Commit Graph
11 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
marcandClaude Opus 5 c96885d5b3 A notebook opens in its own order
The hand-made order is where a notebook's own arrangement lives:
separators show, rows can be put where they belong, nothing slides about
by itself. Starting in "last changed" made both of those look broken
until the sort menu was found — pressing "+ Separator" there drew a line
the order cannot display, so the button appeared dead. A notebook nobody
has arranged still reads newest-first, because untouched rows all carry
position 0, so nothing is lost by starting there. The views keep "last
changed": they are questions asked of every notebook at once and have
nowhere to keep an arrangement. The button that draws a line is now only
offered in the order that can show one.

Removing a chapter left you stuck in the confirmation. Every destructive
action goes through one helper that takes the question down again; this
one set the dialog directly and bypassed it, so the chapter was removed
and the prompt stayed over the app. Closing now happens where the dialog
is rendered, so it happens whoever asked and however they asked.

The suites did not catch that, and the reason is worth keeping: they
read the list straight through the overlay, which is in the DOM the
whole time, and passed while the screen was in fact stuck. Both now
assert the question is gone afterwards.

The separator is no wider than its name. It sat in a fixed 132px slot —
chosen so the row would not jump when renaming began — with a short name
floating in a gap it did not fill.

Thirteen suites green: 345 browser checks, 241 unit tests.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 21:45:03 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 b2a5f051fe A filed note stays filed, and the handles are asked for
Three things that all came from chapters being thought through too late.

A note put into a chapter came back out of it a few seconds later. The
server had it right the whole time; every sync rebuilds the local copy
from the server's answer, and the function doing that never carried
chapter_id — so each sync handed back a note belonging to no chapter and
the notebook took it in again. The bin's query left the column out too,
which would have unfiled anything restored from it.

A separator drawn in a notebook vanished when a chapter was opened.
"Which chapter is open" and "which list is on screen" were one value.
Opened beside or below, the list still shows the notebook — but
everything around it had switched to the chapter, so the notebook's own
separators were filtered away and a drag among its rows was measured
against the chapter's notes, found nothing, and did nothing.

And where a new note lands is now visible and yours to choose: pressing
in either place makes it the one being worked in, marked with a line
along its top and the word "here", and the + button names it.

Rearranging becomes a mode, switched on beside the sort menu — until
then no row wears a grip and none can be dragged. Filing a note is back
in the row's own menu, where starring and exporting already are; the
button that had appeared in every row is gone with its dialog. The
account panel closes with Escape.

Thirteen suites green: 335 browser checks, 241 unit tests.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 16:59:29 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 1757ec9af3 Chapters: folders inside a notebook
A note is in exactly one chapter, or in none — which means the notebook
itself. Chapters sit above the loose notes; tapping one opens its own
list and the menu button becomes the way back out, which on a phone is
the only way, since the list fills the screen.

A chapter is not a wastebasket. Removing one never removes what it held:
the notes come back to the notebook, where they can be seen and filed
again. That is ON DELETE SET NULL, and it is also written out in the
delete route, because it is the promise the whole thing rests on and
should be visible where it happens rather than inferred from a schema.
The dialog says so too, with the number of notes affected, and the suite
removes a chapter holding three notes and asks the server for all three.

Three rules keep the two levels honest. A note filed into a chapter
leaves the notebook's own list, or filing it would appear to do nothing.
A chapter belongs to its notebook, so the server refuses to file a note
into a chapter of a book it is not in, and moving a note to another
notebook clears its chapter. And separators belong to the list they were
drawn in: a separator's order counts the notes before it, which means
nothing across lists.

Two bugs found while building it, both a day old and both affecting the
desktop rather than the phone they were written for:

- A submenu was clipped away. The context menu had been given
  `overflow-y: auto`, which cuts off anything flying out sideways — so
  the notebooks under "Move to..." were invisible and every click on them
  landed on the note list behind. The side was inverted too:
  `right: 100%` places a panel on the left.
- A separator was a one-pixel hairline in the border colour with faint
  grey text on near-black. Present, and on a phone effectively invisible.

And one test that never measured what it claimed. It asked whether a
dragged note had become "the most recently changed" by reading the order
on screen — but three notes made seconds apart share an `updated_at`
second, so that order is a tie broken arbitrarily. It passed on luck for
weeks and fell over on a run a fraction faster. It now compares the
timestamps themselves, before and after the drag.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 13:04:18 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 8ca1ed6e06 Choose a cover in two parts, and let the app be installed
A cover is a colour *and* a pattern now, chosen in turn. Offering every
combination as its own entry meant fifteen colours times a dozen patterns
in a grid nobody could take in — and in practice only the handful someone
had thought to write out. Each pattern is previewed over the colour in
hand, so what is on screen is the cover as it will be. `cover_pattern` is
its own column: they are two decisions, and folding them into one number
would mean renumbering every cover the day a pattern is added.

For one day the patterns *were* twelve appended entries. Those indices
are read back as the colour-and-pattern pair they were drawn as, so
nothing chosen then looks different now.

And three separate reasons the install button never appeared, none of
them in anyone's configuration:

- `beforeinstallprompt` fires once, early — usually before React has
  mounted — and is never fired again. A listener added from inside a
  component simply missed it. It is caught at the top of index.html now.
- A `<link rel="manifest">` is fetched with credentials omitted unless it
  says otherwise. Behind a reverse proxy that authenticates in front of
  the app, that one request comes back as the proxy's login page and the
  browser reads it as an invalid manifest — while the app itself works
  perfectly, because its own requests carry the cookie.
- The service worker cached whatever came back, so a lapsed session could
  be stored as the application itself. The app would then "work offline"
  by showing a login screen it could never get past, curable only by
  clearing the site's data. Only successful, unredirected responses are
  cached now, and the cache name is bumped to drop anything already
  stored under the old rules.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 02:20:37 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 608da16ac2 Make the phone work: touch reordering, reachable menus, and nothing lost offline
Four things that were built for a mouse on a desk and quietly did nothing
useful on a phone. The last one is the serious one.

**A note made offline lost everything written into it.** Its create
reached the server, the server named it something else, and every edit
still queued behind it went on addressing the name only that device ever
knew — 404, five retries, thrown away. The note arrived empty and
untitled, with nothing to say that anything had been lost. The database
was repointed at the new id all along; the queue was not. It is now, by
replacing the id across the whole queued payload rather than in a list of
named fields, because a list of fields is a list to forget to add to. The
same held for a notebook made offline and everything filed into it.

**The order of notes could not be changed on a phone**, because the list
went through the HTML5 drag API, which mobile browsers never fire from
touch. Pointer events instead, which mouse, pen and finger all produce. A
mouse still drags a row from anywhere; a finger drags from a grip,
because pressing the row has to go on scrolling and holding it has to go
on opening the menu. The row under the finger is found with
elementFromPoint — a finger raises no pointerover on anything it did not
press.

**"Move to..." opened off the side of the screen**, and could not be
opened at all without a hover. It is a tap now, unfolding in place where
there is no room beside the menu and flipping sides where there is. The
menu itself is placed by measuring rather than by assuming it is 220px
wide, its rows are tall enough to hit with a thumb, and Escape closes it.

**Installing said nothing when it could not be done.** The entry appeared
only when the browser had offered a prompt, so where installing was
impossible there was no button and no reason. It is always there now and
names the cause — most usefully that a browser will only install a site
served over HTTPS, which is also why the service worker would not have
registered, so one cause was showing up as two mysteries.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 01:16:41 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 9e4677c70b Patterns on the covers, a search box that is simply there, roomier margin notes
Four small things about the shape of the app.

Covers can be patterns as well as colours — ruled paper, graph paper,
pinstripe, bands, dots, cross-hatch, linen, washes, a ledger — drawn
entirely with CSS gradient layers. No image files, nothing to upload,
crisp at any size, and offline like everything else. A cover is stored as
an index into that list, so the new ones are appended and never inserted:
renumbering would silently repaint every notebook anyone already has.

Two things the patterns taught. One idea per cover: two crossed diagonals
meant as a chevron came out as noisy plaid at the size a cover is
actually read, and were replaced with plain bands. And the grid has to
scroll — with 27 covers the dialog ran past the bottom of a laptop screen
and took the Create button with it, which a check now holds at 1440x800.

The search box in a notebook is simply there now, and the button that
used to open it is gone. A magnifying glass cost a click and having to
remember that searching was possible at all; a search box is one line and
says for itself what it does.

Margin notes went from 208x74 to 288x112 — from three short lines to
about five. Three lines is a caption, not a remark on a passage, and the
space beside the page was sitting mostly empty.

And the notebook edit dialog was still part German, and would not say
what the server's default number of versions actually is. It names it
now, read from the server rather than written into the interface: it is
set with MAX_VERSIONS_PER_NOTE, and a hardcoded "50" would quietly start
lying the day that changed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 00:29:00 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 830af6532a Take the paper back out, and quiet the surfaces around it
The sheet was not what it wanted to be, so writing is plain text again: about 73
characters to the line, centred, no border and no shadow. The fixed page belongs
to the canvas — a stroke has to land in the same place on every screen, which
needs one agreed page — so it appears exactly when something is on it or about
to be: in Draw, or when the note already has a drawing. The cap lives in the
stylesheet rather than on a container, so it holds on a page as well as off one.

Emoji are gone from the note rows and the sidebar. They are drawn by the
operating system, so they looked different on every machine and were loud enough
that a row's picture caught the eye before its title did. Rows are tighter by
three pixels of padding.

The trash button no longer stands permanently in the danger colour beside the
star, which made the most destructive control the loudest thing on screen. It
sits behind a divider and turns red under the pointer, when it is about to be
used.

On a phone the toolbar's fourteen controls scrolled sideways, so the ones at the
end could only be reached by dragging the bar and nothing said they were there.
Nine remain, plus a menu holding the headings, quote, code and undo.

A new `sync` suite proves what was assumed: a PDF written on one device — the
document, the drawing and the pinned notes — reaches a second one. Two browser
contexts are two devices.

Both search suites read a row's title as the second line of its text, which only
worked while the icon was itself a text emoji; they read it by name now.

218 unit tests, 249 browser checks across twelve suites.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 15:57:22 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 52bd2b8f3d Put the interface into English, and give the notebook one way in
The interface had drifted into two languages — the frame in English, everything
added later in German — which is worse than either, since the same idea appeared
under two names depending on when that part was written. Sorting by title still
uses the German collation, so Übung 2 comes before Übung 10: that is about the
notes, not the chrome.

Two archive folders were renamed with it (bilder/ → images/, zeichnungen/ →
drawings/). The importer reads both spellings, and both the old and new marker
line for a drawing — archives exported before this are on disk, and an import
that quietly dropped their drawings would be the worst kind of tidy-up.

Making a note, uploading a PDF and importing Markdown were three buttons side by
side, two of them icons you had to hover to identify. They are the same act —
putting something new in this notebook — so they are now one + menu.

The search box moves out of the sidebar and into the note list, labelled with the
notebook it narrows. Nothing changed about what it does: it has always searched
only the notebook you are in, but from the sidebar it read as searching
everything.

A separator no longer carries a sentence explaining the order the sort menu
already names. Renaming joins removing on the right-click menu — a left-click on
the label started an edit, so the row could not be touched without falling into
one.

218 unit tests, 238 browser checks across eleven suites. Two of those caught real
breakage from this change rather than needing a translation.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 02:17:22 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 0a7cf26b28 Group the two visibility switches, and put the drawing tools back where they belong
"Zeichnung" and "Randnotizen" are two halves of one question — how much of your
own work do you want to see right now — and they sat at opposite ends of the
toolbar, each beside the tool that made them. They are now one pair in one shape
at the right-hand end. Each still appears only once there is something of its
kind to hide, so the pair can be lopsided, which is honest.

The drawing tools had drifted past the pin controls as those were added, so
switching to Zeichnen made them appear somewhere other than where the eye
already was. They follow the button that turns them on again.

A separator no longer carries a ×. It sat a few pixels from the label you click
to rename, putting the gesture that tidies the list next to the one that destroys
part of it — so removal is a right-click behind a confirmation that says the
notes are not affected, which is how everything else in that list is acted on.

218 unit tests, 237 browser checks across eleven suites. The toolbar checks
compare measured positions rather than presence, since the complaint was about
where things were, not whether they existed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-11 01:24:25 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 2cee00e38e Fix a permanent black line in the note list, and add separators
The drop indicator was a `borderTop` set in the same style object as a `border`
shorthand. Clearing the longhand resets its width and colour to the defaults
while the shorthand's `solid` stays, so a row kept a 2px black line for good —
measured at rest, before any drag. It is now its own element, which also stops
the list twitching as a row grows and shrinks by a pixel.

That element then turned out to be a dead strip of its own: it pushes the row
down as it appears, so the pointer ended up over the line rather than over the
row and releasing there dropped on nothing. The drag handlers moved to the whole
row and the indicator no longer takes pointer events. A strip below the last row
means "put it at the end", which otherwise needs a drop onto the final note.

Separators are lines drawn between notes, optionally named, stored on the
notebook beside its sort mode. They drag like notes do, and their position is
"how many notes come before me", so they hold their place as the notes around
them are renamed or edited. Shown only in the manual order — in "newest first"
the notes would slide past the line on every edit.

"All Notes" and "Starred" no longer offer a hand-made order: they are questions
asked of every notebook, so there is nothing for an arrangement to belong to.

199 unit tests, 190 browser checks across eleven suites.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-10 01:45:38 +02:00
marcandClaude Opus 5 0a0864c58b Sort a notebook, import Markdown back, and stop the page shrinking in Draw
The paper measurably shrank on switching to Draw — 733px to 460px on the same
screen. The editor was a flex item at its default `flex: 0 1 auto`, so its width
was its widest row's: the toolbar. Swapping a dozen formatting buttons for six
drawing ones collapsed it. It now fills the pane, so the width is a property of
the window.

Each notebook remembers how its notes are ordered, on the server rather than per
device. The manual order has to survive being looked away from, so `reindex`
renumbers every note in the notebook rather than the filtered view, and dragging
is switched off while a search narrows the list. Reordering has its own route:
`PUT /notes/:id` would bump `updated_at` and snapshot a version, so a drag would
move a note to the top of "last changed" and spend a slot of its history.

Markdown and our own ZIP archives come back as notes, with their images
re-uploaded as attachments. A drawing returns as the PNG it was exported as —
vectors are not recoverable from pixels — and the import says so rather than
leaving it to be discovered. Writing the parser turned up a real bug in the
exporter: blocks were emitted with no blank line between them, so a list after a
list became one list and a quote after an item was read as part of it.

Creating or importing from "All Notes" now asks which notebook instead of
silently taking the first one. The web-link prompt is a real dialog: a bare
domain becomes https, javascript: is refused with a reason. The PDF viewer's
hide-drawing control is a labelled button rather than a filled-or-hollow dot,
and the export icon points down into a tray like every other download.

186 unit tests, 179 browser checks across eleven suites, including a new
`offline` suite that loads the app cold with the network off.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-09 01:38:03 +02:00