Public Access
jaap-jan
c882fa0cd3
A long press on a host raised a connect card over the bottom of the list: a password box, CONNECT, EDIT, MOVE and DELETE. It was the right idea in the wrong place. It covered rows, it had room for five things and never a sixth, and every one of them was about exactly one machine — so filing eleven imported hosts under a group was eleven trips through a form, and there was nowhere to put a sixth action if anybody wanted one. A long press now chooses the host it landed on, and the actions move into a bar across the top of the screen, in the vault header's place rather than beside it. That is where Android has put them since contextual action bars existed, and it is the one strip a list can never grow into — but the real reason for it is that while it is up the screen is unambiguously about the ticked hosts and nothing else, which is what lets the count in the middle of it mean something. Left to right: the cross that leaves the mode, the count, the pencil, and a ⋯ holding Connect, Connect via SFTP, Move to vault, Copy to vault, Change group, Duplicate and Remove. A tap still connects and still raises nothing. Once anything is ticked it ticks and unticks instead, which is what every Android list does and is not merely a convention worth following: a tap that connected while five machines sat ticked would open a terminal on top of a selection somebody was halfway through building. Unticking the last host leaves the mode, so there are two ways out of it and the cross is only one of them. Both gestures now read the row from the element under the finger rather than from the list's selection, and that is a correctness change rather than tidying. A tap on a group heading moves the selection and the view model bounces it straight back to whichever host was chosen before — which answered "a host, or nothing" for free while a tap only ever connected. It stops answering it the moment a tap can tick one: the heading would tick a machine the user was not pointing at, into a set they are about to delete. Three of the seven entries are about one machine and are drawn only for one. A terminal, a file-transfer session and a form each have no reading over six, so they are collapsed rather than refused. The other four read better for a count than without one — it is the reason the set exists — and each of them says afterwards how many hosts it wrote and how many it left alone. Skipping beats refusing the whole run: a selection of eleven with one read-only row would otherwise do nothing at all and then report about the wrong ten. Copy to vault and Duplicate are new, and the difference between them is what each can safely carry. A copy crosses a key boundary, so it drops the group and the tags exactly as a move does — both are items of the vault being left, and a host arriving with either would point at something the destination does not contain, resolvable on the machine that sent it and dangling for everybody else. A duplicate stays in the same keychain, so everything it points at is still there and it keeps both. Change group is the write dragging a card onto a group already makes on the desktop, run over a selection; it refuses one spanning two keychains rather than half-filing it, which is the refusal a drop across that boundary already makes one host at a time. Connect via SFTP is the one action that leaves the vault. Which machine is a decrypted item and so is this object's business; the screen it leads to and the transfers view model behind it are the shell's — so it is an event, on the same division SessionOpened already draws for a shell. The host is re-found in that screen's own copy of the list, because the picker binds to rows in that copy and handing it the vault's object would select nothing. What is left of the card is the password box, and only because it had nowhere else to go: a host that authenticates with a typed password cannot be reached by a tap alone. That tap now raises a sheet rather than the bar, and the difference is that a sheet is up only while a question is on screen — the bar was raised by a long press and stayed, so it was a password box sitting over the list whether or not anything was being asked. Dismissing it empties the box, which is not tidiness either: a secret left behind would satisfy the emptiness check that decides whether to raise the sheet at all, so the next tap would dial with somebody else's password. The pencil moving into that bar takes the host editor with it. It was a card in the list's own row, under the search box and the sync line — twenty controls sharing a screen with two rows of chrome about the list it had replaced. It is a page now, and PhoneShell stands all four of its rows down for it, which is what "opens with all the options" means at 360dp. That needed a second subscription in that control: two of its flags are questions about the vault rather than about the shell, and the shell does not forward the vault's notifications. The ticks are held as entity ids rather than as rows, and written back onto the rows after every reload. Every row object in the list is replaced on every filter keystroke and every synchronisation pass, so a set of rows would empty itself once a minute under somebody choosing what to do with eleven machines. Ids that no longer resolve are dropped, so a colleague's deletion arriving mid-selection leaves a count that matches what is on screen. One caller had to change with it. ConnectToRecent opened the pane about a host, which was the desktop's drawer and the phone's card; the phone's answer is now a tick, and nothing on that list means "selected" any more — so arriving with the host merely selected would be arriving at a screen with nothing to press. Both are raised together, and the one the head in front of the user does not draw is inert.