A build gets sent to testers, and this one arrived with the apps it was
developed against baked in as defaults - including an internal Odoo
hostname and a per-person Google account index in every path. Nothing
personal ships inside the bundle, but the seed is compiled into it.
The seed is now three generic Google apps that link to each other, which
is enough for a tester to see app switching work without learning where
anyone works.
A test asserts it stays that way: every seeded URL must be a plain
google.com host with no account index. It would otherwise drift back the
next time the seed is edited for convenience.
Both previous attempts asked a question about a domain, and a domain does
not know which product it is serving. Google's favicon service returned a
marketing site's icon for anything behind a login and nothing for a
private host; Simple Icons returned one flat brand mark where the real
one is multicoloured and, for Gmail, carries the unread count.
The page already holds the answer - fetched, authenticated, current. The
injected script now reads link[rel~="icon"] and reports the best one:
largest declared sizes wins, an Apple touch icon counts as 180, and an
.ico is penalised as usually the 16px tab icon. It rechecks on the same
tick as the unread count, which is when a site like Gmail redraws its
icon with a badge. The URL is stored, so the nav is right at launch
rather than blank until every page has loaded.
The custom frame is gone with it: ordinary macOS title bar, traffic
lights where every other window puts them, and the bar following the
app's Light/Dark choice through set_theme. A window that behaves like a
window beats one that looks bespoke.
The favicon service was wrong as often as it was right: a sign-in page's
icon for anything behind a login, nothing at all for a private host, and
both answers cached past any way of asking again. Refreshing could not
fix it, because the staleness was not local. Now every mark is.
Each app is its brand glyph in white on a round tile, coloured from
Tailwind's 500s by hashing the host - you find things by their colour, so
one that moved every launch would be worse than none. A host with no
glyph gets its initial in the same tile.
Matching tries the registrable name first, since a self-hosted tool is
nearly always on a subdomain of its vendor - aputure.odoo.com is Odoo,
not Aputure. A short table covers what a domain cannot answer, which is
most of Google.
The build reduces Simple Icons' 15MB of SVGs to one 4.5MB map in public/,
fetched once rather than parsed into the bundle at every start; the
bundle stays at 233KB. It is generated on every build, so never committed
and never stale.
Traffic lights are offset to sit inside the window margin rather than
crowding its edge.
Each rise in an app's unread count while you are elsewhere adds to a
tally beside its name, and a dot on its icon in the rail. Looking at the
app is the only thing that clears it.
The window has no frame of its own, so the shell now keeps a 6px margin
in a normal window - the only part of it that is not a web page, and so
the only place left to grab. Full screen gives the room back.
Dialogs get the app blurred behind them. An app's webview paints above
the shell, so it has to be moved aside before a dialog can be seen at
all, and once moved there is nothing left to blur - a still taken on the
way out is the only way to keep the background there. It runs on a
blocking worker: its completion handler is on the main thread, and
waiting there deadlocks until the timeout and returns nothing.
Settings is much larger, the cog moved to the foot of the nav, group
names read as names rather than shouted headings, and "Refresh icons"
bumps a version every favicon URL carries, for the ones that cache wrong.
The cookie import is gone. It worked mechanically - 43 cookies decrypted
from Arc and verifiably visible to the page - but Google, Microsoft and
Odoo all refused the imported sessions, because each binds a session to
the browser that created it. Signing in once inside the app is simpler
and actually works, so the whole path is deleted rather than kept as a
feature that mostly fails. That takes rusqlite, aes, cbc, pbkdf2, hmac,
sha1 and sha2 out of the build with it.
Notifications are now raised through mac-notification-sys rather than
Tauri's notification plugin, because the plugin cannot report that one
was clicked. A click switches to the app that raised it and then runs
the page's own click handler - the only thing that knows which message
the notification was about.
Zoom is per app, on a fixed ladder so Cmd+0 returns to exactly 100%.
The shortcuts are menu-bar accelerators rather than a key listener,
since the keystroke has to work while a remote page has focus.
The hidden-element count is off the nav rows.
Pairing decrypts a Chromium browser's cookie store (PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA1
against its Keychain key, then AES-128-CBC) and injects the result into
WKHTTPCookieStore. Only the configured apps' hosts and their sign-in
hosts survive the filter. Browsers are offered most-recently-used first,
since the first entry becomes the default and someone with four
Chromium browsers installed wants the one they actually browse in.
WKWebView defines window.Notification but it does nothing: constructing
one throws no error and shows no banner, so a page believes it notified
you. Measured on the machine as `api=function shim=no` before the shim
was made unconditional; `from page: Odoo - Test notification -> raised`
after.
Anything on a page can be right-clicked away. The rule is re-asserted on
every navigation, because the injected script only carries a snapshot
from when the view was built and a selector added since would otherwise
come back on reload.
The top bar is gone. Navigation lives beside the cog, the nav carries
the traffic lights, and two-finger swipe goes back and forward.
The seed is now the real app list, scoped to exact hosts so a Drive link
inside Gmail switches rather than being swallowed.
A Tauri 2 shell with one child webview per configured tool. Nav on the left
with groups and a collapsible icon rail; links between configured apps switch
tabs, everything else leaves for the real browser.
Design spec in docs/superpowers/specs/2026-09-01-work-app-design.md.
Vincent