The first cut of ?pi=1 switched off the two things that look most expensive - the
backdrop-filter glass blur and the decorative CSS animation loops - and made the device
slower, not faster: 53.5% of a core idle became 118%. Measured on musicdolphin, sum of
the Firefox process tree, idle on the browse screen, 15s average:
full app 53.5%
+ ambient canvas at half resolution 25.0% <- the whole win
+ 30fps cap on top of that 25.0% (no idle change)
+ decorative CSS animation loops off 24.6% (noise; left on)
+ backdrop-filter glass blur off 118.1% <- 5x worse
The blur is what promotes each glass panel to its own compositing layer. Without it the
animated canvas and the whole album grid above it collapse into one layer and every
canvas frame repaints all of it. The most expensive-looking CSS in the app is what was
keeping the rest of it cheap. SHOW_GLASS_BLUR and SHOW_DECORATIVE_ANIMATIONS therefore
go back to unconditionally on, in both the music app and the typing game, with the
numbers written down next to them so the next person does not repeat this.
What is left is one real change - paint a quarter of the pixels - plus three caps that
only bite while something is playing and so are not in the table above: 30fps on the
canvas, 60 bubbles alive at once, and ten progress-bar re-renders a second. Those three
are unmeasured; measuring them means playing audio.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two separate costs, both measured on musicdolphin (Pi 4, 1920x1080 kiosk), where the
app was burning ~70% of a core with nothing happening on screen.
Per-frame work. The ambient canvas repaints a full-screen gradient plus a particle
field every frame, and `usePlaybackClock` pushes a React setState per animation frame
into both PlayView and PlayerBar for the whole length of a track. `?pi=1` (lib/
lowPower.ts) makes those cheaper rather than switching them off: the canvas paints a
quarter of the pixels at 30fps with a bubble cap, and the clock renders ten times a
second - a progress bar advances one pixel every few hundred ms and its label has
one-second resolution, so nothing on screen can tell. Only the effects with no cheap
version actually go: the backdrop-filter glass blur and the decorative CSS loops.
Also drops a redundant full-canvas clearRect that the opaque gradient always covered.
Search. normalize() runs a Unicode NFD decomposition, and albumMatches/songMatches
called it on every album title and every track title on every keystroke - 4969 of them
for a track search, whose answer cannot change until the library does. buildSearchIndex
does it once per library payload; a keystroke is now String.includes over strings that
already exist. On the real library that is 33ms -> 3.4ms for an eight-letter track
query on a laptop, and this runs on a Pi. The same index partitions albums by shelf and
pre-sorts each shelf's categories, which App and BrowseView were deriving separately
from the same data.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Letters-round lessons only had bubbles and jellyfish as eligible arcade
modes; with jellyfish gone, bubbles is now always used instead of the
two alternating - no lessons need to be dropped.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Moves tippen from a standalone app into web/ as a third tab (audio player /
smarthome / typing), replacing the old single room-toggle corner button with a
vertical icon tab rail. Curriculum and progress now come from the backend
(musicmouse/tippen/*) instead of a build-time YAML import and localStorage.
Adds reward-driven lock rendering: Cover/BrowseView/AlbumModal show a question
mark for locked albums/tracks with a hint on what unlocks them, and
ResultSheet gets a new unlock-animation block alongside the existing
lesson-unlock and aquarium-creature celebrations.
CSS from the two apps is merged carefully: identical rules (bubble/card/
key-cap/view-enter/backdrop-enter and their keyframes) are shared as-is,
while rules that bake in each app's own hue are kept separate under a
`tp-` prefix and scoped to the typing tab's own .tp-stage wrapper, so
neither app's look bleeds into the other's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
