The collapsed rail was a fixed 72px, which left the cluster with more
room on its left than its right. The width now comes from the buttons
themselves - the close button's own inset plus the zoom button's right
edge - so the margin matches on both sides. That inset is macOS's to
choose and has changed between releases, so it is asked for rather than
assumed.
Measured at startup rather than on demand. The answer arrives on the main
thread, and a command waiting for it there deadlocks until the timeout
and silently returns the fallback - which is what the first attempt did.
Both notification paths feed one channel, which is how a single arrival
came to be announced twice: Gmail names the sender, then the unread count
says "1 new" behind it seconds later.
A count is now skipped when the app has spoken for itself in the last
twenty seconds - generous, because a count is only noticed on a
four-second tick, well after the app raised its own. Settings can also
turn count notifications off outright, for hearing only what an app says
in its own words, at the cost of the tools that never say anything.
`npm run ship` now updates only /Applications. The Desktop installer
moved behind `--dmg`, for when a build is going to someone else.
The window's position and size survive a restart, and so does the app
you were last in.
Saving a password was only half of it - a saved password you cannot get
back out is not saved in any useful sense. Right-click now offers "Fill
saved password" wherever a page has a password field. Only on an explicit
click, only for the host on screen, and only into that page's own fields,
never on load. The value is set through the native setter and followed by
input and change events, because assigning .value is invisible to React
and Angular and the site would submit an empty field.
The title bar is painted the nav's colour rather than its own grey, so
the two read as one surface in either theme. Doing that revealed that the
window's content had always run the full height underneath it - the
opaque bar was hiding it - so the shell is now inset by the measured
title bar height, or the nav lands on the traffic lights.
The rail's unread badge is a fixed circle inside the button's bounds.
Padding around a number made a pill at two digits, and hanging it off the
corner put it under the rail's clip; past nine it reads "9+", with the
figure itself in the expanded nav.
Version pinned to 0.0.1 and staying on 0.x while this is in beta.
`npm run ship` now exports twice from one build: /Applications/Work.app
to test here, and ~/Desktop/Work-<version>.zip to send someone. One
build, so a tester runs byte for byte what was verified rather than a
second build that drifted. Packed with ditto rather than zip - a plain
zip mangles the bundle's symlinks and it will not open on the far end.
Settings: groups move up under apps, and the hidden-element list moves
into its own window behind a one-line summary. It had grown to 21
selectors of framework class names and was most of the page, in front of
the things people actually open Settings for.
Reset puts apps, groups, hidden elements and zoom back to defaults, and
leaves sessions alone - those live in WebKit's own store, and throwing
them away would mean signing back into every tool to undo a change to
the nav.
Submitting a form containing a password now offers to remember it.
It goes into the macOS Keychain, through the Security framework rather
than the `security` binary - a password passed as a command-line argument
is visible in `ps` to anyone on the machine, however briefly. Never
apps.json, never a log.
The value travels as little as it can: the injected script hands it
straight to Rust, which holds it in memory and tells the shell only which
host and which username, since that is all the shell needs to ask the
question. It is written on Save and dropped on anything else.
Autofill is deliberately not built. Reading a password back out and
injecting it into a page is a materially larger surface than offering to
store one, and deserves its own decision.
A child webview is positioned against the window frame while the shell
measures the hole it left from inside the content view. Borderless, those
origins coincided and it never showed. With a title bar back they are a
title bar apart, so every app was drawn that much too high - painting
over the right-hand part of the bar, which read as the bar being tinted
by whichever site was open, and leaving a strip of the same height along
the bottom.
Tauri cannot report that height. Both inner_position/outer_position and
inner_size/outer_size come back identical on macOS - measured, both
differences were zero against a window whose content is plainly a title
bar shorter than its frame. NSWindow.contentLayoutRect knows, so it is
asked once and cached.
Also hides the window title, and centres the navigation row in its own
strip rather than letting it crowd the bar above it.
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 report was that a backgrounded site dies slowly and stops fetching.
It did, for three separate reasons, and the first two fixes each traded
one failure for another:
Hiding inactive views lets WebKit suspend them, so nothing is hidden any
more - every view keeps its size and stays in the window, and the active
one is ordered on top.
Telling a background page it was hidden then made Gmail throttle its own
syncing; its unread count sat unchanged for two and a half minutes. That
spoof is gone.
Neither was enough on its own: a background page keeps its timers but
loses the connection its updates arrive on, and WKWebView has no
equivalent of Electron's backgroundThrottling. Background apps are now
poked every 45s with the events a page uses to catch up after you return
to a tab - it fetches without losing a half-written reply.
Notifications now come from the unread count in the title rather than
the site's notification code, which Gmail will not run while it believes
you are looking at it. Measured: Gmail behind Odoo went 155 -> 157
untouched and raised "Gmail / 1 new".
Also adds a background-app probe to Settings, which is what turned this
from guesswork into measurement, and drops the nav's blocked-element
count and the hide-element button.
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.
setCookie is fire-and-forget, so the import's count was what WebKit was
handed, not what it kept. A probe from inside the page reads back the
other end: pairing against Arc gave `names=tz,cids,frontend_lang` for
aputure.odoo.com, and `tz` exists only in Arc's store — so the import
demonstrably landed.
The sites still ask for sign-in. That is the far end refusing the
session, not a broken import, and the two are now distinguishable
instead of being guessed at.
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