Tommaso was not sure about the ring and proposed a vertical list: left-click
selects, right-click exposes icon / name / shortcut. Drawn, it is better, and
the reasons are visible in the renders rather than arguable.
THE DISABLED ROW CAN SPEAK. This is the one that decides it. A ring slot that
does not apply is an empty circle: it says nothing, and on a fresh document six
of the eight are empty. A list row that does not apply is greyed IN PLACE with
its own name and its own reason — "Create a sketch, or pick a solid face,
first", "Create a solid body to pattern first" — which are strings the product
already ships and which tool_atlas.json already carries. The first-run picture
stops being a mostly-empty ring and becomes a map of what the product does and
what you must do first. For the audience section 2 puts first, that is the
whole ballgame.
THE OVERFLOW DISAPPEARS. Sketch Create needs nine addresses; a ring of eight
pushed Polygon and Point behind a "More" slot. Nine rows is just nine rows. The
one measured defect in the ring design is not a defect in this one.
SHORTCUTS READ AS A COLUMN. Right-aligned in a list they stack into something
the eye learns passively, which is exactly the graduation path 4.1 claims —
and it is the mechanism by which the power user Tommaso describes stops opening
the menu at all. Around a ring the same keys are eight loose chips.
Also, unglamorously: long translated names fit, arrow keys and screen readers
work natively where a radial needs special handling, and a 324px box costs the
1366x768 machine far less than a 380px disc over the model.
What the ring keeps: equidistant targets and a future flick gesture. Since the
brief is that power users live on the keyboard, that buys less than it looks.
The invariant is untouched — same eight families, same fixed order, nothing
re-sorted, nothing compacted. Only the geometry changed, which is the point:
the map survived a change of form factor, so it was a real map.
Both forms are now rendered side by side for the same states, and the atlas
opens with the pairs.
snaporca-96r.
The charter fixed the slot-constancy invariant but carried one hand-written
eight-cell table as an illustration, and nothing of the offer exists in the
product. Before any GUI code, the group needs the map itself: what verbs there
are, what each one needs before it can be offered, and what the ring actually
looks like in every situation a user can put it in.
tool_atlas.json is the source of truth and it was extracted from the code, not
from memory: verbs, shortcuts and the exact refusal strings from DesignPanel's
six feat_dropdown call sites and the sk_key table, kernel coverage checked
against CadFeatureType, headless coverage against McpControl's dispatch, and
the selection kinds taken from the callbacks DesignCanvas actually exposes. It
carries each verb's preconditions, so "why is that slot empty" has an answer
already written in the product's own words. The eventual C++ table generates
from this file too — the map exists once.
gen_offer_mockups.py renders it: 20 selection kinds x 2 document states = 40
primary rings, plus 73 sub-rings, plus comparison sheets. 113 states, none of
them hand-drawn, because a human drawing 113 rings is exactly how an address
quietly changes. Everything is framed at 1366x768, the charter's own reach
target, so L11 is tested in the mockups before it is tested in code.
Three things the drawing found that the prose had not:
- MEAN FILL IS 3.45 OF 8. The empty-slot rule is cheap in argument and
expensive on screen; on a fresh document exactly two slots are live. That
picture is the anti-clutter thesis made literal and it is the strongest image
in the set.
- SUB-RINGS MUST ANCHOR ON THEIR PARENT. Fanning them from north put Extrude at
N, which is Create's address in the primary map, so the second level
contradicted the first. Anchored, an address is two consistent strokes: Add
material is NE and its first verb is NE again.
- ONE FAMILY OVERFLOWS, AND ONLY ONE. Sketch-mode Create needs nine addresses
on an eight-slot ring. That is the ninth-position pressure the charter
predicted, arriving on schedule and measured rather than argued: either Point
moves family, or the tail goes to a third level, or the ring is not eight.
Every model-mode family fits. The generator refuses to wrap a tenth verb onto
a first — silent collision is the one outcome worse than an ugly ring — and
reports the overflow instead.
Also fixed while looking at renders: the selection pill sat on top of the north
slot's shortcut chip and hid it, and the scrim at 0.55 swallowed the very face
the ring had been opened on, which is 4.1 failing inside its own mockup.
Fork-neutral: the generator and everything it emits name no product, so both
forks carry byte-identical copies.
snaporca-2is.
Tommaso Bianchi