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.
- IconPicker replaces the three icon selects (rail icon, icon-widget rule,
"Otherwise"): the glyphs in a grid, and a button that clears back to none —
which a Radix SelectItem could never offer.
- ModePicker/StylePicker drop out in favour of a shared ui/Segmented, the same
sliding-thumb shape RangePicker and the widget-side control already wear.
- PanelRail draws no scrollbars at all: hiding them also takes back the gutter
a vertical bar claimed from a column exactly as wide as its buttons, which is
what pushed a horizontal bar under them.
- The panels dialog can re-pair one screen (POST /panels/{id}/unpair) without
deleting the panel it hangs on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_018tULRZJUkZsw7rMJ3h4xvu
Shrinking a dashboard's canvas silently clipped whatever now fell past the
bottom edge: `maxRows` constrains a drag and nothing else, so a stored placement
is corrected against the column count alone. Nothing warned, and nothing offered
a way out.
The remedy is a notice rather than a reflow, because the canvas height is
written on every keystroke — typing 400 passes through 4 and 40, and anything
that moved widgets would flatten the arrangement while the number was still
being typed. The notice carries the reflow as its one button, and packing is
sideways because the grid already compacts vertically: nothing below the canvas
has room above it.
Dropping a widget also selected it, which opened its panel, which rescaled the
canvas under the pointer. The drag handle was simply missing from the selector
that already exempts the resize handle — which is why resizing never had this
problem.
Also: an icon rule's caption could only be set through the API, and the panel
rail drew two letters where a dashboard can now carry a lucide icon.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01Uq8mtNb97A7praJLyeEYgs
A panel is one screen and the ordered set of whole dashboards it shows, so a
hallway tablet and a workshop tablet carry different sets without either
dashboard knowing about the other. More than one and the device draws a rail
to switch between them — the same rail the editor puts on screen, because the
wall has it and it takes room off the canvas.
A screen has no keyboard, so it pairs rather than logs in: it shows a
six-character code, somebody approves it against a panel from the dashboards
overview, and the credential that mints reaches that panel's published
dashboards and the message endpoints its widgets speak, and nothing else.
Deleting the panel revokes it.
Closes the per-device view and the kiosk credential; supersedes the
multi-page/multi-section UI, since a page is now a dashboard of its own.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01AHpLJHozysQXjsxAyU1WHj
stroblme
