizer fetching instead of pre-validating	@jatinkrmalik
#114	fix: prevent double performStartup across multiple AppState instances	@jatinkrmalik
(direct)	fix: add ETag caching to UpdateChecker to avoid GitHub rate limits	@jatinkrmalik
#107	ci: add on-demand PR build workflow with /build comment trigger	@jatinkrmalik
#111	ci: use Python venv for huggingface-cli on macOS 15 runners	@jatinkrmalik
#103	fix: correct version extraction in nightly build workflow	@jatinkrmalik
#102	docs: add nightly builds section to README	@jatinkrmalik

Issue Credits

Issue	Reporter	Description
#104	Dinç Ciftci	Clipboard restore delay causes stale paste after transcription

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Post-Merge Steps

1. Verify CI passes ✅
2. Tag the release: git tag -a v0.6.0 -m "VocaMac v0.6.0" && git push origin v0.6.0
3. GitHub Actions will build, sign, notarize, and publish a draft release
4. Edit the draft release on GitHub — paste contents of docs/RELEASE_NOTES_v0.6.0.md
5. Publish the release 🎉

Full Changelog: v0.5.0...v0.6.0