Stretched end to end, a panel with two dashboards showed a pill nine
tenths empty — which was tolerable while the rail was chrome outside the
canvas and obvious once it moved onto the panel itself. It now hugs its
entries and sits centred in the column it reserves; that column is the
same width either way, so no arrangement moves.
A rail longer than the panel is tall still scrolls, and still draws no
bar: a wall panel is swiped, and there is no room for one.
Five things a wall panel showed that a wall panel should not.
**A tile's body no longer clips.** It scrolled, and a box that scrolls
also cuts whatever crosses its edge — which took the glow off a lit
button at exactly the width where the button filled its tile, and off a
gauge's arc at exactly the height where the dial filled its own. Only
what is written or listed asks for a scroller now; everything else is a
picture drawn to fit, and what overflows is left to the frame, which
clips at the tile's edge where a shadow has already faded out. The
slider's phantom scrollbar goes with it.
**The selector is a selector.** Named for what it does rather than what
it is, and the choice it is holding is held in the dashboard's own
primary — a pill that slides between the options rather than a grey one
that had to be looked for. The stored type is untouched, so no document
changes meaning.
**The arrangement is held off the panel's edges**, by the same distance
it holds between two widgets. The ground is not held off with it: a
background covers the whole panel, and only what is arranged on it has
a margin. No stored panel loses a row to it.
**The rail is drawn on the panel.** It was chrome bolted to the edge of
the screen beside the canvas — in the app's own design rather than the
dashboard's, and on a scaled canvas not even lined up with it. It now
takes a column out of the canvas the way the margin does, scaled with
it and wearing its look. Which cell each widget sits in is unchanged;
only how big a cell is.
Two of these were the same mistake twice: an unlayered rule stating
`position` for everything wearing a class — `.gl-surface` on a rail
placed by a utility, and a blanket lift over every child of a pressable
on a pill placed by `layoutId`. Both now say it one element at a time.
A dashboard is a wall panel somebody hangs in their own hallway, so it
now wears what they choose: a look, and a palette of their own colours.
Two complete component sets live under `Dashboard/ui/` — `glass`
(translucent panes over a slowly moving ground) and `material` (Material
3 tonal cards) — behind one prop contract. Every control's state,
keyboard and `aria-` live in `ui/core` and are shared, so the two sets
are the same dashboard drawn twice rather than two products: a set only
decides what a control looks like while doing it.
Four settings join the channel, each drivable by a flow like any other:
`look`, `palette`, `background` and `touch`. A palette is an ordered list
of hex colours — background, surface, primary, accent, text, then more
chart colours — pasted from a coolors.co link or typed, written onto the
canvas as the token variables everything already reads. Trailing roles
are derived, so three colours are a whole dashboard, and derived text is
held to AA rather than trusted (`theme.check.ts` measures it). A palette
also decides light or dark, since its first colour is the ground.
Widgets are measured against their own tile with container queries rather
than against the viewport, animate through `motion`, and can be drawn
without their title. The three reworks:
- a bar draws a row per reading, up to eight, each in the dashboard's own
data colours and each able to carry its own scale — replacing readings
nested in one fill, which could only ever share one colour and stop at
three. Documents written the old way are read as rows.
- a chart's range picker moved to a column down its right-hand edge, which
gives the plot back a whole row of a short tile.
- the colour wheel became a disc: hue is the angle and saturation the
distance from the middle, so a colour is one gesture rather than three,
with brightness on a slider beside it.
`index.css` and `lib/motion.ts` are untouched — the dashboard overrides
token *values* on its canvas, never the blocks the two repos share.
stroblme