Tool pages, a wish list and a brand new folder tree

Today's OScar changelog has three big chapters and a long tail of small ones. Every tool moved into a page of its own, a wish list opened where you can vote on what I build next, and the sidebar that holds your folders was rebuilt from the ground up. In between, about thirty small things got nudged a few pixels to the left. It was that kind of day.

Every tool gets a front door

Until today, the tools were introduced by blog posts. That worked, but a post that explains every button is a strange way to say hello. So each tool now has two addresses. Its page tells you in a few lines what the tool is for and what you get, with one clean picture. Its guide is the full manual, the old post, living right under the page.

The rule I gave myself: the page sells, the guide teaches, and the same paragraph never appears in both. You can see the pair for Photos and its guide, or start from all tools. The blog itself is back to being a diary, eight entries at a time with a Load more button, on slightly smaller cards.

A wish list you can vote on

I have plenty of ideas for OScar. The trouble is knowing which ones matter to anyone but me. Enter the feature request board.

• Anyone can read it. The most wanted request sits on top, ten at a time.
• Signed-in accounts post and vote. An up arrow, a down arrow, one vote per request.
• Every request has a tool tag and a status: planned, in progress or done, sometimes with a short reply from me.
• New requests wait for a quick look before they appear, so the board stays readable.

Each tool's page shows its three most wanted requests, which is a slightly nerve-racking kind of honesty.

The folder tree

Yesterday every tool got the same sidebar. Today that sidebar got a new heart. I sketched what I wanted on paper first, and the result is a real folder tree in Photos, Documents, Notes and Draw.

• The folder icon is the switch. No more little arrows. A closed folder is grey, an open one turns green and changes shape, and the whole row is the click target.
• Everything steps in. What a folder holds sits one level in, under a thin guide line. The lines on the way to the folder you're in turn green, so even five levels deep you can trace your way home.
• Green means open, blue means selected. The note, document or photo you have open is marked in blue. The two colours never swap jobs.
• It remembers. The folders you left open are still open after a reload.
• Arrow keys work. Up and down walk the rows, right opens, left closes.

Phones get their own version, because a deep tree on a narrow screen turns into a staircase. The menu shows three levels at a time. A folder on the third level gets a small arrow, and tapping it slides in a fresh panel with that folder as the title, a back button, and the full path written underneath. Then the three levels start over. However deep your filing goes, the rows stay wide enough to read.

Groups, the bold headings above your folders, stayed exactly where they were. And under the hood the tree now does its counting once instead of once per row, which matters when a library holds thousands of photos.

Photos, tidied again

Photos got the most attention of any single tool.

• The Timeline is now simply called All photos, "Photos without folder" became Stray photos, and My favorites moved down next to it, in red so you can find it half asleep.
• Search, Select and Upload follow you down the page instead of waiting at the top.
• Select a few photos and the bar at the bottom is now a neat row of round icons rather than a sentence of buttons. It finally fits on a phone.
• Tags left the building. Nobody used them, me included, and the info panel is calmer for it.
• Delete folder sits beside Upload and New folder as a proper button, and the trash is emptied with a small red bin icon. Both still ask first.

Documents shares the same pages, so it inherited nearly all of this, and lost its sort picker along the way: folders list by name, which is what everyone wanted anyway.

Small things

• The home page greeting keeps the date on one line on every phone, shrinking the type a touch if the month is a long one.
• The green grid icon that takes you back to a project now sits to the right of the tool's name, behind a thin line.
• The Overview switch on the home page wandered into the middle of its row. It has been walked back to the right.
• Sticky rows on a phone no longer cover the scrollbar.
• Making a new album gives the name a row of its own, with Create and Cancel underneath.
• The footer says who made all this on a line of its own. Vanity, but tidy vanity.

What's next

The pictures in the guides still show yesterday's sidebar, so a round of fresh screenshots is first on the list. After that the folder pickers, the little "move to" lists, deserve the same tree. And if you think something else should come first, well, now there's a place to say so.