The icons we never looked at

The home page got faster again. Every page here was loading Stripe's payment script, though nothing on this site takes a payment; gifts go through Stripe's own pages. It is gone from here. About seventy separate stylesheets now arrive as three to five files, and the fonts no longer hold the page back. In our own test the home page now makes 30 requests instead of 116 and weighs a little more than half what it did.

The Android versions of Tachline, Lighthouse, Thaw and Mechanical Bestiary, which are not out yet, met a real phone, a small Motorola. Until now they had lived on emulated phones and folds. This one has a compass, which is what Lighthouse steers by, and no gyroscope at all.

The emulated phones had already caught two things on Android 16: the clock and battery at the top of the screen had turned dark gray against our dark screens, and Lighthouse's buttons broke their words in half on narrow phones. Both are fixed.

One honest thing. We checked every screen of these apps, in every posture of two folding phones, and never once looked at the phone's home screen. The first thing the real phone showed was three plain default icons where Tachline, Lighthouse and Thaw should have been. Each now has its own icon, drawn small enough that a round mask can't cut it.

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 was read and chosen by a person.