MaiPai Home 0.4.0

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[0.4.0] - 2026-08-27

Added

• A new look for the whole app, on by default for everyone: Home is a
  full-page launcher with app search, your
  Favorites (hover a tile's star to add or remove), a Today strip with
  headlines and On This Day, and the live ticker. Each app fills the screen
  with its own sidebar. The app icon in the top left is the way home: point
  at it and it becomes a back arrow; click the app's name to reload the app.
• Every app now has a settings gear in its header. Sidebars collapse from a
  quiet handle on their edge and remember your choice per app.
• Videos opens with a rotating featured billboard (hide it if you prefer,
  it stays hidden), quick source filters in the search box, and a Search
  options panel for narrowing by source, length, or creator.
• News grew a full sidebar (reader views, categories, feed management) that
  stays with you while reading an article. Sports, Weather, Time, Calendar,
  and Reference gained sidebars too.
• Updating the server no longer means digging through Admin. When a new
  version is ready, admins get a dot on their profile picture and an
  Install & restart button right on the profile card (one click, then the
  progress screen takes over). The update notification lands on the same
  screen.
• Notifications moved to their own bell in the top right, with unread count
  and mark-all-as-read. Your profile is a card with your picture.
• Searching inside Chat filters your conversations from the header search.
• A card size control next to each app's settings gear: a small slider that
  makes cards bigger or smaller, remembered per app on each device. Settings

  Appearance has a Reset layout button that puts every app back to normal.

• News opens on a front page: top stories from Local and each of your
  categories, with a See all link into the full category. The bottom of a
  category page lists the publications it draws from, opening in a new tab.
• Articles have a Read to me button that reads the story aloud (pause,
  resume, and stop right there), Ask MaiPai about this, which hands the
  article to your companion so you can ask questions about it, and Save,
  which files the article in your Bookmarks.
• Follow a topic, in the News sidebar: type anything (a team, a town, a
  hobby) and it becomes a category that stays filled with the latest
  stories about it.
• A Send button on articles: pick one of your other devices (or all of
  them) and the story lands there as a Drop with an Open button. Handy for
  moving a read from the desktop to the tablet.
• A text size control in the article reader (the Aa button up top): five
  sizes, remembered on each device, shared with the Bookmarks reader.
• The article summary's bullets are now clickable: tap one and the story
  scrolls to that part, with a brief highlight so your eye lands on it.
• Music channels on MaiPai TV now show a proper now playing screen: the
  song's cover art front and center with the station, song, and artist.

Changed

• The user guide and README now describe the new interface, with fresh
  screenshots throughout (taken as the demo household, never real family
  data).
• Reading a news article shows its title once; before, it could appear up
  to three times, sometimes under an empty grey block.
• Movies and Shows load with shimmering poster placeholders instead of flat
  grey boxes, and "In Theaters Near You" no longer pushes the page down
  when it finishes loading.
• Opening heavy apps is faster: the app's code preloads while you are on
  the launcher, and pointing at a tile warms that app before you click.
• The launcher's background glow now stays put while you scroll instead of
  scrolling away into a plain black page.

Fixed

• The Remote app no longer crashes the first time it is opened.
• MaiPai TV channels stuck on "off the air" heal themselves: if a
  channel's source was simply not ready when its schedule was written (a
  cold start, Plex still connecting), tuning to it now rebuilds the
  schedule within moments instead of waiting out the hour.
• TV channels still carrying their old "Doki" names (like Doki Movies)
  rename themselves to the MaiPai names on the next restart. A channel
  you renamed yourself keeps your name.
• The guide button on the TV's right-edge rail (and the G key) now opens
  the full-screen guide channel; pressing it on the guide flips back to
  the channel you came from.
• On MaiPai TV's guide channel, clicking any listing (or the featured
  panel) now changes to that channel, and the scrolling grid pauses while
  your pointer is over it.
• The update dot on the profile picture now appears without the wait:
  the status refreshes when you land on the dashboard, when you open the
  profile card, and the moment the Server page finds new updates.
• Podcasts could crash with a blank error screen while its show list was
  still loading (worse on a busy server). Fixed.
• The card size slider now also resizes Music's shelf tiles and the "On TV
  Tonight" posters in Shows.
• Opening a reference like Wikipedia keeps the sidebar and the new look,
  and you can hop between your references right from it.
• The Admin Server page no longer crashes after loading its status (a bug
  that briefly shipped with the one-click update button).
• The Videos home no longer shows the same video in row after row. Each
  video now appears once, in the first section it belongs to; Popular,
  Trending, and the main feed each show something different.
• Accounts that had tried the old "tabs inside apps" experiment were still
  seeing top tabs instead of the sidebar in Videos, Music, Podcasts, and
  the stores. Everyone gets the sidebar now.

Removed

• The "Use tabs inside apps" switch. Navigation now works the same way
  everywhere.