Ink on water, in any browser

Floating Ink was built for a fingertip on a phone, but the dish underneath is six hundred lines of arithmetic about ink spreading on water, and arithmetic does not care what it runs on. So yesterday it was carried over to the browser, line for line, and you can try it here. Tap to drop sumi, indigo or vermilion, drag to comb, tilt the phone if you are on one, and save the print. The seed that makes a dish on the phone makes the same dish on the web, ring for ring. It has sound now too, a drop meeting water, on both.

The Bestiary's cover kept going. Beside the 1872 binding it is measured against, the round before had too much going on: pin lines, roundels, a label that read too white. Now it is one double rule with a drawn fleuron in each corner, the label toned to the page paper, a spine with four raised bands and the title running down it, and a soft shadow where the book meets the deck. The same cover is on iPhone and Android, and on the phone it stands up to face you instead of lying flat on the table. It is close. It is still too clean, and no real book has been photographed next to it on a real device yet.

A new thing started: a daily puzzle on folded paper. A square sheet printed with marks, fold it along the lines down to one square so the stack reads right. The engine is done, every one of next year's sheets has exactly one solution, and the first web page exists. Nobody has played it on paper yet, which is the only test that matters.

And Tachline is reaching past the wrist. A public scoreboard through Game Center, the iPad version finished, and the first code for an Apple TV version where the remote's up and down stand in for the Crown.

One honest thing. A tab left playing a video at midnight kept the studio's builds frozen until half past four, because the machine could not tell a person watching from a tab nobody was looking at. The watcher now asks whether anyone has touched the Mac in the last two hours.

Sources and thanks

• The web dish is built with nothing but the browser's canvas; the sound comes from the studio's own synthesizer, no samples.
• J. G. Wood, Insects at Home (1872), from the Internet Archive, still the cover's measure.
• The folding puzzle's ancestor is the stamp-folding problem, set by Édouard Lucas in 1891.
• The first drafts and the checks had help from Artisanal Intelligence; every line here was read and chosen by a person.