STARTING UP
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FIELD GUIDE · GETTING STARTED
What you are looking at, and where things live.
The whole site is a single window resting on a desktop. It does not move and it does not resize, and everything you read is inside it. The title bar rolls it up out of the way and puts it back; the box at the left closes it altogether, leaving an icon on the desktop that opens it again and can be dragged wherever you want it. It never reflows: on a smaller display the whole window is drawn smaller instead, so the layout you see is the layout everyone sees.
Categories sit on the left, the article you are reading fills the middle, and the headings of that article are listed on the right. The left pane moves you between articles; the right one moves you inside the one you have open.
Articles are cut into pages that each fit the reading area exactly. Use the arrows at the bottom to turn them, the arrow keys, or pick a heading from the outline to land on the page it appears on. Pages are written to length rather than trusted to fit, so in practice little here scrolls — but the reading area will if it has to, at a large type size or in a short window. Screen holds both halves of that: Reading scrollbar shows or hides the bar, and Scroll whole page decides whether the page heading travels with the text or stays put above it.
FIELD GUIDE · GETTING STARTED
Colour, contrast, brightness and the desktop.
Thirty-nine schemes are available under Theme, grouped into eight families, each built from five hand picked colours. Every surface, edge and piece of text in the interface is mixed from those five, so a scheme changes the whole window at once rather than recolouring parts of it. One is drawn at random each time the machine boots, and Randomize Palette at the top of the menu draws another without rebooting.
Contrast has two settings. Normal keeps the scheme as drawn; More pushes the ground darker, the paper lighter and hardens every edge. Brightness is separate, and the button says where it will take you rather than where you are.
Twelve tiled patterns sit under Desktop, and every one of them is drawn by the browser rather than loaded as an image, so each follows whichever scheme is active. Sliders set the tile between two and thirty-two times its base and turn the whole layer on its axis. Below them are the ground colour and a slot for an image from your own computer, which stays on your machine and is never uploaded anywhere. Randomize Pattern rolls the tile, its size, its angle and the colour underneath all at once — which is exactly what a fresh visit does, by calling the same control.
FIELD GUIDE · GETTING STARTED
The screen that runs before the desktop appears.
Three blocks cross a trough while a thin rule along the foot fills once, and then the screen fades and the desktop is underneath. The blocks are decoration; the rule at the foot is the only part that measures anything. Nothing is loading behind it, so clicking anywhere clears it at once — and the jingle plays on whichever comes first, the click or the wait.
Length offers three settings, and Scroller sets how fast the blocks cross independently of it — they are a sign that the machine is busy rather than a measure of progress, so a long boot should not make them crawl. The fade, the wordmark and the rule along the foot all derive from the length, so they stay in step whichever you pick.
Reboot puts the screen back and runs it from the beginning, with a fresh jingle. It leaves the desktop as it is: the pattern and the colour scheme are drawn once per visit, so reloading the page gets you a new one and replaying the intro does not. Command-B, or Control-B, does the same from the keyboard. If your system is set to reduce motion, the moving parts are dropped and the screen simply appears and clears.
FIELD GUIDE · GETTING STARTED
The layer drawn over everything else.
Screen Type draws a rule over the whole display: horizontal lines, or those crossed with vertical ones for a grid, or nothing at all. Strength sets how far it shows. The pitch is fixed at three pixels with a two pixel stroke, because the pair has to land on whole pixels or the lines smear across two rows.
Square rounds nothing and cuts the display to a rectangle; Circular rounds it, by as much as Curvature says. The corner is drawn as one opaque shape rather than a stack of translucent ones, so the edge is solid and the text underneath is never scaled.
The fall-off around the edge is six copies of the screen, each scaled a little smaller and each darkening what lies outside it. Depth sets how dark, Distance how far in they reach. Randomize rolls all six settings at once, and the whole menu returns to its defaults on every visit — it is a look to play with rather than one to keep.
FIELD GUIDE · INTERFACE TOUR
Three kinds, each behaving differently on purpose.
Rows in the category list, the outline and the menus sit flat until the pointer reaches them, then rise and fill. They are the quietest control because there are the most of them. A row that records a setting rather than performing an action carries a mark when it is the live one.
The page arrows stand above their own shadow, lift when pointed at and drop into the shadow when held. The buttons along the menu bar are drawn in the bar’s own colours, one step lighter so they separate from it. How much of this you see is a setting: Buttons under Theme runs from bevelled, through outlined and underlined, to flat and clean.
A menu opens on a click and stays open. Opening another closes the first, and so does clicking into the page or pressing Escape; working the title bar does not, so rolling the window up leaves the menu where it was. The underlined letter in each name opens that menu from the keyboard. Choices apply when you click them, not when you point at them.
FIELD GUIDE · INTERFACE TOUR
Pages, the outline, and the bar along the bottom.
Each page holds three sections and no more. The count at the bottom refers to the article you are in, not to the site, so page two of three means two of three in this piece alone. The arrows do not stop there: at either end of an article they carry on into the next or the previous one, and dim to say so before you press them. Only the very first and very last pages of the whole listing have nowhere to go.
The right pane lists the headings of the open article, nested one level. A heading is a link while it lives on another page; once you are on that page it stops being one, since there is nowhere left to go.
The bar in the status strip shows how far through the article you are. Its two ends sit exactly under the two edges of the reading pane, on every page and in every article, so the only thing that ever moves is the fill inside it. The arrows and the counter to its left occupy the width of the category pane; the notice to its right occupies the width of the outline.
FIELD GUIDE · INTERFACE TOUR
Every key the interface answers to.
The underlined letter in each menu name opens it. Pressing the same letter again puts it away. No modifier is needed, because nothing on the page takes typed input.
The left and right arrows turn pages, and so do the comma and full stop keys, which carry < and > printed on them. All of them run through every article in the listing rather than stopping at the end of one. An arrow goes to the control instead while a slider or a set of options has focus.
Each of these is a toggle, so the same key undoes it. That matters most once the window is closed, when there is no title bar left to click.
FIELD GUIDE · INTERFACE TOUR
What makes a noise, and what it sounds like.
Four things can make a noise: pointing at something, clicking it, turning a page, and the jingle at the end of the title screen. Each has its own switch, so any of them can be silenced without silencing the rest. Mute stops all of it, and Volume is separate from your machine’s.
Five kits — Mechanical, Soft, Glass, Metal and Paper. Choosing one sets hover, click and page turn together; setting any of the three on its own moves you to Custom, which is simply whatever those three are. The site opens on Custom every visit, so an afternoon spent on another kit is not a new default. Randomize rolls the three of them, and keeps rolling on each visit until you turn it off.
Twelve of them, two to three seconds each. One is drawn at random per visit unless you pin a particular one, and pressing the pinned one again releases it. It plays when the title screen clears — whether that is the timer running out or you clicking it away, whichever comes first.
WORKSHOP · BENCH NOTES
What a bench needs before any work starts.
Good light from two directions and a surface you are willing to damage. Most of the frustration people blame on their tools comes from squinting at a dark corner of a cluttered table.
Everything used in every session belongs within arm's length, and everything else belongs somewhere else. A drawer you open twice a year can be across the room without costing anything.
Leave a clear patch of bench that never accumulates. Work in progress goes there and nothing else does, so a half-finished job is never buried under the next one.
WORKSHOP · BENCH NOTES
Order of operations, and when to stop.
Change one variable per step and check it before moving on. Two changes at once turn a five minute fault into an afternoon, because neither can be ruled out without undoing both.
A reading takes seconds and settles the question. Most of the time the measurement agrees with the assumption, and the few times it does not are the times that would have cost days.
Stop while the next step is still obvious. Finishing a session at a known-good point with a note about what comes next is worth more than the extra half hour of tired work.
WORKSHOP · BENCH NOTES
What to write down, and in what form.
Notes made afterwards are reconstructions. The value is in the small details that seem too obvious to record at the time and are gone by the evening.
Text files and photographs outlast the applications that made them. Anything that needs a particular program to open is a record you are renting rather than keeping.
Records of things that worked are common and records of things that did not are rare, which is backwards. The failures are what stop the same afternoon being spent twice.
ARCHIVE · ON KEEPING THINGS
Most of it is not, and that is the useful part.
Storage looks free and is not. Every kept thing is something to move, search past and decide about again later, and those costs are paid repeatedly while the saving is hypothetical.
The test is not whether something is useful but whether it could be got again. Anything still sold, still published or still downloadable fails that test however useful it is.
An unlabelled box is not storage, it is a delay. The minute spent writing on the lid is the difference between an archive and a pile.
ARCHIVE · ON KEEPING THINGS
Formats, copies, and the passage of time.
A single copy is a plan to lose something eventually. Two copies in one building is one copy as far as fire and theft are concerned, which is the whole argument for keeping one elsewhere.
The disc will fail before the format does, and the format will be forgotten before the writing is. Copy forward while the current medium still reads, rather than after it stops.
An archive nobody has opened in ten years is an assumption. Reading a few items at random every so often is the only way to find out whether what you have is still there.
ABOUT · COLOPHON
The pages, and what runs them.
Every setting is a hidden radio button or checkbox, and the stylesheet reads them to decide what to draw. Themes, contrast, the patterns, the screen effect, the title screen and all navigation work this way.
A single script handles the jobs a stylesheet cannot do: playing sounds, reading the sliders, remembering settings between visits, dragging the desktop icon, the keyboard shortcuts, and reading an image you pick from your own computer. Removing it leaves the site silent and otherwise unchanged.
Fonts, sounds and images are all served from this folder. No request leaves for another host, so nothing here depends on a service that might not be there later.
ABOUT · COLOPHON
Type, colour, sound and licences.
Five faces, all under the SIL Open Font License: Departure Mono by Helena Zhang, drawn on a seven by eleven cell; IBM Plex Mono by IBM; Inconsolata by Raph Levien; Roboto Mono by Christian Robertson; and Fira Mono by Carrois and Edenspiekermann. Each comes at two sizes, and the choice is remembered per face, so returning to one returns to the size you last read it at. Headings take whichever face the body is set to.
Thirty-nine schemes in eight families. Each is five colours filling five roles, and every other value in the interface is mixed from those, which is why a scheme, a contrast setting and a brightness setting can be combined without any of them being drawn twice.
Twelve boot jingles at 16 kHz and five interface kits at 22 kHz, eight bits, mono, each kit covering hover, click and page turn. They were synthesised from scratch rather than sampled, and are released into the public domain under CC0.
FAUXOS
This is a fixed three-column window built for a desktop display. It scales down to fit whatever room there is, but there is a point past which the type is too small to read, and this is under it. Try a larger window, or a desktop screen.