Kyle: "this is going to be a soulseek menu now — essentially the soulseek
app in our app." Approved against research/soulseek-search/hub2.html, a
one-to-one mock in the real frame, then built in three layers.
THE AREA. Search and Downloads leave the sidebar; one Soulseek entry
(globe) opens src/views/Soulseek.svelte, whose tab row is SoulseekQt's own
anatomy: Transfers, Search, Browse, Rooms, Chat, Users. The old view ids
stay routable — App.svelte aliases "search" and "downloads" to the hub and
the component syncs its tab off them — so the title bar's download ring,
"get on soulseek" hand-offs, history entries and restored sessions all
land on the right tab. The glass bar rides the hub with the connection
line on its right (online as X · sharing N files), the page takes Home's
below-the-bar inset, and the bar arrows join the chrome spec (16px glyphs)
alongside the sidebar toggle's disc. The replaced Search.svelte and
Downloads.svelte are deleted; Transfers carries their data forward in Qt's
own columns (User/File/Progress/Status/ETA/Speed/Size/Place, cancel and
play/reveal/add on the rows, clear-complete and open-folder in the
toolbar, live speed totals in the footer) and Search re-skins the peer
search as the Qt table: results regrouped user -> folder -> file,
slot/queue chips, format filter chips that actually filter, fold-out
files with stream-and-download on hover.
THE WIRE. soulseek-proto learns the rest of the protocol: rooms 13-17
(say/join/leave/user-joined/user-left), private messages 22/23, the
watch/status/stats family 5/6/7/36, the room list 64, and the peer-side
browse pair 4/5 with Directory::read to decode what our own responder
already encoded. Parsers are tolerant where the wire is baroque — roster
sections consume their own declared counts even when they disagree with
the name list, RoomList ignores the private-room tail, truncated stats
default instead of failing the frame. Codec tests ride along, including a
browse round-trip against our own encoder.
soulseek-client turns those into Events (RoomList/RoomJoined/RoomMessage/
PrivateMessage/UserWatched/...), auto-acks every private message the
moment it lands — unacked DMs are redelivered on every login — and grows
a spawn-shaped browse(): the returned future owns an Arc of the internals
so the caller drops the client lock before awaiting the 45s worst case.
THE APP. The event pump forwards everything as soulseek:* events; new
commands cover join/leave/say/message/room-list/browse plus a buddy list
persisted in config and re-watched on every login so status and stats
stream while connected. The frontend slsk store drains it all into the
four tabs: Rooms (joined + popular lists, live roster column, per-user
colored feed, say box — the server echoes our own lines so nothing is
appended locally), Chat (recency-sorted conversations, unread badges, DM
bubbles — our half appended locally since DMs are NOT echoed), Users
(add/remove buddies, status chips, one-click Browse/Chat cross-wiring),
and Browse (type a name, walk their tree, stream or download any file).
And the sharing side finally taps the shoulder: UploadToast announces the
first event of every new upload in the shared toast slot, folding a
same-user burst into one counting pill ("nikac is taking 12 files")
instead of twelve entrances.
Live-verified against the real network: the server handed 703 rooms after
login, and a browse of a live peer returned 3,796 directories / 34,773
files in 929ms with full paths, sizes and attributes. Join/say and DMs
are wired but deliberately unexercised — the first hello in a real room
is Kyle's to say, not a probe's.
Kyle: "when clicking and dragging the window the window gets light." It
did, by design that no longer had a reason: WM_ENTERSIZEMOVE parked the
accent at plain BLURBEHIND for EVERY modal loop, move drags included, on
the old assumption that a suspended acrylic punches through on moves the
same way it does on resizes. Plain blur ignores the gradient tint and has
none of the acrylic's material dimming — measured over a striped backdrop,
every glass surface stepped ~15% brighter (band luma 45.5 -> 52.2) for the
whole of every titlebar drag. And no compensation was possible: move loops
emit no resize-drag event, the frontend never hears about them.
Measured on this machine (research/glass-drag harness, SC_MOVE posted so
no synthetic mouse goes near the UI, GUI_INMOVESIZE as ground truth): DWM
composites the acrylic straight through a move loop. Re-asserted mid-loop
it restored rest luma EXACTLY (45.5/31.8/29.4), stationary and through 28
frames of real mouse-speed motion — no punch-through, no trailing.
So the swap is now gated on SIZING_LATCH: a titlebar move keeps the
acrylic, a latched resize parks at Blur exactly as before (DWM genuinely
suspends acrylic in live resizes — that half is load-bearing and stays).
The WM_SIZING belt-and-braces arm swaps the accent too, so a resize the
hit-test latch misses still degrades one mouse-move late instead of never.
Verified after: entering a move loop changes nothing to the decimal;
entering a resize loop still swaps (+6.7 band luma, the intended trade)
and restores on release.
Kyle reported the blur "being masked by just going opeque" on maximize, and
separately the desktop punching through a maximized window. Both were the same
transition, and the old guard covered neither honestly.
THE GUARD'S SIGNAL IS NOW THE MODAL LOOP ITSELF. thumbbar.rs already
subclasses the main window for the taskbar transport, so the size loop is three
arms on that existing proc: WM_NCLBUTTONDOWN carrying a sizing hit-test (or
SC_SIZE, the keyboard path) latches "this loop is a RESIZE", WM_ENTERSIZEMOVE
arms, WM_EXITSIZEMOVE releases, and WM_SIZING arms as a second net because this
window is undecorated and tao does its own NCHITTEST. Emitted as
soulseek:resize-drag, POSTED to ourselves rather than emitted inline: emitting
from inside DefWindowProc's modal loop reenters the wry runtime's window store
while that loop holds it.
The signal and the failure are then the same object, which is what the two
previous attempts were not. The first grounded on any DOM `resize` — one event
fires for a maximize, so the settled window sat flat black for ~70ms hiding
glass that was already back. The second discriminated on event CADENCE, and
that is the one worth remembering: on this 4-core laptop, re-rasterising every
backdrop-filter at each new size pushes `resize` deliveries far apart, and
measured 2026-08-28 events 150ms apart never grounded AT ALL — a real drag
stayed see-through, shipping the exact artifact the guard exists to prevent.
Cadence is not a proxy for the loop.
DWM SUSPENDS THE ACRYLIC INSIDE THE LOOP but keeps compositing the plain
BLURBEHIND, so the accent swaps down to Blur for the gesture and back on
release (window_glass refactored into apply_accent + an Accent enum; GLASS_ON
tracks the main window so the subclass can re-assert). The window stays glassy
through a drag instead of going black — which is what Kyle actually wanted, and
GROUND_DRAG is off on his verification by hand.
THE MAXIMIZE ANIMATION SCALES A SNAPSHOT the accent cannot ride: measured at
43ms/frame, desktop icons read sharply THROUGH the maximized window until
~613ms after the call. Disabling the DWM zoom animation removed the
punch-through outright and every frame of a ground-suppressed maximize showed
the blur soft and present — but that also removed the animation, and Kyle chose
the animation back with the canvas grounded across the recomposition. So
transitions are forced ON, the subclass brackets the jump (active at WM_SIZE, a
re-assert immediately and again at 650ms, release with the second), and
GROUND_DISCRETE paints the canvas for exactly that bracket. Both policies are
one-line JS constants in glass.js — flipping between "animation + dark bracket"
and "instant snap + live glass" needs no rebuild.
The DOM resize listener survives as the fallback for a build with no subclass,
reverting to the original behaviour; it stands down for good the moment one
native event is heard. Measured clean: 3 maximize/restore gestures, 3 brackets,
canvas never opaque outside them; a 9-second modal loop held with zero resize
events in it.
98/98 tests.
SURFACES: panes add black, surfaces INSIDE panes add white. Every pane stands
on 0.7075 black over the acrylic (.content 0.35 over .app 0.55), so a
translucent black card nets 0.81 - darker than its own pane and inside the
~0.85 band already rejected once on the artist page. Solid mode's ladder is
measured UPWARD from #121212 (+6/+18/+24), so glass elevates with WHITE: new
--glass-surface/-hover/-press/-hairline/-well/-ring under :root.glass
(0.03/0.08/0.11/0.10/0.18), which is independently the vocabulary
.btn-ghost:hover and .ax-ghost:hover already shipped. The four solid tokens are
NEVER redefined - they are consumed inside color-mix() and gradient stops where
an alpha multiplies through and kills the call site (0.74 x 0.03 = an invisible
chip; the album row's text-overflow fade works by BEING opaque), and they paint
modal chrome that has to stay solid. 129 additive :global(:root.glass)
declarations across 18 files, all 129 verified inside a glass block by walking
the diff - solid mode byte-identical, confirmed structurally, by computed style
with the class off, and visually.
Three of them are not colour swaps: the album row's .rowbtns shim was OCCLUDING
the last ~19px of the listeners bar and nothing translucent can occlude, so
.tcount masks out just before the buttons instead; Playlist's banner scrim and
the discography's pinned ambience both landed on opaque --bg-base and now
dissolve like the album banner; and the 0.9 black hero tint on
Home/CatalogSearch/Discography paints straight onto the pane when there is no
artwork, so :first-child (the {#if} renders no element) flips it to white.
Menus, dialogs, toasts and the import surfaces stay opaque deliberately, and
the Settings copy for the mode now says so instead of claiming cards do.
Measured with a known ground substituted behind the transparent window, since
CDP never sees the acrylic: library toolbar chroma +2 as shipped, +16 with a
white fill AND its backdrop-filter dropped, +30 for the bare pane beside it.
RESIZE: Windows drops the legacy accent-policy acrylic for the whole of a live
resize and the window stays transparent through it, so the desktop punches
through sharp - measured by toggling window_glass alone, desktop icon labels
readable through the titlebar. The blur cannot be kept (documented since Win10
2004, and the modern DWM backdrop was already rejected for the
overlay-promotion blink), so armGlassResizeGuard grounds the canvas to
--bg-sidebar for the length of the gesture.
STALLS: "choppy but the FPS says 144" was 200-750ms MAIN-THREAD TASKS, not
frame pacing - idle-scheduled work fires at scroll pauses by definition. Twin
bake moved to display resolution and off the ready task (was a same-task 4K
WebGL readback plus software blur, 100-170ms per rotation AND per artist
entry); gl.finish() -> gl.flush() in buildMaster, which had been draining the
whole 4K EASU/RCAS/grade chain on the main thread; copyCanvas realloc guarded;
one app-wide scroll clock in scrollbar.js (markAppScroll/appScrollIdleFor) so
all three periscopes stop cloning mid-gesture on ANY pane rather than only
their own; bounded reclone with the querySelectorAll census deleted, the gate
widened 250->1000ms, and the build/attach split across an idle callback and a
rAF behind a generation guard; the hero rotation tick gated on scroll recency
and its payload cache sized to the working set (2->4 entries, 24->32MiB,
32->64MiB); sessionTick no longer force-rewrites every 12s while merely PAUSED.
Scroll storm went from 109-616ms long tasks to zero. Hover recalc and GC were
measured innocent - do not re-chase them.
98/98 tests throughout.
Two threads from one session, both of them the same shape: something was
being decided from the wrong source.
THE PROVIDERS WERE ASKED ABOUT A FOLDER. The picker sent the directory name
to Deezer and MusicBrainz — the ripper's naming, carrying catalogue numbers,
years and initials. "[WARP CD 156] Battles - Mirrored - 2007" matches
nothing anywhere; "Mirrored" matches instantly. Across the reference library
501 of 515 records carry a tag album and 315 disagree with their folder, and
no amount of cleaning turns "ACPP" into "Prospect Park, Brooklyn NY". The
record's own claim now leads and the folder is the fallback, in one place
(src/lib/import-title.js) that apply and the picker both read — apply
already resolved it this way, and only the picker did not. The verdict judge
had the same split: it compared candidates against the folder too, so an
exact answer scored as mere containment and a clean match wore a warning.
Identification also stops searching when searching cannot work. A folder
named "1989 Pauls Boutique" is a hopeless query and an easy comparison, so
after Deezer and MusicBrainz come back empty the artist's own catalogue is
ranked by title similarity. Scoring rather than stripping is the point: 1989,
1984 and 2001 are real albums, and any cleaner aggressive enough to rescue
Paul's Boutique would have destroyed them. Words split on whitespace with
punctuation folded inside them, so "Paul's" stays one token; pressing
vocabulary is ignored for scoring only; coverage is measured from both sides.
15 assertions pin the cases that would break it.
Cached verdicts now carry the engine that produced them. A cached match is
good forever, a cached "nothing found" only as good as the thing that
looked — and nothing ever re-asked. Negatives from an older engine, or from
a query that has since changed, are dropped and asked again.
Soulseek was asked the same wrong question, with the artist said twice:
"battles battles - mirrored - 2007". The server matches on ALL terms, so
every leftover token narrows the search — that copy was only found because
the peer happened to have 2007 in its path. The ladder now leads with the
record's name and keeps the folder as the narrower rung behind it.
AVAILABILITY OUTRANKS ENCODING. Candidate copies were ranked with avgBitrate
above hasFreeSlot, and queue depth — captured on every candidate — was never
read at all. A peer with no free slot and 277 people ahead beat a free peer
with a queue of two, because its files reported a bitrate and the others
reported none, and `?? 0` scores "didn't say" as the worst possible answer.
Bitrate is now ignored between two fully-lossless copies, where it describes
the material rather than the quality.
And nothing ever gave up. Track 1 is requested alone so it is not queued
behind eleven of our own files, the rest follow once the peer proves it will
serve us, and a copy that makes no progress for 45s is abandoned for the next
ranked one — cancelling the transfers it leaves, which used to trickle on
forever. A refusal falls through to the next peer instead of ending the
record. "Try another peer" is reachable while one is loading, which it never
was.
RE-IMPORTING BUILT A DUPLICATE FACTORY. Apply decided a track was already
filed by comparing the destination's size to its source — but apply itself
rewrites that file, embedding the chosen cover, so it is 582 KB larger from
the moment it is written and the sizes can never match again. Every run laid
down another " (n)" copy with its own library row: three runs left three of
everything, 2.16 GB. A file at the destination that this run did not write is
now simply an earlier import; within one run a repeated name is still a
collision, which is what `kept` is for.
ARTWORK FOLLOWS THE RECORD, ONLY THE AUDIO FOLLOWS THE CHOICE. Apply read
art from whichever folder the audio came from, which for a kept found copy is
the pen — and a downloaded album often carries no picture, so three records
imported with no cover while their own files held a 1500px one. It also only
ever looked at tags, never at the Folder.jpg the review had just offered as
"yours".
COVERS ARE RESAMPLED BY RUST, NOT BY THE COMPOSITOR. The webview was handed
2000px masters to paint 132px tiles — a 15x single-step reduction that reads
as aliasing on photographic covers, and carries megabytes of base64 to draw a
thumbnail. Artist portraits already had this exact fix; album covers never
got it. getArt is now bounded by default and getArtMaster is the deliberate
act, because ~60 places paint a cover and only two want real pixels: with the
polarity the other way round, every surface anyone forgets is silently wrong.
The fullscreen viewer also framed non-square art inside a square element, so
its rounded corners and shadow wrapped 96px of nothing; it takes the
artwork's own ratio now, bounded on both axes.
Smaller, from the same passes: the preview play button is a real transport
rather than a restart, and leaving a record silences its own preview without
touching music started elsewhere; bucket chips navigate with per-lens memory
instead of overwriting the saved resume position; Next counts from the
record's real place in a queue that re-sorts under it, which was skipping one
record for every one reviewed under a filter; a cover URL with nothing behind
it is shown as the empty answer it is rather than a broken image in a
pickable frame; write_tags returns early when there is nothing to change,
instead of rewriting the whole file to write values it already had; and the
import window has a Start over, which says what it costs before it costs it.
Everything the import grew over the last week, landing in one go — the
window, the picker, the audition pen, apply, and the review that stands
between them.
The fold is the new part. A release filed as a container of parts arrived
as N albums, because the scan groups audio by its immediate parent and the
container holds none of its own: Analord's eleven volumes were eleven
records, and six more releases split the same way. Records now fold into
the release above them, and apply is handed an explicit part list — never a
recursive walk, which is what let one stray file swallow 288 descendants
and duplicate 9 GB.
Where releases live is read off the collection rather than assumed, so a
genre-nested library moves the answer instead of breaking; below a dominant
majority at one depth the pass refuses entirely, because no folding beats
wrong folding. Three vetoes independent of depth catch a misread level.
Every fold is listed in the review with a way out.
research/import/fold-audit.mjs imports the shipping module, so the audited
code is the running code: 9 folds, 0 swallows across four library shapes,
and none of the 148 artist folders touched. It was that harness that killed
the tempting version of this rule — matching a part against its container
folded 40 artist folders, Mac Demarco's 8 albums into one, because album
folders carry the artist's name.
The regression test found a live bug on the way: parts number from 01 each,
so flattening two discs collided, and "same name, same size" read the
second file as already-imported and dropped it while still counting it.
That reuse now also requires that this run has not already written the
path.
Also here: the picker's accent crossfades between records instead of
cutting through the app's blue (ownership moved to the window, which
survives the per-record re-key), the fullscreen viewer wears the album's
accent instead of the one it left behind in the portal, Skip defers a
record without deciding it, and Keep mine is gone — with the cards picked
field by field it was Next under another name.
The expander reserves once on the page root instead of standing min-heights
on the grid; shelf heads carry artist portraits keyed by path; every record
tints its own card, expander and glow from its cover; the artwork opens the
shared viewer; the banner wash reads the playing record and actually paints
(isolation, the artist page's own fix); descriptions animate on both pages
via partAnim. Portrait resolution rejects placeholder rows and never stores
a silhouette (pick_artist_portrait, 3 tests); repair re-resolves the missing.
Kyle picked this off an interactive prototype (research/library/) over a
long evening of passes, and the settings he landed on are baked in rather
than left as choices: records no catalogue knows about are ordinary
citizens with no marks at all, artwork is generated from a record's own
name when there is none, the albums you do not have are one collapsed
line that opens into full-size dimmed cards, an artist's shelf splits by
release type, the toolbar is a floating card, the index rail is always
on, the List view's column header is welded to that card, the entrance is
a wave of records, and cards are the artist page's own 150px.
The artists accordion is gone. In its place: three views (Shelves, Grid,
List), six groupings (Artist, Decade, Format, Type, Added, None), thirteen
sorts that are independent of the grouping, a live filter that moves every
number in the header, and a stat row that is derived rather than written
down.
A library page has to say what the files ARE, and library_albums only
carries id/artist/title/year/art/count/added. So the library crate gained
album_stats: one pass over tracks per call, aggregating length, bytes,
average bitrate, bit depth, sample rate and the dominant file extension
per album, plus the newest play that met a seconds floor the caller
passes (the same 45s the recents list uses — under it a play is a skip,
and a page that sorts by "never played first" must not count skips as
listening). Aggregated in Rust rather than SQL because the dominant
format needs the path's extension counted per album, which SQLite cannot
do without string gymnastics, and a library is a few thousand rows.
Filing a record as an album, an EP, a single, a live set, a compilation,
a soundtrack, a remix record or bonus material is not a new opinion:
localReleaseType.js carries CatalogArtist's own title heuristics verbatim
— the regexes are the tuned artifact — reduced to the branches whose
evidence a LOCAL record can carry. A file on disk has no MusicBrainz
release group, no editorial lead sentence and usually no record_type, so
the MB and description-hint branches are absent because their inputs
cannot exist. Under it sits the floor the prototype settled on: when the
classifier lands on "other" and the row carries no provider type, the two
facts a file always has decide — three tracks or under ten minutes is a
single, seven or under twenty-five an EP — with the session/demo check
re-run inside it so a five-track practice tape stays bonus material. It
is a copy, and it is marked as one at every function; unifying it with
the artist page is follow-up work, not something to smuggle into this.
Clicking a record opens CatalogArtist's inline expander, class for class,
with its numbers unchanged: the 460ms slide whose height is read live per
frame and kept monotonic (a captured height animates to a stale number
once the tracklist lands), the staggered waterfall that fades each part
to its OWN resting opacity, per-row entrances at min(i*16, 180), and a
same-row switch that keeps both panels alive while the stage's height
eases between them. What differs is the content, because a library knows
different facts: where the artist page shows Last.fm plays and listeners,
the rail shows size on disk and bitrate, where it offers Save an owned
record offers its folder, and each track carries what its file is.
Three things about the chrome are measured rather than typed, and each
one is a bug the prototype found first. The bar's height is read off the
bar, because a typed 50px parks anything pinned below it behind a bar
whose controls have wrapped; the bar's own minimum is a constant, because
publishing a measurement into the property that decides it is a ratchet.
The index rail's 34px gutter is reserved whenever the rail is on, drawn
or not, so no click on Group can change the width of the content column.
And the table's column template lives on the page rather than on the rows,
because a 1fr column floors at min-content and RECORD is wider than an
ellipsized title, so identical declarations on two elements resolve to
different widths; columns drop by tier from the page's measured width so
a record's name is never squeezed out.
The entrance is timed by POSITION, not by index. Indexing the document
spends the whole stagger on sections nobody is looking at — 38 shelves
means every visible one hits the cap and they all arrive in the same
frame, which has no relative motion in it and reads as no animation at
all. Delay comes from how far down and slightly across the pane a thing
sits, normalized to the topmost thing that is both moving and on screen,
and the delays are pulled forward over the next few frames as
content-visibility geometry lands (only forward, except while a thing is
still hidden, where a correction is invisible). The hero, the toolbar and
the column header never move: they are the page's furniture, and dealing
them in animated the whole window instead of the part that changed.
A rail click corrects until its target stops moving. content-visibility
makes the height of everything unpainted an estimate, so one scroll to a
section overshoots — measured on the prototype at up to 1143px, with the
page's own height moving 2260px during the jump.
Two bugs fixed on the way, both the same mistake: `>>` on an unsigned
32-bit hash goes negative above 2^31, so a generated track name indexed
past its word list and a generated cover's second hue produced an invalid
gradient. Both are `>>>`.
Deliberately not here. There is no Import button because there is no
backend command to import a folder — Rescan re-reads the library and its
stats, and a real importer is a backend feature. The "N of M released"
count and the missing-albums line appear only for artists you FOLLOW: a
follow carries an anchored artist id, and matching a local artist to a
provider by name is exactly what the identity rules forbid, so an
unfollowed shelf says what it holds and nothing more.
Verified against the running app on real files: 7 albums, 72 tracks,
1.8 GB on disk off the new command, and Maladroit opening to 13 tracks,
33:37, 279 MB, 1019k, FLAC 16/44.1 with per-track rates, its notch under
the card it belongs to and its row landing 10px under the pinned bar.
Verified headless against the mock library at scale: all eighteen
view-by-grouping combinations at one content width, the toolbar pinned
with zero drift, the joined header's columns matching the rows on both
edges, the expander opening from a card and from a row, morphing in place
within a row and closing without leaving its reserve behind, and the wave
moving 74 things with 34 distinct arrival times across 391ms while the
chrome stayed still.
Approved on research/home-redesign after four passes: the Desk layout,
the Showcase polish, the welcome card, a 6-month feed window, news with
reviews filtered, and all three of the sections I proposed.
Nothing here is a new design. The release cards, their grid, the date
chip and its accent-glass recipe, the upcoming wording and the missing
play button on an unreleased record are the artist page's. The section
heads, the featured card, the artist cards and the list rows are
ArtistExtras'. The entrance is CatalogDiscography's edition deal with the
same four approved numbers, and the arrival rule with it — a null from
consumeScroll means a fresh arrival, which is the only thing that deals;
coming Back is a return to something already read. Only the rails, the
aside panels and the news list are new vocabulary, and those came off the
mock verbatim. The styles are copies rather than imports for the same
reason the discography page carries copies of the album page's: a page
that reaches into another page's stylesheet couples them forever.
The feed is what "new" honestly means. Deezer's release list merged with
the MusicBrainz identity supplement — A ? of WHEN is a Panda Bear record
that exists only in the supplement, and Weezer's upcoming album only
carries its real name (Gold Album) there — then deduped per artist by
cover and by base title, which collapses Weezer's BBC triplet and
Röyksopp's four same-day remix drops to one card each. Upcoming first,
then newest, with the age riding the artwork so the reader never has to
work out whether "new" means this week or last spring. Jump back in is
deliberately NOT deduped against it: a record can be new and also what
you were just listening to, and it belongs in both.
Everything reads caches. Assembling this feed cold costs one
catalog_artist call per followed artist — 48 seconds for nine, measured —
so home_warm walks the follows in the background through the same entry
points the pages use and emits per artist as it goes. The page fills in
progressively instead of waiting for the last one, and a follow change
re-walks it.
Three sections were mine to propose and are now in: the back catalogue
(albums older than the window, one per artist first so a deep discography
cannot own the row), the library rail, and Complete the set — you own two
of sixteen Weezer albums and a new one lands in seventeen days.
No per-artist music news API exists — every product that does this
aggregates and filters, so this does too. Google News RSS is the source:
free, keyless, no pagination, and no contract at all, which is why it
gets the most conservative pacer in the file (4 requests per 10 seconds)
and a 6-hour cache on disk as well as in memory. Nothing user-facing
waits on it; the home page asks after it is already drawn.
The query is the QUOTED artist name plus the word "music", and the
quoting is the whole design. Measured 2026-08-04 against the real feed: a
bare ambiguous name returned 0 of 10 relevant items — searching "Girls"
gives Indigo Girls, The Deli Girls and a school production of Mean Girls
— while the same name with a corroborating token returned 8 of 8, and an
unambiguous one 10 of 10. That is the identity-anchor rule the rest of
the app already lives by, applied to a provider that only speaks in
names: never trust the name alone.
The parser is deliberately not an XML library. One provider, four flat
tags inside <item> blocks, exactly the judgment the Bing scrape made.
What it does handle is what Google actually emits: entity-encoded titles
including numeric forms, a " - Publication" suffix on every headline
(stripped when the tail matches the <source> tag, so the title reads as a
headline rather than a citation), and RFC 2822 pubDates converted to unix
seconds by a hand-rolled civil-date conversion — nothing else in the
workspace needs a date crate for one field.
Freshness and relevance stay OUT of here. The 45-day window and the
review filter are display policy and belong to the surface that shows
them; this returns what the feed said, newest first, capped at a dozen.
Kyle's pick — the deep-navy-glow rounded icon. Regenerated from the 1024
master through Tauri's own generator, so every surface comes off the same
art rather than a hand-resized copy per platform: icon.ico (16/24/32/48/
64/256 frames), icon.icns, the Square*Logo tiles Windows uses for the
Start menu and taskbar jump lists, and the Android and iOS sets. icon.svg
is the source SVG itself, so the vector beside the rasters is the one
they were cut from and not a stale ancestor.
public/logo.png is the app's own titlebar mark, drawn at 20px. It gets
the full-resolution master rather than a downscale — it is one asset, the
size costs nothing next to the artwork this app already holds, and there
is then no second file to keep in step when the icon changes again.
Verified in the running app: the titlebar draws the falcon, and the icon
extracted back out of the built exe is the new one, not a cached
resource.
Hovering the taskbar button pops a preview, and an app may put buttons
under it. Every media player uses them for the transport, and now so do
we: previous, play/pause, next, with the middle one swapping its glyph as
playback starts and stops.
Clicks are emitted as `soulseek:media-button` — the same event the OS
media card sends — so the frontend's existing dispatch handles them with
no new code and the two surfaces cannot drift apart. Verified by posting
the exact WM_COMMAND/THBN_CLICKED the shell posts: next advanced the
queue, toggle paused, toggle resumed.
Three Win32 facts shaped the implementation. The buttons can only be
added ONCE per window and only after the shell has created the taskbar
button, which it announces with a registered message — but Tauri shows
the window before the setup hook runs, so that announcement is usually
already gone by the time we could subclass, and the first build put no
buttons up at all. They are added directly at init now, with the first
playback as a retry for the case where the taskbar button genuinely does
not exist yet. Clicks arrive as WM_COMMAND, so hearing them means
subclassing Tauri's window — SetWindowSubclass chains rather than
replacing the window procedure, so wry still receives everything it
expects. And ITaskbarList3 is apartment-threaded, so it lives in a
thread-local touched only on the UI thread, with updates from the
player's event thread marshalled through run_on_main_thread.
The glyphs are drawn at runtime rather than shipped: they are four flat
shapes, and a .ico per glyph per theme would be files to keep in step
with a transport that already draws itself in the app. Coverage is
sampled on a 4x4 grid per pixel, which is what stops a 16px triangle
looking like a staircase. They follow SystemUsesLightTheme — the
thumbnail flyout rides the system theme, not the app's — and are rebuilt
on WM_SETTINGCHANGE when that flips, so they do not end up dark-on-dark.
Registering with the System Media Transport Controls is what makes an app
a media app to the OS rather than a window that happens to make noise.
The card that the media-key overlay, the taskbar media flyout and the
lock screen all draw now carries our cover, title, artist and album; the
hardware media keys reach us with the window unfocused; and the transport
buttons on that card drive this app. Verified against the OS's own
session list: title/artist/album/albumArtist, type Music, a live
scrubber, a present thumbnail, and play disabled while playing.
Where each half of it comes from follows where the truth already lives.
Status and position are pushed by the backend's player event pump, which
already sees every transport change and every position tick — the card
is driven by the same events the UI is, so it cannot drift from the
window, and it costs no IPC at all. Metadata goes the other way, once per
track, published by the player bar: the queue lives in the frontend and
so does the derivation the bar displays, and publishing exactly what the
bar shows means the two can never disagree. Deriving it a second time in
Rust would guarantee that one day they do.
Button presses are forwarded as `soulseek:media-button` rather than
handled in Rust, because nextTrack knows about shuffle, repeat, the album
fill and re-sourcing a track restored from the last session, and none of
that is knowable from that side. They run the same functions the on-screen
transport runs — the play/pause branch moved into togglePlayPause() so
there is one implementation, not two that drift. Proven by driving the
app from the OS session: next advanced the queue, pause and play moved
the status, previous restarted the track on the >3s rule the app already
had.
Stop is deliberately disabled: this transport has no stop, only pause,
and a dead button on the card is worse than a missing one. Buffering maps
to Changing, which is what "finding best source…" honestly is. The
thumbnail is the bar's own data URL decoded into an in-memory stream —
no temp files — and it is explicitly cleared when a track has no cover,
because the previous track's art outliving it is worse than none.
The debug handle gains the local playback entry points beside the
streaming ones it already had. That is not only convenience: verifying
this end to end needs a track playing, and every run that reaches for
Soulseek to get one costs a login the server starts ignoring after a
burst.
KeelrLeek