Bloks 2.5

Bloks 2.5 is the calmest Bloks yet: every conversation in view, a sidebar with room to breathe, and Settings you can actually find.

Every conversation in view

• Show conversations. Turn it on in Settings, General, or from the list icon beside Agents, and each agent's conversations are listed under it. Each has its own unread dot and shows whether it is working or waiting on you. Hover an agent for a + that starts a new conversation. Thanks to @LandonSchropp for the design in #78.
• Unread per conversation. A dot on an agent now means one conversation, and opening the agent goes straight to it, with the view on or off. Opening a conversation marks it read.
• Waiting on you, at the top. When an agent stops for an approval or an answer, a row at the top of the sidebar says so. With one waiting, it goes straight there; with several, it opens Activity.

A calmer sidebar

The nine rows at the bottom became four:

• Today: the morning brief and activity.
• Automate: routines, watchers and rehearsals.
• Library: skills, memory, plugins and projects.
• Settings.

Each of the first three opens a short menu, and a dot tells you when something inside needs a look. Agents get the space back.

Settings, as a page

• A page of its own, beside the sidebar, instead of a window.
• Fifteen pages in four groups: you, your agents, what they connect to, and what they leave behind.
• Search goes straight to the page a word lives on, and so does Cmd+K: type "voice" or "telegram" and press Enter.
• One pattern throughout: a name, a line of why, and the control on the right.
• Links into Settings from elsewhere in the app now open the page they mean.

Polish

• Motion with a purpose: segmented controls slide to your choice, conversations fold open under their agent, and nothing animates that you do a hundred times a day.
• Reduce motion on your Mac is respected throughout.
• Menus grow from the button that opened them.

Fixes

• Escape now closes every panel, and only the one on top. Several panels never listened, and a few closed along with the one under them.
• Clicking an agent while Automations is open now shows its chat. Before, the chat stayed hidden.
• Jumping to a message in another conversation from Cmd+K, the brief, Activity, rehearsals, watchers or the job board opens the right conversation every time.
• Styles that never took effect now do: menu origins, brand focus rings and several colours. They had been written in an older syntax.
• A new conversation on an existing agent reads "New conversation", not "New agent".
• The morning brief is back in the phone-width menu.
• The New menu says "New agent" and "New room".
• A test harness flake is fixed: it could talk to another test's server when two test files picked the same port.

Also in the 2.3.x releases since 2.3: twenty conversations per agent, closing the last one, routines in a conversation of their own, renaming conversations, clickable links, and defaults for new agents, many of them from @rpavlovs.