The grid was five panes at three fixed widths and one fixed height, written as
lengths in the stylesheet. That is a claim about every screen the tool is ever
opened on, and it was wrong on two of them: a phone, where 210 + 250 pixels of
side pane leave nothing for a 320x200 stage, and a large display, where the
inspector is the width somebody once typed rather than the width their work
wants.
So the tracks are custom properties and `ui/layout` owns the numbers. A drag of
an edge is one `assoc-in` and one property on `.app`; no pane's contents
re-render, which is the same reason the picture is painted by `ui/player`'s loop
rather than by anything reactive. Sizes stay in PIXELS and not fractions —
three of these panes hold fixed-width rows, so what you drag an edge to is the
width you meant at any window size.
State, events and widgets are one namespace, which is not this repo's shape
anywhere else. They are the same six integers: `:pool` is a width, a grid track,
a drag's clamp and a button's label at once, and splitting six integers across
`db`, `events/` and `ui/` is more wiring than state.
Three things follow from making it state at all:
SHUTTING A PANE. Pool and inspector unmount; the timeline collapses to its
transport strip instead, because play, pause and the frame readout live in that
strip and a window with nowhere to press play is broken rather than small. The
toggles are in the top bar because a shut pane has no head left to carry its
own handle.
A NARROW WINDOW. Below 760px the grid is one column and the side panes are
drawers over the stage rather than columns beside it. The breakpoint is read
once, at load, and only decides what the layout OPENS at: throwing away the
sizes somebody dragged because they turned a tablet sideways is worse than a
layout that is briefly the wrong shape.
ZOOM. The stage's was already a constant 2 in `ui/stage`; it is now an integer
in [1 8], still CSS over a canvas that is the raster's own size, so the browser
suite still reads 320x200 of real pixels off `canvas.stage`. Whole pixels
only — a fractional scale under `image-rendering: pixelated` draws some rows of
the raster thicker than others, which misrepresents the one thing the preview
exists to judge. The timeline's is the stylesheet's entirely: every mark in the
tracks is positioned as a percentage of their width, so one multiplier on that
width spreads the grid, the spans, the keys, the ruler and the playhead apart
together. Both readouts are the button back to normal, accented while there is
something to return from, because the quick way back belongs in the one place
you already look to find out where you are.
One trap, paid for and then found: the top strip has to scroll sideways on a
narrow screen, and `overflow-x: auto` makes an element a clipping container on
BOTH axes. Every top-bar menu — open, snapshots, share, sign in — was then cut
off by a 30px-tall bar and drawn at whatever x the strip happened to be
scrolled to, which reads as the button doing nothing at all. They are fixed to
the viewport there, as `.menu-drop` already was one pane down for the same
reason. The same shape of bug ate the polygon tool and both zoom readouts: a
flex row that does not fit shrinks every item and pushes the last ones off the
end, so nothing in a strip shrinks now and the strip scrolls as a strip.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Making a lane one row cost the thing a row was for. A clip stopped being a row,
so there was no longer any way to open a clip and see what was inside it, and
the inside of a drawing — the most ordinary thing in the document — became
reachable only by opening it as its own tab. This is that capability back,
from the root timeline, down as far as it goes.
An expanded lane opens exactly ONE clip: the selected one. Its own keys, then
the lanes and nodes of the symbol it places, then theirs, each mapped into this
ruler by the recursive walk that was already there. Twelve clips in a lane
still cost one row, and inspection costs one branch rather than twelve.
Two things that only showed up once it ran. The portal is chosen by the whole
LINEAGE of the selection and not by the selected id: selecting a shape inside
the clip — or the end of its span — is still working inside that clip, and
matching the id alone shut the portal the instant anything under it was
touched. And selecting now waits for the pointer to come UP, because selecting
on the way down re-drew the timeline before the gesture had said anything: it
shut the portal holding the lane being dragged INTO, out from under the
pointer.
A HELD clip opens too, which the old row walk never did either. `source-time`
is nil for a hold, so the walk stopped there and the contents of every drawing
were invisible from here. Its rows are shown across the hold — which is when
the node is on screen — and marked `:unmapped?`: no keys, and no draggable
edges, because a frozen clock gives no frame inside it a place on this ruler.
Refusing to place the keys is the honest half; refusing to show the rows was
not.
Double-clicking a clip opens the symbol it places as a tab, as double-clicking
the same symbol in the pool does. That was already written and had never once
run: the track captures the pointer for a slide, so the click and double-click
that follow are delivered to the track and never to the block. The track now
resolves them itself. Fixing the delivery exposed two more: `symbol/lineage`
reported a `parent cycle` for any id in a symbol with NO nodes, because a
one-element chain is longer than zero nodes — and opening a symbol left the
selection pointing into the symbol being left, which the breadcrumb and the
inspector then tried to resolve. The editor unmounted. Both are fixed where
they were wrong, and the browser test asserts the editor is still standing
afterwards.
Audio is a clip in a lane like everything else. A dropped sound lands in one
and is trimmed and moved by the same commands; a lane holds picture or sound
and not both, which is the explicit capability the model asked for rather than
a guess per frame. The refusal lives in the commands and not only in
validation, because placement claims time: `blank` would have deleted the
sound to make room for the picture and left a perfectly valid document behind.
What is in a lane of the open symbol is drawn as a lane; what is nested inside
a placed symbol is still flattened by `audio-tracks`, so no sound is on two
rows.
Everything that enters the timeline now enters a lane: a converted take, a
symbol brought in from another project, a sound. One rule answers where —
`lane-destination` — and every symbol is born with a lane for it to answer
with. An unaimed drop fills an EMPTY lane rather than taking an occupied one
nobody pointed at, because the alternative is trimming away what was there to
make room for what was dropped.
Shift during a clip-body drag means the other intention: put this node INSIDE
the symbol the clip under the pointer places, through `nest/move-node`, which
is what keeps the world transform and the root timing. Overlap cannot say
which of the two is meant — dropping on occupied time already means claiming
it — so the person says, and a label by the pointer says it back. The label
asks `nest/move-refusal`, the same check the command makes, so it cannot
promise what the drop would refuse. Today it refuses more than it allows:
both clips have to be on screen at one frame, which two clips in one lane
never are, and a held destination has no clock to move through at all.
`docs/lane-nesting-notes.md` argues that the second refusal is stronger than
the facts require and says what would settle it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A lane was a drawing lane: the only thing that could go in one was a one-frame
held cel, and every other symbol instance stayed a permanent root row of its
own. Those are not two kinds of timing, they are one kind with two creation
policies. `lane/place-symbol` drops any library symbol in as a clip that plays
naturally at speed one, `lane/adopt` moves an instance that is already in the
document into a lane keeping its source, span, playback and corrections, and
`append-drawing`/`overwrite-drawing` keep being the policy that makes a new
empty symbol a one-frame hold. The child shape they produce is the same.
Both new commands claim their interval through `blank` before they write, so
the partition rule is unchanged and unduplicated: placing into occupied lane
time trims, removes or splits the incumbents, and a lane still never stores an
overlap. Real compositing overlap is another lane, where the order is explicit.
Creating a symbol with nothing aimed now makes a lane and a clip in it instead
of a loose root instance, and a pool drop prefers an explicitly targeted lane,
then the selected one, and makes a lane only when there is neither. That is
what stops the row-per-symbol growth coming back in through the drop path, and
it is why `add-lane` now takes a z in front of the existing root nodes and
calls what it makes a "lane" rather than "drawings".
The timeline learned the two gestures that a generic lane needs. A clip body
dragged over another lane's track previews there as a dashed block and lands
through `::adopt-in-lane`; the track is found with `elementsFromPoint` and its
selection read back off the element, because a pointer capture does not
retarget. A pool drop over an existing lane previews as a dashed clip inside
that lane instead of a temporary new row that appears and then vanishes --
which also needed the drag-leave check to be geometric, since inserting the
preview changes the element under the pointer and Chromium then reports a leave
with no related target. Lanes are renameable from their label, by double-click,
F2, or the pencil, through `::rename-node`.
`symbol/lane-cels` is `symbol/lane-clips`, and the vocabulary table in the
handoff now separates the two words it had merged: a clip is an instance in a
lane, and a cel is specifically the one-frame held source that drawing creation
makes. Keeping `cel` for the policy is what lets the lane stop being about
drawings at all.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Moves the tracing toggle and its opacity slider off the palette bar. The bar is
what you set before you draw — the tone and the tool — and whether a reference
photo is showing is not that; it is a viewing aid, like solo, and it belongs
with the other things the inspector says about what is on the stage.
Its own `footage` section rather than part of `tracing · <face>`, which is the
whole reason it could come back to the inspector at all. That section needs a
face to be about, so it is absent when a take is open and nothing is selected —
the commonest case there is — and a switch that appears only once the right row
has been found makes the way to see the footage you are tracing depend on what
you clicked, which is what put the thing on the bar in the first place. So the
section keys off `trace/traceable-faces` of the OPEN symbol: present whenever
the picture has any footage behind it, wherever the selection happens to be.
No change to the state or the events. `[:ui :trace]` is still a set of faces and
one opacity, `::trace-faces` still switches every face the open symbol has on
unless they all already are, and a face's own timeline row still singles it out.
The label loses the word "footage" because the section heading now says it.
`.trace-opacity` was 64px to survive a crowded flex bar and is `flex: 1` on a
pane row instead; `.palette-bar label.dim` had no remaining user.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Every row is one line now — a thumbnail at the stage's own 16:10, the name,
and the one number you need before dragging it somewhere — at the timeline's
own row height. Two always-open folders cost eight headings before the first
row in a pane 210px wide; they are two tabs, and a search counts its hits in
the scope you are not looking at so nothing can hide behind the one you did
not pick.
Symbols draw their own first frame, through the resolver and rasteriser the
stage uses. A PLACED symbol is drawn where it is placed, with the rest of its
host isolated away: rooting at a symbol renders its DRAWING, and a rotoscoped
face is head-local in units of one image height, so the source-to-stage scale
that makes it pixels lives on the :face group of whatever places it. Rendered
rooted at itself a face is correct and under a pixel across. Thumbnails are
smoothly downscaled for the same kind of reason the preview is not: at a tenth
of the stage's size nearest neighbour samples one pixel in a hundred, and the
silhouette is the whole of what makes a thumbnail recognisable.
Names are editable, and that is two operations behind one pencil. A symbol's
name is a field of this document, so it is an undoable edit and blank gives it
back its id. Footage and sounds live beside projects rather than inside one,
so theirs is a server write shared by every project using the row — PATCH on
the existing Footage.label, and a new Sound.label kept separate from the
filename, which is a fact about the upload and not somebody's name for it.
No TIMELINES section beside a SYMBOLS one: every symbol here IS a timeline, so
that pair named one thing twice. What is true is that exactly one of them is
where the work happens, and clip/opens-on already answers which — it leads the
pane as PROJECT, drawn at a size you can read a pose off, with the library
under it. Still not :main being special; rename it or place it inside
something else and the pool follows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Constant, ramp, and return offsets now append ordinary channel layers to a lane or cel in explicit owner frames. The inspector exposes the commands as one undoable transaction, shows conflicts, and offers removal or retry while preserving generated bases through regeneration.
Ordered-stack compatibility is shared by validation, conflict reporting, and regeneration, including adjacent replacement coverage. Cel-sheet gaps and headers select their lane, so commands cannot fall through to another column's stale selection.
437 tests, 5,804 assertions; both browser flows; 56 Django tests; optimized frontend build.
The cel sheet is a second projection of the same lane rows: frames run down, lanes run across, and each occupied cell carries the timeline cel's exact selection address. The shared action strip proves the point in the browser test by selecting a cell and issuing the existing hold command.
Before exposing that second entrance, fix the boundary mistakes it revealed. Nested commands now convert the open playhead through their enclosing instance path. Overwrite composes blanking with non-rippling placement as one transaction. Picture-rate and pose sampling select only the generated base frame while hand corrections retain the node's authored frame. Stack validation follows covering replacement layers so a document accepted by the validator cannot throw solely because a later offset sees a different shape.
429 tests, 5,767 assertions; both browser flows; 56 Django tests; optimized frontend build.
The photo blinked out for a frame or two and sometimes never arrived, from
three causes that each present as the same bug. The still cache emptied
itself on the frame it filled, so every still on screen had to be fetched
and decoded again — every 48 frames of a scrub, and with two traced faces a
permanent flicker, each one's still evicting the other's; it drops the least
recently used now, a still being touched on every frame it is drawn. A still
cannot decode in the animation frame that asks for it, and a face whose next
one had not arrived drew nothing, so it now keeps the still it was showing
until the new one is there. And nothing was read ahead, so continuous
playback was always a frame behind its own footage; the next few frames'
stills are asked for while the playhead is moving on its own, and only then,
because a scrub asks for a different few at every step.
Whether the footage shows is no longer the document's. It was an :underlay
on an instance, inherited down the row path, nearest wins, and it went
through edit — so showing a reference photo was an undo step that travelled
to collaborators. It is [:ui :trace] now, the faces switched on and one
opacity, like solo, and there is nothing left to inherit: a face is the same
face wherever it is placed, so one switch covers every placement of it. The
paint loop asks for its own redraw when that changes, since the resolver no
longer does it for them.
Opening a face shows its footage, because a symbol has measured footage
behind it only because it was traced from that; a take does not, because a
take is the picture. The switch is on the bar above the stage, with the tone
and the tool, and on each face's timeline row beside solo — not a section
that appeared once the right row had been found. A face open in its own tab
could not show its footage at all before, shown having walked instances, and
that is the one place tracing matters most. The inspector keeps the face's
own keyed facts, its trace keys and its origin, and says why it cannot key a
frame rather than greying out the only button in the section.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A face's :head carries :trace {:frames :origin}: the frames its photo holds
on, and whether the head reads every frame, jumps to the trace frames, or
holds frame 0. It replaces :anchors, so which measured frame a head reads is
one stored fact. An instance's :underlay shows the tracing stills over every
face at or below it, registered through each face's own head, at an opacity,
unkeyed. The clip resolver answers where a row path went on its last frame,
so the paint loop reads the photo's matrix instead of resolving again.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A click selects the thing in the open symbol, a double-click goes one
level in, ⌘-click goes to the shape itself and Esc comes back out —
Figma's rule — and a click inside the selection keeps it, so a shape
several symbols down can be dragged. The selection is the one a
timeline row makes, so the inspector shows it and its row opens and
scrolls into view.
A drag writes what the inspector writes: a key on the node's own frame
where the channel has keys, its one value where it has none. It is
previewed like a bar being slid and let go as one edit, so one undo
step. Measured transforms refuse. A shape's points are edited by
double-clicking it, and new shapes turn about their middle.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A nested mark is now named by the flat path its row has, [a b mark] rather
than [a [b mark]], so a soloed row is a prefix of what it shows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The title is a button that becomes a field, saved on Enter or blur. Export's
target and scale move out of the bar into a dialog.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Delete or Backspace, or the × on the selected row, takes the node out of its
symbol along with every node hanging off it. One edit, so undo brings it back.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Each of vis, anchor, pos, rot, scale and skew is a row: ◆ keys the channel on
the node's own frame, or takes the key there off, and a typed value is written
on blur or Enter — a key on a keyed channel, the one value on one that is not.
Rotation reads in degrees. Dense and other channels keep their readout.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node's bar drags along the timeline: one write to its :at, for every node
alike, carried down through the instances above it. The stage and rows show
the slide live through ::render/clip, and it lands as one edit on release.
A row dropped on another's top or bottom edge goes in front of it or behind:
one write to :z, between its new neighbours (symbol/z-between). Onto the edge
of a row in another symbol, it moves there first. Neither needs anything on
screen — nest/down walks a row path by structure, without a frame.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A project is only ever at /p/<id>/<slug>; / is the index of the projects
you own or edit. Every project has an owner, who can name editors;
anyone with the link can view. Every edit saves itself, one request in
flight at a time, as a patch of the leaves that changed, and a websocket
(channels + daphne) carries presence and each committed write to
everyone else in the project. The first write to a leaf wins, and the
loser is told.
Undo is per person: a step undoes only if the leaves it touched still
hold what it left, so it never takes a collaborator's work with it.
Named snapshots replace saving, and restore as an ordinary write.
An empty symbol now survives the leaf round trip with `:nodes {}`.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A node's row can be dragged onto an instance's row, to go inside the symbol
it places; onto any other node's row, to be grouped with it into a new
symbol; or onto empty label space, to come back to the top of the open
symbol. All three keep the picture and the timing as they are, and a refused
move says why in the status line. Pool drop targets now only take things out
of the pool, and row drags set a move effect so the browser delivers the drop.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Dropping footage on the stage or the timeline asks which frames and what name:
a dialog plays the video with start and end handles that seek it. Detection
runs on that range only (decoding stops at the end, frames before the start
are skipped) and the range is part of the analysis address, so a partial
analysis is never served as a whole one. The frozen take comes in as one
named symbol, carrying its sound as an audio node, placed where it was
dropped; tracking and tuning come with it when the document has no analysis
of its own.
clip/adopt copies symbols between documents, renaming ids that collide, and
clip/audio-tracks carries sounds out of nested instances so a placed symbol
is heard where it is placed.
Fixes the stage going blank after a conversion: ::store recomputed only when
the clip id changed, so blocks merged into the loaded entry were invisible to
the resolver. And the paint loop now schedules its next frame before
painting and reports a frame it cannot draw instead of stopping.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The stylesheet and bundle were served with Last-Modified only, so a browser
could pair new JavaScript with a stale app.css and render the tab strip and
thumbnails unstyled. Their URLs now carry the file's mtime. Tabs are flat on
the chrome with the open one underlined; the close button shows on hover.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A symbol dragged out of the pool shows where it would land: on the stage, a
dashed outline of its first frame centred on the pointer, and on the timeline
a preview row of its own length. A stage drop places it at the playhead under
the pointer; a timeline drop places it at the frame under the pointer, in its
own coordinates. A drop that would make a cycle is refused while hovering.
Pool thumbnails are capped at 40x30.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This project lists every symbol in the document and the video it uses or was
given this session, each with a frame from its proxy as a thumbnail. All
assets lists every upload on the server and every other saved project's
symbols, from a new /api/symbols that reads symbol leaf paths. Every row is a
drag source (symbol:, import:, footage:). Uploading no longer runs straight
into detection; it lands in the project's media.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Double-clicking a symbol in the pool, or an instance's row in the timeline,
opens it as a tab above the stage; the stage, the rows, the transport and new
shapes follow the open tab. Each tab gets a clock as long as it is: its own
mixed tracks, the document's audio for the symbol it opens on, or silence.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Step 9. The tier split was the work; Django was the easy half.
Tier 1 — the authored scene — is the document, and it is addressed as
independently versioned leaves rather than saved whole, so one vertex drag
cannot clobber a collaborator's keying. `domain/leaf` is the document as
path -> value; `domain/wire` puts it on the wire as transit, because JSON
has neither integer map keys nor keywords and a save would quietly turn
`{0 v}` into `{"0" v}`.
Tier 2 — the dense channel blocks — is content-addressed by a hash over
every input, with the detector version inside every key through the
analysis the block descriptor names. `flow/address`'s `block-knobs` is the
invalidation table, and `address-test` does not trust it: it re-freezes the
take once per knob and asserts the biconditional, that a block's bytes
changed if and only if its key changed. That found `brow-pos` not depending
on `contour-avg` — the brow ring is smoothed, the raise is not.
Tier 3 — frames and audio — is served by the hash of its bytes out of the
same store. A manifest now names frames and carries a URL for each, so the
frame layout stopped being a shared secret between a shell script and a
ClojureScript namespace, and the `?v=` cache-buster went with it: a blob's
name is the hash of its contents, so a stale copy is not a thing that can
happen. The synthetic take's `audio.wav` moved to `static/arthur/` — an
asset the project owns, not an extraction that churns.
The server verifies rather than trusting a name it was handed: it
recomputes every key from the descriptor stored beside it, refuses an
analysis that declares no detector version, and refuses a document naming
blocks it does not hold. It hashes the descriptor TEXT, because JS prints
an integral double as `1` and Python as `1.0`, and a scheme where both ends
re-render the numbers disagrees on the first parameter that happens to be
whole.
Two loose ends from step 8 closed on the way. `pack` no longer takes a
`(track, frame)` predicate whose call sites each re-derived a feature from
an index — every track names the feature it follows, which deleted five
hand-maintained mappings. And `:dev-http` is gone: Django serves the page,
shadow-cljs only builds into the staticfiles tree.
227 CLJS tests, 31 Django tests, green.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
