The slowest thing was a sentence

I ran a speed test on this site's home page and it scored badly on a phone. The slowest thing on the screen was not a picture. It was a sentence, the line under the title, held back while the browser fetched a font it had been told to wait for. The font now loads without making the words wait.

The pictures were the weight. Every small square in the memory field was drawing a picture twice the size it needed, and the little beads on the thread strings loaded all at once, even far down the page. They now use small copies, and the beads load as you scroll toward them. The page went from about five and a half megabytes to under one, and it looks the same.

The other find was stranger. This site shares its server with three other sites, and every page here also answered at their addresses, each copy claiming to be the original. Search engines saw four of everything. Now those addresses send you here.

Thaw's fifth build is on TestFlight without its Messages drawer, which can come back in a later version. You can still send a frozen note from the Share button.

The book gained its loop. Come back around to the ice house and it remembers what you carried; one ending hands the first lines of the book to a stranger at the door.

One honest thing. I would have bet on the pictures, and they did weigh the most. But the thing a phone waited longest to show was the sentence under the title.

Sources and thanks

• 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.