Three sentences we had wrong

Yesterday started with a plain question about our own site: do the stories link to the apps they come from? They did not. Now nine chapters of the book end with one quiet line that names the app whose world you just walked through, and how to try it free on TestFlight. Each line was written from the app's own code.

Writing those lines turned up two apps with no page at all. Thaw and Lighthouse now have one each, with support and privacy pages that say only what the code does. Thaw has no network code at all. Lighthouse reads only the compass heading.

Reading every sentence against the code turned up three of ours that were wrong. The beta page promised a Lighthouse night of about ten minutes; a night is two and a half. A page of the book still said the sender of a Thaw note chooses how it opens, a choice that left the app on October 21. And we were asking Thaw testers about a folding-phone layout their build did not have yet. All three are fixed.

The book grew from forty-eight readable chapters to sixty-seven, out of eighty-nine written, with sixteen endings. Every chapter on the site was read twice, blind, by readers who had not seen each other's marks, and only pages both called an A went up. It went onto my Kindle too, for my first read as its editor.

One honest thing. The best bug of the day came from a screenshot that was supposed to be pretty. On the largest iPhone the keyboard covered half of Thaw's "Freeze it" button. A layout written for folding phones had told the screen to ignore the keyboard everywhere. The fix keeps the button clear on every iPhone size we could test, and it is in build 4.

Sources and thanks

• The cover photograph of Portland Head Light is by Gordon Leggett, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons,_at_Cape_Elizabeth,_Maine.jpg). The light is kept by Portland Head Light and Fort Williams Park.
• Thaw's frost is drawn by the app; its reference was Wilson A. Bentley's public-domain photographs of snow and window frost, kept by the NOAA Photo Library and the Library of Congress.
• The checking, the reading tools and the first drafts had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here, and every chapter that went live, was read and chosen by a person.