Files
lanework/DESIGN
rzen ca5d45156b A picture off the pasteboard becomes a card's file, its hero, or the board's backdrop
⌘V grows an image-data branch, below the app's own clipboard format and refused
outright while a file URL is on the pasteboard: a screenshot or a browser's Copy
Image lands as "Pasted Image.png" in the anchor card's attachments/, through the
very import path Finder file drops and ⇧⌘A take — one bracket, one Finder-style
collision ladder, one set of banners, and the same silence a drop's arrival has.
A card window's ⌘V pastes onto its own card; a focused text field still wins the
selector natively. A file-shaped flavor travels byte for byte, PNG preferred when
several are offered; TIFF and BMP are re-encoded to PNG, being interchange
encodings rather than files anyone wants in a folder.

The hero key gets the setter it was born owing: "Set as Hero" on any image row of
the attachment list, "Remove Hero" on the row that holds it, with menu-bar twins
so the context entry is nobody's only home. It writes as a restyle — one key, one
bracket, one invertible step on the window's own stack — and replaces rather than
refusing, because a card has one hero and the row that has it says Remove instead.

Edit ▸ Paste as Board Background is the same payload's other destination, taking
the existing background.image convention at its word: the picture into the board
folder as "Pasted Background.png", the colour subkey untouched, the generator's
overwrite-our-own-name rule inherited and its echo memo taught to tell the two
producers apart.

Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_014PtZdPwqZuqEDLc6wZMtEy
2026-08-09 02:43:53 -04:00
..
2026-07-26 14:58:16 -04:00

Lanework — Design Documents

A ground-up rewrite of the Kanban app, to ship as Lanework on the Mac App Store. The old repo (../../Kanban, one level above this repository — not the rewrite's own Kanban/ source folder, which shares the codename) was a pathfinder — it never shipped, but it is the reference implementation and the source of hard-won decisions. This design starts from a clean slate and keeps only what earned its place. The rewrite keeps the internal codename Kanban (bundle id dev.rzen.indie.Kanban).

Each document covers one aspect of the design. Within each:

  • Decisions — settled, either carried over from the old app or newly made.
  • Changes from Kanban — where this rewrite deliberately diverges.
  • Open questions — flagged for iteration; nothing here is implicitly settled.

Index

Doc Aspect
00-vision.md What Lanework is, who it's for, goals and non-goals
01-storage-format.md On-disk contract: folders, frontmatter, ordering, the materialized trash
02-architecture.md App structure: source of truth, stores, watchers, concurrency
03-board-ui.md Board window: layout, lanes, cards, styling, templates
04-interactions.md Selection, drag & drop, keyboard, clipboard, search
05-card-window.md The card window: Markdown preview/edit, attachments
06-history-undo.md Git-backed undo/redo and history — retired 2026-08-08 (git excised, strategy/01-git-excision.md; Undo routing migrated to 13)
07-sync-collab.md Board modes and git-rails sync — retired 2026-08-08 as written; successor: the ops-based sync service workstream
08-agent-integration.md AI agents as first-class users of the board
09-templates.md Board templates: inventory and definition format
10-accessibility.md VoiceOver, text scaling, visual accommodations
11-command-nexus.md The command Nexus — every command and action: bindings, contexts, customizability
12-editions.md The tiers — mooted 2026-08-08: one version, everything free, tier machinery excised; Pro returns with the iPhone/sync era as a fresh pass (the doc is record: entitlement mechanics, distribution, the git rows)
13-native-undo.md macOS-native undo/redo — the history substrate (sole since 2026-08-08); owns Undo routing
14-git-operations.md Extracted pathfinder git-operations conclusions — retired 2026-08-08 (superseded record)

Deferred design iterations

The card window (05-card-window.md), toolbar (03-board-ui.md ▸ Toolbar), styling controls (03-board-ui.md ▸ Styling ▸ Controls), and comments (01 ▸ Enhanced schema + 05 ▸ The comments column — designed 2026-07-29, shipping post-2.0) each had their focused pass and are settled.

The authoritative list of open design passes is the findings board (Lanework Redesign.kanban ▸ Issues to Resolve) — this section stopped enumerating by hand after drifting twice. Standing examples as of 2026-07-29: the attachment-undo staging design and the EchoLedger foreign-undo bridge (both flagged in 13-native-undo.md), Teams' tracker integration (no design yet), the fail-fast decision surface (01 ▸ Refuse), and the drop-release settle presentation (03 ▸ Motion — deliberately last in line).

Wishlist

Ideas worth keeping but outside the committed design live in ../WISHLIST.md.

Terminology

The rewrite adopts lane as the canonical term for what the old app called a column (it's in the name: Lane-work). "Column" survives only when referring to the old app or to interior card-grid columns inside a wide lane.