The surfaces v4 has that v5 did not. Each announces itself and each can be
absent without the rest noticing, which is the point of the exercise: the
frontend should read as v4, and nothing in it should be load-bearing for
anything else.
* SCENE AND PROJECT, in the column v4 keeps them in, which now says which
scene it is about. Length on the timeline is the scene's own CROP and says
outright that a regenerate reads the project's -- the rule that mixing the
two is how a per-scene value quietly becomes everyone's.
* RATINGS on a scene, and a clip carries its rating as a colour on its edge.
Stored, not yet read: nothing in v5 learns from them yet.
* A RULER, and clips as wide as they are long, so the strip reads as time
rather than a row of equal boxes. Both ends bounded -- one long clip must
not become the whole strip, and one short one must stay hittable.
* THE PICKER WHEEL, on the middle button anywhere. It shows whatever
announced itself to actions.js, so a part of the app that grew a new action
is in the wheel without the wheel being told, and a part that failed to
load is simply not among them. v4's three pinned buttons had a fixed idea
of what could go in them.
* THE WAY IN, and it closes -- on Escape, on the backdrop, on its own button.
v4's could only be completed: a page refresh was the only way out, which
makes it a trap rather than a wizard. Dismissing is a real answer.
* File > rename, and the listing moves with it rather than going stale until
a reload.
Two things the kit refused, correctly, and now nobody has to know: a wheel of
fewer than two items throws (there is nothing to aim between), so the shell
does not offer one; and a strip cell with no ceiling took the whole strip.
Steps, Sampler and Scheduler are on the main window -- the three v4 buried
several clicks deep in Engine Settings. No new UI: the sampler slot declares
roles the way the prompt and the size already do.
What made that nearly free is that the controls now come from the NODE's own
description, through the settingFor/rendererFor pair the pipeline window has
always used. So a combo is a dropdown of the real choices and a number obeys
the real bounds, and prompt.js lost both of its hand-rolled branches: it no
longer decides what a control looks like, it asks.
File: New project, and every project listed with the open one ticked. The
store has been able to do this since the day it arrived and there was no way
in -- 20 lines of menu.
Three faults found on the way, all in the shared input helper:
* ENTER COULD NOT BE TYPED IN A TEXTAREA. `wire()` bound Enter to commit for
every text control, textareas included, so a multi-line value was
impossible -- the prompt above all, which is the longest multi-line thing
in the app. It has been that way in the pipeline window since it was
written; nobody had typed a second line into one.
* A control committed on blur alone, so autofill, a password manager and any
script setting a value went unheard. It listens to `change` as well now,
and commit() only acts on a real difference so the pair costs nothing.
* A control commits on blur, which means text still being typed is not in
the project yet -- and a tab closing is exactly when that is lost. boot
blurs before it saves.
Width, height and length belong to the PROJECT, not to a scene: a scene
cropped on the timeline and regenerated comes back at the project's size,
because the crop was a timeline decision and a regenerate is a new scene.
They sit in the Constructor beside the prompt -- the two things settled in
one sitting -- and travel to the graph on the path the prompt already uses.
No new mechanism: the pipeline declares roles at `project.video` the same
way it declares the prompt, so core still names no node and no setting. A
role whose value is a number gets a number control instead of a box; that
is the whole of the UI change. What the pipeline does not offer is not
shown, so a graph with no length input simply has no Length.
Bounds are the NODE's and stay there -- it already refuses a value outside
them with a reason, beside Generate. A project file is the one thing here
that outlives the code that wrote it, so everything read back out of one is
checked: a whole positive number, or gone.
Also, four faults the browser suite was already red with before this:
* Six tests still clicked a rail toggle that moved into the timeline head.
* At 420px the panel OVERLAYS the centre -- and the named toggles are in
the centre, so the panel covered the control that closes it. That is the
v4 trap this project forbids. They are not offered at that width now; the
View menu, which nothing can cover, is the way in and out.
* A 768px window laid out 860px wide and scrolled sideways. Root cause, and
it was never about one component: a flex item's automatic minimum is its
CONTENT, so every stack, split, panel body and frame region in the app
handed its content's width upward. A scroller that cannot shrink below
what it holds is not a scroller -- the strip of scenes made the WINDOW as
wide as the strip. Floored at the five places every layout routes through.
* A bin test counted `.cx-cell-glyph` across the whole page, so the timeline
drawing cells with the same glyph in them broke a test about the bin.
The app could run a pipeline and had nowhere to keep what it was making. A
project is an ordered list of scenes, one JSON file each, and it is the only
part of the app that has to survive a reload.
A scene owns its prompt text and the result it produced, and nothing else. v4's
Scene grew three dozen fields; each belongs to the feature that needs it. Per
scene length and fps are deliberately absent — a regenerate uses the project's
values, so a scene cropped on the timeline comes back whole.
The prompt box edits the current scene rather than holding its own copy, so
what is on screen and what a run uses cannot disagree.
app: the region toggles are named buttons in the timeline bar
v4's arrangement. The kit's fallback is one glyph on a rail at each edge of the
window, which is right for a kit that cannot know what its panels are called and
wrong here, where they have names and a bar to put them in.
A pressed toggle was styled only inside a button group, so a standalone one
carried aria-pressed and looked identical either way.
gallery.strip is selectable like its siblings: a filmstrip is the one shape
whose whole job is saying which of these you are on.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
digital-garbage