The desk stays lit
Light's console glowed in all the wrong places. Fixing it meant writing down what a lighting desk actually is, running four designs against each other, and then trying to prove the winner wrong.
Before this release, LIGHT's grid had fourteen cyan lamps lit before a single pad had played. Cyan meant selected, and focused, and drop-here, and playing. A colour that means four things means none of them, and at front of house in the dark, the one thing you need to read across the room — what is on the rig right now — was competing with thirteen other things wearing the same light.
That is not a bug anybody files. It is the kind of thing you notice on the fourth night of a run, when you have stopped looking at the screen and started looking for something on it.
releasev1.6.0Write down what the thing is
The fix started with a sentence rather than a commit: LIGHT is a desk in a dark booth beside Arena, and a desk has three planes. Matte chrome that never glows. A few large readouts you can read from the stage. And the light itself, which is the only saturated thing in the room.
Everything else followed from that. Three principles, each one a rule you can lose an argument to:
- The grid is the constant; everything else gives way. A layer head and eight pads is the measurement the layout is built around. Panels fold, the band shortens, pads shrink to a 96 px floor — the grid never scrolls sideways until the panels have given up their width, and a panel only opens when the window can hold it beside all eight columns.
- Light is the only saturated colour. One overloaded cyan became three tokens that each mean one thing: tungsten for what is playing, the accent for the cursor alone, amber and red for trouble. Brightness is state, colour is content.
- Nothing new reaches the rig. Exactly five pointer gestures change the output, and they are the same five as before. Editing stays on right-click and hold. Clearing on glass is a hold, so a sleeve cannot do it.
The measurements are real ones, taken at 1440×900, 1280×800, the 1100×700 Tauri floor, a 1024-wide browser client, a 14-inch MacBook Pro scaled, and a phone at 390×844. Every size is a token, generated into CSS, with a check that fails the build if somebody edits the generated file by hand.
Four designs, then an attempt to break the winner
Rather than one design and a set of opinions, four went up against each other and were judged. The winner absorbed the best of the others with attribution — the pad face drawn as a rig miniature, the hold-to-clear ✕ bound to the same constant the code uses for a long press, the phone pager, the lock-on-by-default rule, the guard that no panel opens except beside a full grid.
Then the winner was attacked. Revision 2 exists because adversarial verification refuted parts of revision 1: the grid's gap arithmetic was wrong, the phone's four-gap row did not fit, the strip's drop schedule assumed a window the app cannot actually produce, momentary freeze on a client that can vanish was unsafe, and one lane of work was labelled in a way the Rust project struct would have silently dropped.
That last one is the argument for the whole exercise. A design document that
cannot be wrong is not describing anything. Every claim in it cites a
screenshot or a file:line at v1.5.0, so each one can be checked and several
were found false.
What landed
The September series shipped as 1.6.0 and three follow-ups over the next three days: the grid that never gives way, the command strip and panic pair, the editing page, the FOH remote, palettes and tint, a FADE master over every crossfade a layer starts, an APC40 busk layout whose right-hand faders ride groups, a MIDI input switch for a second controller that belongs to another app, and a light mode for a screen in daylight.
Two of the follow-ups are worth naming because they are the kind of thing only a real rig finds. A red dot now appears when the OS refuses our packets, and the send socket rebuilds itself to recover — before, a refused send meant relaunching. And an RGB fixture's colour wheels open instead of chasing the look colour, which is obvious once you have watched a Spiider try to find tungsten on a wheel that does not have it.
releasev1.6.3The part that is not finished
Builds are Apple Silicon, signed and notarised. Intel Macs stay on v1.2.2, the last universal build, and will not get this. That is written on the download page rather than discovered at load time, because an Apple Silicon bundle does not launch on an Intel Mac at all — no dialog, no explanation.
The 40 Hz tick is untouched. It was the one number that could not move, and every change above was measured against it.