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feat: rework Home's About column and columns - #653

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feat/home-about-tidy
Sep 2, 2026
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feat: rework Home's About column and columns#653
TheSevenPens merged 7 commits into
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feat/home-about-tidy

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@TheSevenPens TheSevenPens commented Sep 2, 2026

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Seven commits reworking Home. The first was reviewed as its own change; the rest came from iterating on the running app.

Layout

The columns swapped. The right column is now everything wanting attention and nothing else; the left leads with About/Resources into your tablets.

before                          after
── left ──────  ── right ──     ── left ──────────────  ── right ─────
needs attention  ABOUT          about   [links]          needs attention
your tablets     HELP           your tablets             [alert]
                 RESOURCES
                 [logo]

The daemon-problem card moved right along with the health list. It was not named in the request, but it is an alert about something needing attention, and leaving it behind would have stranded it between the links and your tablets. Both children of the right column hide themselves when nothing is wrong, so on a healthy machine that column is empty by design — the blank right half is the "all good" signal.

The About section is now two columns — blurb left, links right, under one heading. The links column is Auto, sized to its longest label so it never wraps, with the prose taking what is left; a 50/50 split would wrap the links, which reads worse than a narrower paragraph.

Content

  • The logo is gone. 200px of decoration at the foot of a reference column — and the tallest thing on the page, so removing it was most of what stopped Home scrolling.
  • The version closes the About paragraph as ordinary prose ("…on Windows. Version v0.73.0 BETA.") rather than taking a row or hanging off the heading.
  • Help became a manual pagedocs/user/HELP.md, reached by a Get help link. A page has room to say what to include in a post, which is what makes the first reply useful. Linked from the manual twice so it is not an orphan.
  • The RESOURCES heading is gone. The links are accent-coloured and underlined, which already marks them as a group — the label was naming something the reader can see.
  • Releases (downloads & release notes)Releases.
  • about joins the display layer, matching your tablets and needs attention. It was the last Home heading still dressed as an eyebrow.

Two bits of cleanup that came free

  • ~50 lines of code-behind retired. Making one phrase of the Help paragraph clickable required hit-testing the pointer against that run's character range in the text layout, because Avalonia has no inline hyperlink and an embedded button will not baseline-align in flowing text. An ordinary link in a list needs none of it. HelpDiscordUrl went with it.
  • A 14px alignment nudge, added and then retired. The columns started at the same y but did not look it: a 44px heading carries far more leading than a 10px eyebrow. Once about joined the display layer both carry identical leading and align on their own, so the offset came back out rather than staying in place doing nothing.

For the reviewer

  • Verified live after every step — this was iterated against the running app, not reasoned about.
  • Home no longer scrolls at the default window size with four tablets remembered.
  • One caveat: at the 800px minimum width the left column is ~380px, so the prose gets roughly 150 once the links take their Auto width. It works, but it is narrow — a width threshold that stacks them vertically would fix it, and I would rather not add one speculatively.
  • Build clean, 673/673.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

TheSevenPens and others added 7 commits September 2, 2026 05:34
Three changes to the right-hand column.

The app-icon watermark is gone. It was 200px of decoration at the foot
of a reference column, and it was also the tallest thing on the page --
with it removed, Home fits at the default window size again instead of
scrolling once a few tablets are remembered. That had been an open cost
of the 44px section headings; it turns out the logo was paying most of
it.

The version moves onto the ABOUT heading as "(v0.73.0 BETA)" instead of
taking a row of its own. It is something you look up when reporting a
problem, not something you read down the column, so it rides along with
the heading it belongs to.

The Help card becomes a manual page (docs/user/HELP.md), reached by a
"Get help" link at the top of RESOURCES. The guidance had outgrown a
paragraph: a page can also say what to include in a post, which is what
actually makes the first reply useful. The Discord link and the reason
it is the first stop rather than the OpenTabletDriver forums live there
now.

That retires the inline-link plumbing in the code-behind -- about fifty
lines that hit-tested the pointer against one run's character range in
the text layout, because Avalonia has no inline hyperlink and an
embedded button will not baseline-align in flowing text. An ordinary
link in a list needs none of it. HelpDiscordUrl goes with it.

Verified live: all four Resources links present with Get help first, the
version beside the heading, and Home no longer scrolling.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Right column is now everything wanting attention and nothing else; left
is About/Resources leading into YOUR TABLETS.

The daemon-problem card moved right along with the health list. It was
not named in the request, but it is an alert about something needing
attention, and leaving it behind would have stranded it between
RESOURCES and YOUR TABLETS -- the one place on the page it makes no
sense. Both children of the right column hide themselves when nothing
is wrong, so on a healthy machine that column is empty by design: the
blank right half IS the "all good" signal.

Retuned the one seam this created. "your tablets" carried a 30px top
margin to clear the needs-attention block that used to sit above it;
following RESOURCES it only needs enough to read as a new section, so
30 -> 18, and the About block's trailing 4 goes. Without that the last
tablet row fell below the fold.

Verified live: all four tablet rows visible, the alert in the right
column, About leading the left.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The columns started at the same y but did not look like it: a 44px
display heading carries far more leading above its glyphs than a 10px
eyebrow, so "needs attention" sat about 14px below ABOUT even though
their boxes were level. Equal boxes, unequal text.

The offset goes on the LEFT column. The right one is already flush
against the page menu and has nowhere to move up to -- pulling it up
would need a negative margin overlapping the nav row's box, which the
content ScrollViewer could clip.

Paid for most of it out of the seam rather than the page height:
"your tablets" drops from 18 to 10 above, so the net cost is 6px and all
four tablet rows stay above the fold.

Measured rather than guessed: 14px was read off a zoom of both column
tops, and re-measured after to confirm the cap-heights now line up.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The links are accent-coloured and underlined, which already marks them
as a group and as links -- a RESOURCES label above them was naming
something the reader can see. The gap above does the separating now,
widened 12 -> 16 to carry the break the heading used to.

Side effect worth having: the ~18px that recovers puts Home back under
the fold. The scrollbar is gone and all four tablet rows fit with room
to spare, which the column swap had cost.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
It closes the paragraph as an ordinary sentence -- "…on Windows. Version
v0.73.0 BETA." -- instead of hanging off the ABOUT heading. The heading
goes back to plain text and loses the StackPanel that was only there to
sit two TextBlocks side by side.

Split into Runs so the prose stays in the view and only the number comes
from the model. The separating space lives at the END of the first Run's
text, with the two tags flush against each other: whitespace BETWEEN Run
elements is preserved too, so the obvious layout -- one Run per line
plus an explicit <Run Text=" " /> -- renders three spaces, not one. It
looked wrong on screen before it looked wrong in the markup.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Blurb on the left, links on the right, both under the one ABOUT heading
and both top-aligned so they start on the same line.

The links column is Auto, not half the width. Sized to its longest label
("Releases (downloads & release notes)") it never wraps, and the prose
takes whatever is left — a 50/50 split would wrap the links, which reads
far worse than a narrower paragraph does.

Collapsed the two Sections into one while moving things: the second
existed only to hold the links below the first, and side by side there
is nothing left for it to do.

Side effect: the About block is now three lines tall instead of eight,
so the left column shortens and Home keeps its headroom.

Caveat worth a look at some point: at the 800px minimum window width the
left Home column is around 380px, so the prose gets roughly 120 once the
links take their Auto width. It still works, but it is narrow.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The About heading takes the same treatment as "your tablets" below it
and "needs attention" opposite — 44px lower-case display. Home has no
tab menu, so its section headings ARE that layer, and this was the last
one still dressed as an eyebrow.

That retires the 14px nudge from 7f49a26. It existed because the left
column opened with a 10px eyebrow while the right opened with a 44px
heading: equal boxes, unequal text. With both on the display layer they
carry identical leading and align on their own, so the offset is gone
rather than left in place doing nothing.

"Releases (downloads & release notes)" -> "Releases". The parenthetical
was explaining a link whose destination is obvious from its name, and it
was also what set the links column's Auto width. The longest label is
now "Source code on GitHub", so the column narrows and the prose beside
it widens — the blurb drops from three lines to two, and the 800px
minimum-width caveat from 1e46b2c eases with it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
@TheSevenPens TheSevenPens changed the title feat: tidy Home's About column feat: rework Home's About column and columns Sep 2, 2026
@TheSevenPens
TheSevenPens merged commit 9ea83e5 into master Sep 2, 2026
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@TheSevenPens
TheSevenPens deleted the feat/home-about-tidy branch September 2, 2026 13:01
TheSevenPens added a commit that referenced this pull request Sep 3, 2026
Home was reworked into two columns (#653) and its About section reworked
again (#655), but the manual still described the old single-flow page.

HOME.md said "Below Needs Attention, you'll see a list of tablets" —
Needs attention is the right-hand column now, and the tablet list is on
the left under About, so nothing is below anything. It also called the
tablet rows "cards", which they stopped being when Entity was de-boxed:
they are hairline-separated rows with no container. Adds the About
section, which the page never documented at all.

USERMANUAL.md's per-page line promised "the About/Help cards". The Help
card is gone — its text moved to HELP.md and the card became a "Get help"
link — and About is a section with links rather than a card.

HELP.md told people to find their version "in parentheses next to ABOUT",
which was true for about a day. It is plain text at the end of the About
paragraph now, so the instruction points there instead of naming a
version-shaped string that will drift.

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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