One page for every tool, and a menu that floats

Today's OScar changelog is about sameness, the good kind. Four tools that each had their own idea of what a page looks like now agree with each other, a small floating menu replaced a pile of buttons, and the Vault quietly borrowed the folder tree from the sidebar. There were also pills. Quite a lot of pills.

One page for Notes, Draw, Documents and Photos

It started small. "All photos" was a date timeline, while "All documents" was a plain page of folders and files, and switching between the two felt like changing apps. So All photos became the same kind of page: your top-level folders first, then the photos that aren't in a folder yet. Documents picked up the two rows Photos already had, My favorites and Stray documents, a home for everything you haven't filed.

Then the obvious question: why stop there? Notes and Draw had their own layouts too. So all four tools now draw their start page and their folder pages from one shared design. Folders first, items below, as a list or a grid. Change the design once and every tool follows, which is exactly the point.

Each tool keeps what makes it itself. Draw shows a preview of every drawing in the grid. Notes keeps its Pinned section, its priority letters and drag-to-reorder. Documents and Photos keep uploads, versions and albums.

A menu that floats

With the pages matching, the buttons above them looked busy: New this, Upload that, a search field, view toggles, a red Delete folder. I drew a sketch of what I wanted instead, and now every page has one small pill of icons floating at the top.

The order is always the same: the main action in green (New note, New drawing or Upload), New folder, search, list and grid, a sort picker, and inside a folder a red bin at the very end. The folder's name sits in a tiny pill tucked under the menu, and a click on it still renames the folder. Hover an icon and it tells you its name.

The menu does not move. Not when you scroll, and not when a phone does its rubber-band bounce at the end of a list. That last part took a second attempt: the first version stayed put on a computer and wandered on a phone.

Two things arrived along the way because the sketch had them: Notes and Draw can now search by name, and both got a sort picker (your own order, name, or last modified).

Right-click on a computer, swipe on a phone

Note rows used to carry a colour dot and a bin, and drawings had three little dots. All of that moved into the right-click menu, so a row is just a name and a date. The menu for a note or a drawing now has Favorite, Color, the tool's own actions and Delete.

Phones don't have a right-click, so rows learned to swipe:

• Swipe a note or a drawing left for Settings and Delete. Settings opens the same actions as a sheet from the bottom of the screen.
• Swipe it right for Color.

We had the directions the other way round for about an hour. Left is where delete lives everywhere else in OScar, so left it is.

And when you colour a note, a drawing, a document or a photo, its name now wears that colour in the sidebar's folder tree too.

Draw: pills, inside and out

The whiteboard got a third edge style. Next to Sharp and Round there is now Pill, which rounds a rectangle's short sides into full half circles. It exists for one reason: sketching buttons in a wireframe without faking them from two circles and a box.

The editor took its own advice. Back, share, comments, zoom, undo, the toolbar and every tool on it are pills or circles now. Panels and menus stayed rectangles, because a pill-shaped settings panel is a bad idea that only sounds fun.

One more: open a text to edit it and the cursor waits at the end, where you were going to type anyway.

The Vault grew a tree

The Vault page had its own way of showing folders. It now uses the very same folder tree the other tools keep in their sidebar, only here the tree is the page. Each project is a heading, folders open and close with their little green icons, and every item ends in its two copy buttons, User and Secret.

It got the floating menu as well, with four icons: New item, search, New folder and a padlock to lock the Vault right now. Folders reorder by drag instead of tiny arrows, and an item can be dragged straight onto a folder.

Small things

• The OScar logo sits at the same height on every page. It was two pixels higher on a project's home page, and once seen it could not be unseen.
• The sidebar scrolls without showing a scrollbar.
• The space under the last row of the sidebar matches the space above the first.
• The Budget and Quick notes cards on the home page got the same breathing room above and below their fields.
• The app went through a twenty-point security checklist. Everything inside held up, and one piece of housekeeping outside the app got tidied.

Next up: screenshots. Half the pictures in the guides still show yesterday's buttons, and a guide that points at a button that no longer exists is not much of a guide.