Small things, properly seen

A few small things this month, none of them new writing, all of them the kind of fix that only shows up once you notice it was ever broken.

The first was the skip control, the little arrow that appears while text is typing itself onto the screen. It has been too dim to see comfortably since the very first build, styled to brighten when you hover over it, which works on a desktop and does nothing on a phone, where there is no hovering to do. Since most of you read on a phone, most of you have only ever seen it at its faintest. It is brighter now, all the time, for everyone. There was a second problem sitting right on top of the first: a small marker that appears when more text has arrived below the edge of the screen was sitting directly over that same skip control, catching your taps. Aim for the middle of skip while that marker was showing and you got a gentle scroll instead, which felt like your thumb was at fault rather than the button. They no longer share a spot.

That fix sent me looking for whatever else on the reading screen had been sitting too faint to read, and I found rather more than I expected. Twenty odd small labels across the story index, the map, the pause menu and the feedback form were all set at a level that looked fine on a bright monitor and was, in practice, close to invisible on a phone in daylight. The worst offenders were in the feedback form itself: the character counter, the little "optional" note, and the Cancel button were the three faintest things in the whole game. If you ever tried to send me a note and could not quite tell what you were looking at, that was why, and I am sorry. Two things I left alone on purpose. A Load button on an empty save slot is still greyed out, because it genuinely is not something you can press yet. A locked track in the soundtrack still shows as a dim question mark, because being dim is the entire point of a thing you have not found yet. Everywhere else, if it is text you are meant to read, it should now be text you can actually read. A few buttons also grew a bit more forgiving to tap: the zoom controls on the map and the rows in the story index look exactly as they did before, but the area your thumb actually has to land on is considerably more generous.

The other change this month is bigger and easier to explain. The game moved to a new address, and your place in it came with you. If you had already signed in, nothing changed at all, your save has always followed you rather than the address. If you had not, the game now notices when you arrive somewhere new with nothing saved, and offers to go and fetch your progress from the old address for you. One tap, and your stories, your collected notes, and your reading settings all come across. It will never overwrite anything you have already started here, and it will never do this without asking first. Say no thanks and it will not ask again.

Small things, all of them, but the sort that make the difference between a reader closing the tab in mild irritation and a reader not noticing anything was ever wrong at all.