The interface

A tour of the screen: three zones, and what each part does. Once you know the zones, everything in Daimond has a place.

The rail (left)

The rail is split by a divider you can drag but not remove. Above the divider is what you are working on; below it is the admin panel.

A row named Everything sits over the lot, holding every Diamond, chat, worker, mailbox and page fetch at one press. Its light is the root of every other in the app: green while everything that could spend is running, red when none of it is, amber in between. The rail's own closer is on that row, the only one that speaks for the whole rail.

A second divider sits between the two lists. Diamonds accumulate, and without it a long list of them pushed the chat tiles off the bottom; drag it to give either list the room, or double-click it for an even share. Neither can be crushed away entirely, and the share is remembered per device with the rest of your layout.

Diamonds sit above chats, which is the way the ground is: you mine in the conversation underneath, and what you bring up is cut and polished above it. A chat is raw, a Diamond is worked, and the order says which way the work travels without a word of explanation. The word chat was left alone for the same reason. A Diamond is a new sort of thing and earns a new name; a conversation is ordinary and keeps its ordinary word.

Both are covered in full on Chats & Diamonds.

The admin panel

Below the divider, the admin panel is the state of the machine at a glance. Settings live here and not in a pop-up, so a chat stays live beside them: you can ask Daimond what an app password is while the box asking for one is still on screen. Each row that can be acted on is a button that opens what it names:

• An identity row (who you are on this device) with a settings cog beside it.
• Models, counting the providers you have connected and opening the Models form.
• Credits, showing your balance and opening the Credits view.
• Tools · N of M, how many tools are available, opening the Tools panel.
• Version, naming the release you are running and how long you have been on it, and opening the release history below.
• Workspace storage, how much space your files use in each place a workspace can live.

Which version you are running

The Version row reads as a name and an age (Version · Albany · today), not as a build number. Releases are named after Western Australian places in alphabetical order, so the sequence is legible without looking anything up. A name marks a milestone: Daimond ships several builds a day, and a name for each would be noise. Hover the row for the build id and its publication date.

Clicking the row opens the release history, which reads from the top down:

• What is planned, first, in a dashed outline.
• The build you are running, marked you are here.
• Every earlier build, newest first, each with its date, a line saying what changed, its build id and its place in the sealed record.

This is not a changelog kept beside the app. It is the published record Daimond's own delivery check reads: every build ever served, in order, in a chain that cannot be rewritten without breaking. The one-line notes were added without disturbing that chain, so you are reading annotated history and not a retelling of it.

There is no way back to an older build. A pinned one walks into the gateway's own refusal to talk to a client that is too old; it can hold a security fault since fixed, in an app holding your provider keys, your identity and your passkeys; and meeting newer local data it risks reading it wrong. Dislike of a change is answered at the change, by saying plainly what changed, which is what these notes are for.

The stage (centre)

The stage is the middle zone. Its occupants sit side by side and never dock at the right, so you never leave the conversation to do a thing: read the message, watch the page, read the document beside the pages it was typeset into, with the daimon still there to be asked about any of it.

How many seats there are is decided by how wide the stage is, not by a fixed number: two at the narrowest, four at the widest, and one more for roughly every 380 pixels, which is where a line of prose still holds about 45 characters. Four of them want around 1550 pixels of stage, so they are for a large monitor; a laptop usually gets two or three. Two is the floor whatever the width, because the whole point of the stage is that whatever you are attending to opens beside the conversation rather than over it.

Narrow the window and the rightmost seat closes, the one you opened most recently first. The conversation is never the one to go. Widening again does not bring the panel back: a panel that reappeared because a window grew would be one you never asked for, with no way to tell it not to, and getting it back is one click on its chip. Ask for a panel when every seat is taken and the guest that has been on the stage longest leaves instead, because you have just said which one you want.

Each stage guest has a header with a close button. A closed panel does not vanish: its chip stays in the top bar, unfilled, and clicking the chip brings it back.

The dock (right)

The dock holds the sources you pull from. Closing one leaves its chip in the top bar; clicking the chip docks it again. How the dock tiles, and so how many panels it holds at once, is yours to set under Dock tiling in the appearance menu, described below.

The top bar

Across the top sit the wordmark, a row of panel chips, and, at the far right, a button to link another device, an About dialog, this guide, and the appearance and layout menu. A chip appears beside them when a new build is out.

The chips

Every panel has a chip, open or shut, and clicking one toggles that panel. An open panel's chip is filled in, so the row reads as a map of what is on screen. Were only the closed panels to have one, the row would be longest when the app was emptiest and every chip would shift sideways each time one was used; a chip that stays put is one whose position you can learn. (Agents is the exception to every: it keeps out of the way until the first agent runs.)

The chips are grouped by zone (rail, then stage, then dock) with a thin divider between the groups, in the order the zones sit on screen. So a chip is on the side the panel it opens will appear on. Two marks carry meaning:

• A closed stage chip whose panel would displace a guest already on the stage is drawn with a dashed outline. It appears only when every seat is taken, which depends on the width, so the same chip is plain on a wide screen and dashed on a narrow one. The chat keeps its seat and the guest that has been there longest leaves. It warns without refusing, and it is an outline and not an added mark so the chip keeps its width and its neighbours stay put.
• A closed dock chip is greyed out when the dock is full. Its tooltip points at the fix: a larger tiling in the appearance menu, or close a dock panel.

Pinned panels, and the gallery

You decide which chips sit in the top bar. Any panel can be pinned or unpinned; the unpinned ones live behind a ⋯ chip at the end of the row, with a count of how many are back there. Clicking it opens the gallery: every panel there is, searchable by name, grouped by zone, each row carrying a pin control and saying whether that panel is open. Clicking a row opens or closes the panel as a chip would.

The row may be incomplete only because the gallery is not. Nothing is ranked by how often you use it, either: a row that reordered itself would destroy the muscle memory fixed positions exist to build.

The palette

Ctrl K, Cmd K on a Mac, opens a search box that reaches any panel or setting by typing. Arrow keys move through the results, Enter runs the highlighted one, Esc closes it. It lists the panels, the palettes, the four text sizes, the dock tilings, the languages, the currencies and the permission modes. It is never the fastest route to a panel you can see a chip for; it is the route that stays complete however many panels there are.

By keyboard, and by ear

Daimond can be driven without a mouse. Tab moves through the controls in the order they are drawn, Enter or Space operates the one you are on, and Esc closes whatever is open. Every dialog, menu and sheet also carries a cross in its corner, one control built one way, sized for a thumb on a phone.

Where you are is drawn outside the control, as a ring standing off from its edge. Drawn as a change to the control's own border, as it once was, the ring is legible only while the resting border is nearly invisible, so making borders visible would have taken the focus ring away on every palette at once. Against the surface behind it the ring survives the whole range: measured on all eleven palettes, the faintest ring is still four and a half times the contrast the standard asks for.

Two places in particular:

• Email is fully operable from the keyboard. Mailboxes, folders, drafts and messages are controls you can reach and press, not rows that only answer a click. The mailbox you are in and the folder you are reading are announced as the current ones, so a screen reader says where you are and not only what is there.
• A dialog keeps focus inside itself while it is open, and hands it back to whatever opened it. Tabbing does not wander off behind a window covering the screen, and closing one does not drop you at the top of the page.

With a screen reader, an answer is announced once, when it has arrived ("Daimond answered, 120 words"), and not as it is written. A live region is read out on every change, so a streaming answer would be recited at you in fragments for as long as the model kept typing. People switch that off, and an app whose announcements have been switched off looks answerable and is not. One sentence per turn is less, and it is usable.

The window has named regions and real headings throughout, so a screen reader's own list of landmarks is a working table of contents for the app. Anything you cannot reach or cannot hear is a fault, not a limit; say so.

Appearance and layout

The button at the top right opens one menu holding the choices about how Daimond looks and sits, as opposed to what it does:

• View: Simple or Max. Simple gives each thing its name and whether it is running, with everything else one press away; Max puts the model, the cost and the context beside it, so two can be compared without opening either. It sets the shape of the interface with it, since an airy shape at maximum density is a combination nobody wants. A tile's own cog still overrides it for that tile.
• Theme, eleven palettes in three bands: Light, Intermediate and Dark. The band is how you find one; within it the choice is taste, except Amber, which holds the blue out of everything it draws for reading late at night. This guide wears whatever palette the app is wearing when it is shown inside Daimond.
• Text size: four steps, Small, Normal, Large and Larger. Only the type responds: the frame, the padding and the panel widths stay put, because this is a control for reading and not a zoom. For a bigger interface, use the browser's own zoom. The sample in the menu is set in the size being chosen, so the control shows the change instead of naming it.
• Dock tiling: Auto, 1 column, 2×2, 2×3 or 3×2, each drawn as the grid it selects. The tiling also decides how many panels the dock can hold, its columns times its rows: four in one column, four at 2×2, six at either 2×3 or 3×2. Auto lets the window decide, taking a second column once there is room for one. A smaller grid closes whichever panels no longer fit, most recently opened first, and each goes back to being a chip you can see and click.
• Language and Currency: what Daimond says, and what figures are shown in. A language with no table yet stays in English; billing is always in US dollars, whatever the figures are displayed as.

Keeping an arrangement with a Diamond

With a Diamond selected, the appearance menu offers to keep the current arrangement of panels with it, and to update or forget one already saved. Opening that Diamond again puts it back, so returning to a piece of work is not reassembling its panels by hand. It is saved only when you ask, never inferred and never in the background, because a switch that silently closed panels would read as work being lost.

On a narrow screen

Below the phone width the chips and the gallery give way to the phone shell, which answers the same question with less room: the chat is the floor, a panel rises over it as a sheet you can drag, and the rail becomes a drawer opened by the button at the top left. The row along the bottom is the same chip row, scrolled sideways. Every panel has a chip in it, in the order the zones run on a larger screen; the filled one is whatever you are looking at, rather than everything that is open, because on a phone only one thing is; and a chip takes you there rather than toggling, since the thing it would close is the whole screen. The admin panel is reached down the drawer. Nothing is lost; it is the same panels, shown one at a time.

Installed to the home screen, Daimond runs in its own window with no browser furniture, and holds itself clear of the notch and the home indicator. It is the same page and the same stored work, so nothing has to be moved into it.