Use the page at night

What the installed app does once it is on the phone: how to ask it things, how the player behaves under a thumb in the dark, and the three screens behind the corners. Getting the page onto the phone in the first place is Serve the page that plays the book.

Asking it things

Type, or hold the button and speak — it listens only while held, because a bedroom is full of speech that was not meant for somnia. Answers are read, not spoken back: the only thing the page makes a sound with is the book.

The button glows and pulses while it is listening, and the phone buzzes when it starts and stops. Android’s own speech recogniser plays a start and stop tone that no web page can turn off; silencing it means muting system sounds on the phone.

Ask to be taken somewhere and the book goes there and plays from there. If the passage is in a book that was not even open, that book opens. Nothing has to be pressed afterwards — including nothing to get back to the book. A question is asked on the conversation and answered by a book that moved, so the page puts the player back in front of you rather than leaving the seek behind a transcript. It does that whether you typed the question or held the microphone, which it did not use to: typed, the keyboard going down took you back by accident, and spoken there was no keyboard to go down.

Ask it a question instead — who Rob Roy is, what became of Ginger, why they went to London — and it answers in a sentence and leaves the book exactly where it is. Nothing moves, no list goes up, and the book carries on playing underneath. It is worth saying because it did not use to be true: every question was read as take me somewhere, so asking who somebody was either put a list of places on the screen or moved the book to one of them, and cost you the hour you were in.

When more than one place could be what you meant, it does not ask — it puts them on the screen. The screen is headed Places you might be, with a line under it saying how many there are and what they span, and each row is a time, a chapter and the book’s own words — its own, never a description of them, so you recognise the moment rather than take somnia’s word for it, and never the words of a place you have not reached yet, which is the paragraph after this one. Every row starts covered: press its reading and the words come up, press it again and they go away, so the list can be read down without ending up as four paragraphs of book on a phone at 2am. Sitting between the rows in book order, so you can see which places are behind you and which are ahead, there is a you are here line — and under it, in amber, where you were when you asked: the time, the words being spoken there behind the same press, and a here button that takes you back to it if you have gone somewhere and it was wrong. If the book has moved on since — you pressed goto, or the sound simply ran on — the line says you were here instead, and the amber time under it is still the one the here button will take you back to. Pressing it takes you back and starts the book playing there, so by the time you have opened the list again to look, the sound has moved on and the line reads you were here once more: the button gives the place back, not the tense. Press goto on a row and the book goes there and plays, and the list goes with it, leaving you on the player looking at where you have arrived. The line at the foot of the screen names where you landed — moved to 1:20:20 — with undo beside it for six seconds, which puts you back exactly where the press found you and says back where you were. It is there because goto is the one press in the app that throws a position away, and without it the only route back is asking again. Anything that moves the book inside those six seconds takes the offer away and leaves the sentence: a way back holds a position, not an intention, and after a press of +30 it would be a fourth move rather than a way back. After it has gone, the here button on the list is the way back that is left — it remembers where you were when you asked, not where the book has got to since. Press ‹ controls in the top left — the same corner and the same word as the way out of everything else — and nothing whatever happens: the book carries on exactly as it was, in the same place, with the same sleep timer running, on the player the list was standing over. It stands over the player however the question was asked, so what ‹ controls gives back does not depend on whether you spoke it. Nothing has moved while the list is up, so there is nothing to undo. The book keeps playing underneath it the whole time, which also means a sleep timer left to run out under a list still ends the night — the list is not a reason to keep the book going.

It will not answer about a part of the book you have not heard. An answer can come out of somnia’s own reading of the book rather than only out of the passage it just looked up, and that line is the whole of what bounds it: somebody who has not turned up yet gets he hasn’t come up yet in what you’ve heard, and nothing after that — not who he is, and not that he arrives later. The bound is simply where the book is: the line on the scrubber is the line the answers stop at. What you get instead is that place as a row on the list, marked ahead, showing its time and its chapter number and nothing else — no words, and not even the chapter’s name, since a chapter called How Ginger Died gives away as much as the sentence under it. What it says instead is tap to reveal · may spoil: press anywhere on the row’s reading and it uncovers, and you decide having read it; press it again and it goes back under, name and all; press goto and you go there without reading it at all. Two things follow from measuring it that way. A book somnia has never played is bounded at its opening minute, so a book you know well but have never opened here puts everything on the list as ahead until you have played into it. And going backwards takes the bound back with you: rewind an hour and the hour above you goes quiet again until you have played over it. It comes back as fast as the book plays.

Conversations are held in memory, keyed by a token the page mints when it starts, and nothing is written to disk. Start over drops the history when the agent has got the wrong end of a mumbled question; restarting the service drops all of them.

Playing the book

The page opens the book you last had open — the one you were listening to, or the one you last pressed on the shelf — at the place you left it, or at its beginning if you have not started it, and does not start it: opening the app at 2am to ask a question is not the same as asking for the book. Press play when you want it.

To read something else, open books and press the book on the shelf — or ask, which still works and is still the shortest way to say it. There is still no library of things you do not have to browse: Workshop, behind the quiet workshop › pill in the top-right corner of Books, is where a book is added, and its search goes to Gutenberg’s catalog rather than to your shelf.

Those two are one screen each on purpose. Books is the night screen — which book — and it is set at the same type size as the player, because it is read in the same dark without glasses. Workshop is the daytime one — find a book, have it read, watch it being made — and it is smaller and denser than anything else in the app, because it is read sitting up with the lights on. The three things you can change about how the app behaves are on a third, Settings, which is a night screen and is reached from the player’s top-right corner.

On the page there are three buttons: back thirty seconds, play/pause, forward thirty seconds — or fifteen, or sixty, if you have said so in Settings under how far the skip buttons move; the labels say which. Most nights you will use none of them, because the screen is off. With the phone locked the book is driven from the notification, the lock screen and whatever is paired over Bluetooth: play, pause, back and forward, previous and next chapter, and a scrubber. The scrubber covers the chapter, not the book — three minutes to the pixel across a whole novel is no use for the nudge you actually want, and one sleepy thumb from the ending.

Pressing play again gives you back a little of what you missed, sized by how long the sound was off: nothing under half a minute, then eight seconds, twenty after a few minutes, and half a minute after an hour — and that longest one lands on the start of the sentence you were in rather than in the middle of it.

The sleep timer is the word sleep next to the clock. Tapping it walks fifteen, thirty, forty-five and sixty minutes, then the end of the chapter, then off again, and it always says which it is on. It counts listening time, so pausing to ask a question does not spend it. It ends in a twenty-second fade that reaches silence at the time it named; tapping the control during that fade brings the sound back, on the grounds that anyone reaching for it is awake enough to have changed their mind. It is written down as it counts, so a reload — or the phone throwing the app out of memory while it is in the background — brings it back with the minutes it had left on it. A timer more than six hours old is not brought back: opening the book the next evening is starting a night, not finishing one.

The morning after a fade. If the night ended in the sleep timer rather than a thumb, the next launch shows this instead of the player, once. It says the wall-clock time the sound went and that you were probably gone before that, and offers three presses: the last query’s places, when there were any; tell me what you remember; and keeping the position, with the position written on the button. There is no way off it but those three, on purpose. A fade more than twelve hours old is not worth a morning for, and is not shown. The reasoning is in Design decisions.

If something else takes the sound — a call, an alarm — the book stops and stays stopped, and the page says so. If the phone refuses to start audio without being touched first, the page says tap anywhere to carry on, and anywhere means anywhere.

A book that is still being rendered grows underneath you, and the page keeps up with it: while the render is running it asks again for the chapter list — when the audio runs out, and whenever you come back to the app — and carries on into whatever has landed since. Open one that is three chapters in and it will play those three, say waiting for the next chapter to be read, and go on when chapter four arrives. A book with nothing rendered at all says the first chapter is still being read, and the player appears when that chapter lands — already playing if the agent took you to that book, waiting to be pressed if you only opened the app. A book whose render is not running and has no audio at all says nothing yet — press books, then Workshop, to add one, which is also what a somnia with no books in it says.

When a render stopped part way — you stopped it, or a reboot did — the audio runs out mid-book, and the page says the rest of this book hasn’t been read yet rather than that is the end of the book. It knows the difference because the parse writes down how many chapters the book has, so a book three chapters into thirty-nine is tellable from one that is over. Nothing ends: the sleep timer keeps counting and the page keeps wanting the sound. Queue the book again — from Workshop, or by asking — and it picks up at the chapter after the last finished one.

When the tailnet goes — wifi power save and a tailscale re-key both do it for a few seconds — the page says the book stopped arriving and keeps trying, waiting longer between attempts up to half a minute, and puts the chapter back where you had got to rather than at the top of it. Opening the app while the server is unreachable says couldn’t reach the book — trying again, and does. It stops the moment you pause — nothing reloads chapters under a book somebody has put down — and waking the phone, or the wifi coming back, makes it try again at once, so there is nothing to press.

Choosing a book: Books

books, in the top left corner, opens a panel over the page. The book keeps playing underneath it, and ‹ controls puts it away having changed nothing at all. What does change something is tapping a book — the one at the top, which starts the book already open, or one on the shelf, which opens that one. No book on this screen carries a button of its own: opening one is the same gesture wherever it is in the list.

It is a night screen, and everything on it is set at the player’s own type size for that reason: it is read in the same dark, at the same arm’s length, by somebody who has taken their glasses off. It asks one question — what shall I listen to — and nothing that is not part of that answer is on it. It asks the server for one thing, once, when it opens: which books there are. It schedules no wake and polls nothing, so a night spent looking at it is a night with no radio traffic in it.

At the top, under reading now, is the book that is playing underneath the panel — The Moonstone in amber, the only amber title in the app, and under it chapter 4 of 37 · picks up at 1:12:08 over a hairline showing how far through it you are. The time is where a tap would land you; while the book is actually sounding the heading reads playing now and the line ends · playing, because then there is nothing to start. The hairline is not drawn at all while the book is still being rendered, because until the render is over the book’s length is only how much of it exists so far. Tapping the block starts it and puts the panel away — the same press as the play button, made from up here.

Under it, on the shelf are the books you are most likely to want, each with where you left it — 0:27:42 in, or not started. Tapping a row opens that book at that place and takes the panel away with it. Changing your mind costs one press back: nothing is written to the book you left, so it is still exactly where it was, and so is the one you looked at. A book still being rendered says so and is not a press at all until its first chapter exists, because until then there is nothing to play. A book whose render stopped part way says part rendered and can still be opened — what was read plays. If the box cannot be reached, the shelf you last saw stays on screen with couldn’t reach somnia under it: an empty shelf and an unreachable server look identical and mean opposite things.

The shelf stops at twenty books — the twenty you were nearest to most recently, which after a year of somnia is not all of them. A book you have said you are finished with is not on it either, and does not take up one of the twenty. When anything has been left out, the foot of the list says the rest of your books are in the workshop, and on a night when nothing has been, it says nothing: the line is an answer rather than a fixture. Nothing is hidden by any of this — every book somnia has is in Workshop, and a finished book still plays if you open it there.

The rows say the title and nothing else — no author, no dates, no cover. At this size the catalogue’s Title — Surname, Forename, dates is three lines of a phone, and it is metadata about a book you already own and chose. The title is what you recognise a book you own by. Who wrote it appears in Workshop, where you are choosing among seventy thousand you do not.

The way to Workshop is a quiet workshop › pill in this screen’s own top-right corner, opposite ‹ controls. Nothing behind it is a job for 2am, which is why it is drawn no louder than the way back — but it is not at the bottom of the shelf either. It used to be, and on a twenty-book library that meant scrolling past every book on the screen to reach the one thing on it that is not about books.

how dark used to sit under the shelf. It is on Settings now, which is a night screen too, so nothing it needed is lost — and this screen is back to answering one question with nothing on its scroll but books.

Adding a book, and watching it made: Workshop

workshop ›, in the top-right corner of Books, and reachable no other way. ‹ books comes back, and Books is exactly where you left it.

This is the daytime screen and it is denser than anything else in the app, because it is read sitting up with the lights on — denser, and brighter. It is drawn in its own ink rather than the night palette: fuller cream, stronger hairlines, a lifted amber, and the sheet of black the rest of the app is read through comes off entirely while it is up. Every alpha in the night scale was chosen for a dark room, and in daylight those same values are not quiet, they are gone. Nothing on it goes below 16dp. It asks one question too: get me a new book, and tell me it worked. The order down it is that sentence.

At the top, under bring in a new book, is the search. Under the results is what is happening, in a box headed the server is working — on the same screen and directly beneath them on purpose, because somebody who has just pressed add this book wants to see it being made, and splitting the press from its consequence is how the same book gets added twice. The box holds the book being rendered, with narrating in the corner of its line and, under the name, which chapter it is on and how much of it can be played now — chapter 4 of 39 · 1h12m read so far — over a hairline that fills as the chapters land. Under it is whatever is waiting, marked queued, saying how far down the line it is. One book renders at a time, always, so a queue of three is three books’ worth of waiting and not three renders fighting over two cores.

The word in the corner is the stage — queued, narrating, ready, failed, stopped — and the line under the name is what is actually going on inside it. A book whose text has not been parsed yet has no hairline at all rather than one sitting at nothing: until the parse has run, nobody has written down how many chapters there are, and the line says fetching the text instead of counting. The box is not drawn at all when nothing is rendering.

A render that has not been heard from for five minutes says not responding instead of pretending. That is a real answer: it means the worker died, or the box did, or nobody ever started somnia-worker. Check journalctl --user -u somnia-worker.

Under those are the renders that ended in the last day, and a failed one says why in a sentence — Gutenberg has book 4321 but no HTML edition, so somnia cannot read it. They go away by themselves after a day. There is nothing to dismiss and no badge or count anywhere: a book finishing at 3am is not news to somebody asleep, and it is on a screen nobody opens at 3am.

Searching is the top of this screen, and it is what you came here for: type part of a title or an author into search gutenberg and press find. The line above it says where that goes — searching Project Gutenberg, not the books below — because there are two lists of books on this screen now and typing into the wrong one is either adding a book you already have or waiting for a render that has already been made. That searches the copy of the Gutenberg catalog on this machine, so it answers in the time a tap takes and works with the internet down — run somnia catalog-update if a book you know exists is not in it. A book somnia already has, or already has coming, is marked and offers no button; a render that died is marked part rendered and offers finish this one, which picks it up at the chapter after the last finished one.

add this book does not queue it. It opens read in under that row — the voices somnia can read it in, one pill each, with add it underneath — and the same press closes it again, so the way back is the button your thumb is already on. Pressing a name plays a few seconds of it: the same line of Black Beauty in every voice, so what you are comparing is the voice and not the sentence. If the book is playing it is paused first, and stays paused — two things reading aloud at once is the one thing worth avoiding here, and starting the book again under somebody who is still choosing is worse than leaving the play button where they can find it. The last voice you chose is the one the next book opens on, so the second book of an evening is two presses.

It is asked here, and only here, because a book is read by one narrator and cannot be re-read by another: every timestamp somnia holds — chapter marks, index entries, the place you fell asleep — was measured against the audio that was actually made. finish this one therefore offers no choice at all and picks the book up in the voice it started in.

add it queues it, and the sentence underneath is the server’s own — the same sentence the agent says when you ask it out loud. The row it makes says which voice, beside its place in the line, while taking it out again still costs nothing.

stop reading this takes two presses, and the second one only asks. The render stops at the end of the sentence it is reading, about twenty seconds later, which is what keeps every chapter that was finished playable and stops the index filling up with half a chapter. The row stays as the record of a render somebody stopped.

Workshop asks the server how things are going every five seconds while it is open, and stops the moment it is closed or the phone goes in a pocket. Nothing about the queue is polled otherwise — and since this is the only screen the queue is on, and it is two presses from the player behind a row that says daytime, no night has a five-second wake in it.

Workshop holds no settings. They are all on Settings, below.

The books you already have, in Workshop

At the foot of Workshop, under books you already have, is the whole library — including the book playing underneath and the ones you have said you are finished with. This is where the night shelf’s the rest of your books are in the workshop sends you, and it is the whole of somnia rather than the remainder: a list whose contents depended on what you happened to listen to last week would not be a list anybody could search.

Each row is the title, who wrote it, and how much of it is actually here — all 27 chapters, or read to 8 of 21 in amber for a book somnia has not finished reading yet. That second number is the number of chapters the book has, and it never shrinks to match a render that is behind: what moves is the count of what is ready. A book rendered before somnia counted chapters says nothing at all there rather than all 0 chapters.

Every row is a press, and where it goes is that book’s own page — the section below.

filter your books narrows the list as you type, on the title and on the author, and asks the server nothing: the books are already on the phone. The three words under it — recent, title, author — are the order the rows are in, and recent is when somnia was first asked for the book. This is the only sort control in the app, and it is deliberately on this screen and nowhere near the night one: a filter has states, and a filter at 2am is a shelf that can be left in a shape where the book you want is missing.

Books you have finished are under the ones you have not, behind a count of them — 4 finished. They are still here and still play. The count is of what is on the screen, so with a filter on it counts what the filter left.

One book: renaming it, finishing it, removing it

Press a row of books you already have and you get that book’s own page, over Workshop. ‹ workshop comes back, and the list is exactly where you left it, filter and ordering intact.

The title and the author at the top are boxes, not headings: type in them, and what you typed is saved when you leave the box. There is no edit to press first, because a mode is a thing to get into and then out of, and this screen is two presses deep in daylight. A book cannot be renamed to nothing — every screen in somnia names a book by its title, so a blank one would look exactly like a book the catalog never named — but it can be given no author at all.

A name you choose is yours from then on. Rendering a book again is the ordinary way to restart a render that died, and it used to write the catalog’s title back over yours hours later; it no longer touches either column once a person has.

Under the boxes, how far into the book you are, counted in chapters — read up to chapter 24 of 37. Nothing anywhere stores that: it is where the book was left and the list of chapters, read against each other. It is information and not something to act on. A book somnia is behind on reading says so in how much is here below, and the answer to that is to wait.

Then four facts: where the book came from — gutenberg #289, or gutenberg australia #900000123 for the other library — when somnia was first asked for it, how long it is, and how much of it has been rendered. A fact somnia does not have is left off rather than drawn empty, so a book still being rendered has no length on it: while a render runs, the length somnia knows is how much audio exists rather than how long the book is.

read it is the same press a shelf row is: it makes this the book a cold launch opens, starts it, and puts all three screens away. mark finished takes the book off the night shelf and puts it under the count of finished ones in the list you came from — it changes nothing else, the book still plays, and the label then says back on the shelf, which is the whole of undoing it.

remove this book is the only press in somnia that cannot be undone, and it asks twice: the button becomes really remove it? and forgets it was ever asked after a few seconds. The second press takes the book away — the audio, the text, the chunks the agent searches, every queue row it ever had, and where you had got to. A book being rendered right now is refused rather than raced, with a sentence saying which job to stop first. There is no undo behind any of it: a removed book comes back only by being rendered again.

Changing how it behaves at night: Settings

settings › in the top-right corner of the player — the corner that had been empty since start over moved to the chat screen. ‹ controls comes back.

It is a night screen in the night palette, which is the point of it rather than a default: all three controls on it are reached for in the dark with the book playing, and none of them can be had from the phone’s own settings.

how big the words moves the page’s root size, so the words and the space around them go together and the player’s rhythm survives being resized. It moves every screen, not only this one. It is somnia’s answer to browser zoom, which is several screens into Chrome and retunes every app on the phone — this is one press from the player and moves nothing but somnia.

how dark the room takes the page darker than the phone’s own minimum brightness, by laying black over everything. Press – or + and the screen you are looking at gets lighter or darker as you watch — the layer is over this screen too, which is why it has to be set on a screen read in the dark. It goes from nothing to rather dark in ten presses, and it cannot go dark enough to hide itself.

how far the skip buttons move — fifteen, thirty or sixty seconds — is what the two buttons either side of play mean, and what they say. It was in Workshop, on the argument that a thing set once is daytime configuration. That is wrong about when it is discovered: nobody decides thirty seconds is the wrong distance sitting up in daylight, they decide it lying in the dark with a narrator who leaves long gaps, having missed the same sentence twice.

All three are written down and outlive the page. The sleep timer is the one setting that is not: it expires after six hours, because a timer is an intent about one night.