factorai v0.11.0

factorai stops wearing Tauri's placeholder icon.

The mark

A notched dark housing with an amber F cut into it. The housing reads two ways on purpose: a machine seen from above, and a chip package — the two halves of the name, neither of them spelled out, because three letters never fit a 16px square and an icon you have to read has already lost.

The notches are the idea rather than decoration. Three on the left edge and three on the right, none top or bottom: something goes in, something comes back, which is what a session is. They also do the practical work — a dock icon is judged as a silhouette before it is judged as a drawing, and the notches are what make the outline unmistakable when it is 16 pixels tall. They cut through to nothing, so your desktop shows in the gaps.

The F is drawn rather than set in a typeface. Every face on hand was tried inside the housing, matched on cap height, and they all lost the same way: a text face is drawn to sit in a line with neighbours on either side, so alone in a square it leaves air and reads as a letter in a font instead of a mark.

In the app

The header carries the mark and the name, and the name is now set one way everywhere — factor in the text colour, ai in the accent — instead of being typed out differently in each place it appeared.

Known gap

An existing Linux install will keep showing the old icon. The desktop panel takes its icon from the installed .desktop entry rather than from the app itself, so the new one arrives with a fresh install and not with an update. That plumbing is still to come.

Installing

macOS — the .dmg is unsigned, so Gatekeeper blocks it on first open. Clear the quarantine flag after copying the app across:

xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/factorai.app

Linux — the .AppImage needs glibc 2.39 or newer (Ubuntu 24.04+, Debian 13+, Fedora 40+). chmod +x it and run it.

Already running factorai? It will offer this version itself — the update badge appears in the header.

Full Changelog: v0.10.1...v0.11.0