A moon with company

The nightly tester’s to-do list

Bughunt, our nightly tester, keeps its fixes on branches of its own until they’re brought in. This round, all eleven in its backlog landed. A few favorites:

• A thumbs down tapped twice, fast, turned a track down twice.
• A track whose take never reached the server, because the phone was offline, fell out of the list. Now it keeps its place.
• The refresh button could offer the very prompt already in the box, so the tap seemed to do nothing.
• On the narrowest phones, the engine picker stood wider than the prompt and the whole page scrolled sideways.
• The admin console’s assistant now says a message is too long before you send it, in plain words, and its Users page fits a phone.
• The audio engine no longer reads a time from before the start when you pause right after Play.

Eclipse gets visitors

Raheel had the moon in Eclipse reworked. The phase scope at its center is gone; in its place he asked for, the normal waveform, fitted inside the dark disc across 92% of its width at 40% of its usual brightness, so it glows without shouting. Behind the moon he asked for Ridgeline’s multicolored, glimmering stars. Then for Ridgeline’s meteors, and its three lights that meet in the sky, moved up and away from the moon: they fly in a chevron, bank into a line, fold into their leading light, and leave on the next beat. The decision record adds, with a perfectly straight face, that this is “artistic choreography, not a claim to reproduce a verified sighting.”

Smoother, in whole steps

Entry 009 settled Auto at thirty frames a second. Raheel then saw an occasional judder in full screen on a laptop’s wide display, while Med looked smoother, and asked that Auto run at a perfect ratio of the display’s refresh rate. The trouble: thirty doesn’t divide evenly into a display that refreshes 144 times a second, so some frames waited five refreshes and some waited six. Now Auto picks a whole number: every fifth refresh at 144 (28.8 frames a second), every sixth at 165. On a simulated 160 Hz display with a little timing jitter, the old pacing mixed 102 gaps of five refreshes with 94 of six; the new one drew 178 gaps, all six. The honest caveat: that proves the schedule, not that real display.

Also in this pass: Auto stopped doing work nobody sees, and Ridgeline went from 30 waveform uploads in 30 frames to none. Then two more of Raheel’s settings: each new layer now needs four good seconds instead of eight, and the looks take turns every 90 seconds, which gives Auto longer to build each one up. At his request, a new slider lets you delay the visuals by up to 20 milliseconds, in steps of two, starting at zero, so the picture lands where your ears say it should. And in AriaTone Mix, the eye on the Visuals menu now pulses slowly while the visuals are still getting their notes for a track, as Raheel put it: “Make Mix’s eye pulse while a track’s map is still loading.”

Where it stands

The nightly tester’s backlog is empty, Eclipse has company, and Auto steps in whole refreshes of the display. Raheel edits.