remindwall / SPEC-DASHBOARD.md

# SPEC-DASHBOARD — the wall has too many voices, give them a protocol

The dashboard started as a slideshow with one overlay. It's now five surfaces
composed in an ad-hoc ZStack, with battery (H1) and traffic (TR1) queued up to
join — every new feature invents its own placement, its own font sizes and its
own idea of how important it is. This spec defines the protocol they all render
through instead: three priority tiers, explicit interruption rules and a shared
card rail (D1.3 builds it, D1.4 migrates onto it).

Scope: WHAT renders where and when it may interrupt. Layout geometry (where the
rail sits, how cards look) is D1.2's mockup decision — this spec constrains it,
it doesn't draw it.

## Surface inventory

| Surface | Feature | Status | Tier | Gate | Update cadence |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Photo slideshow | `SlideShowFeature` | live | ambient (base layer) | album configured | continuous (Ken Burns) |
| Med late alert | `AlertLoaderFeature` → `AlertView` | live | EMERGENCY overlay | late window + not scanned + trackee enabled | 30s tick |
| Scan feedback | `TagScanLoaderFeature` | live | EMERGENCY overlay (transient) | tag tap | event-driven, tap to dismiss |
| Calendar "Now" | `CalendarEventsFeature` → `NowView` | live | ambient | event in progress | 30s tick |
| Calendar "Up next" | `CalendarEventsFeature` → `UpNextView` | live | time-sensitive rail | event within 60 min | 30s tick |
| Bus arrivals | `BusArrivalsFeature` → `BusArrivalsBar` | live | time-sensitive rail | bus window + enabled + stops configured | 30s poll |
| Battery chips | `BatteryAlertsFeature` (H1) | planned | ambient | enabled + a battery low | 30 min poll |
| Traffic / drive time | `TrafficAlertsFeature` (TR1) | planned | time-sensitive rail | traffic window + routes configured | 5 min poll |

## The three tiers

```mermaid
graph TD
    T0["TIER 0 - EMERGENCY overlay<br/>med alert, scan feedback"]
    T1["TIER 1 - time-sensitive rail<br/>bus, traffic, up-next"]
    T2["TIER 2 - ambient<br/>slideshow, now-event, battery chips"]
    T0 -- "washes over, never unmounts" --> T1
    T1 -- "renders on top of" --> T2
    SCAN["scan feedback"] -- "outranks (it IS the resolution)" --> MED["med alert"]
```

- **Tier 0 — EMERGENCY overlay.** Owns the full screen. A missed dose still
  outranks the world: the med alert is the reason this wall exists, everything
  else is decoration. Members: med late alert (red wash, persists until
  scanned), scan feedback (green/amber wash, transient).
- **Tier 1 — time-sensitive rail.** Cards that matter in the next hour: bus
  ETAs, drive times, the up-next calendar event. Priority-ordered in ONE shared
  rail (D1.3's card model) — features contribute typed cards, the dashboard
  owns placement. No feature invents its own bar again.
- **Tier 2 — ambient.** Glanceable, never urgent: the slideshow itself, the
  in-progress event title, battery chips (a AAA dying over three days is not an
  emergency, it's a chore reminder).

## Decided at the D1.2 gate (2026-08-01)

- **Layout: Candidate A — the priority stack.** One vertical rail, urgency =
  height, most urgent card at the bottom (eye level); up-next is a card like
  any other. Exactly what D1.3's model emits, rendered verbatim.
- **Tier 0 wash goes near-opaque.** Today's 50% alpha makes the alert text
  hard to read on the live kiosk (chotchki, at review). Readability of the
  emergency text beats seeing the rail through it — start at 80%, D1.5 tunes
  the number at distance.

## Interruption rules

1. Tier 0 renders OVER everything, near-opaque (80% starting bid — see the
   gate decision above; the earlier "see the bus through the wash" instinct
   lost to being able to READ the alert at all). The rail and slideshow stay
   MOUNTED and updating beneath — hidden for the duration, current the moment
   the wash clears.
2. Scan feedback stacks above the med alert. Tapping the tag is the ACT of
   resolving the alert — the thank-you must win the screen for its moment.
   (Today's ZStack order already does this; the spec makes it law.)
3. Tier 1 cards NEVER interrupt: they enter and leave the rail with
   transitions, they don't flash, they don't wash. Urgency inside the rail is
   styling (the red "late" capsule), not motion.
4. Tier 2 never occludes Tier 1. Ambient chips live in a corner the rail
   doesn't use (mockup decision, D1.2).
5. Within a tier, ordering is by card priority (below), not by which feature
   mounted first.

## Gating and the screen-off interplay

- Every Tier 1 source carries a window gate (`busWindow`, TR1's traffic
  window). Outside the window the card does not exist — not dimmed, GONE. An
  errored source shows one compact error chip in the rail (lowest priority),
  not a full-width banner: the wall's job is family info, not devops.
- Screen-off (`ScreenOffMonitorFeature`) trumps Tiers 1 and 2: a dark panel is
  dark. Tier 0 med alerts FORCE the screen on (the existing late-reminder
  force-on) — the one thing worth waking the wall for. Scan feedback never
  wakes the screen (nobody scans a dark wall; if they do, the med alert
  already lit it).
- All gates evaluate on the source feature's own cadence; the rail just
  renders what it's handed. Gating lives with the data, layout with the
  dashboard.

## Type scale — readable from across the room

Two viewing-distance classes, because the same UI serves the kiosk's 32" LG
wall monitor at room distance and two 9th-gen iPads at arm's length. EVERY panel runs PORTRAIT — width is
the scarce axis, height is plentiful, so the "rail" is a vertical stack and
vertical position carries meaning: ambient lives up high (glanceable), the
time-sensitive stack sits in the lower half (eye level from the couch):

| Role | Wall 32" (pt) | iPad (pt) | Today |
|---|---|---|---|
| Tier 0 overlay headline | 200 | 80 | 200 ✓ |
| Tier 0 overlay body | 80 | 44 | 80 ✓ |
| Rail card primary (ETA, route number) | 48 | 28 | 20 ✗ (`.title3`) |
| Rail card secondary (label, "in 4 min") | 32 | 20 | 12-16 ✗ (`.caption`) |
| Ambient chip / floor for ANY text | 24 | 14 | 12 ✗ |

The 200pt overlay headline is the empirically-validated anchor — it ships on
the live kiosk today and reads from anywhere in the room; the rail numbers are
derived relative to it. The current `BusArrivalsBar` was designed at desk
distance and its captions are
unreadable from the couch (the ✗ column is why D1.4 re-renders it through the
card model instead of restyling in place). Hard rule going forward: nothing
below the 24pt floor ships to the wall. D1.5 verifies the scale AT distance —
numbers here are the starting bid, the couch is the judge.

## Rail capacity and overflow

- Max 4 simultaneous cards on the wall, 3 on iPad — capacity is STACK DEPTH
  (portrait panels), not rail width. Past that, ETAs stop being readable at
  distance and the wall becomes a departures board.
- Priority order: late/degraded things first — (1) late bus, (2) slow route,
  (3) on-time bus, (4) on-time route, (5) up-next event, (6) error chip.
  Ties break by soonest ETA.
- Overflow: render the top N by priority plus a "+2 more" chip — dropped
  silently is a lie, and a wall that lies gets ignored. The chip is not
  interactive (the wall monitor takes no touches; a tap anywhere exits to
  settings); it exists so a missing card reads as "over capacity", never
  "broken".
- Unit tests on ordering and overflow are D1.3's exit criteria, not this
  spec's.

## What this spec does NOT cover

- Card visual styling beyond the type scale — D1.3/D1.4 build to the picked
  Candidate A geometry (see the gate decision above).
- The card model's Swift API — D1.3, constrained by: typed cards carrying
  (content, tier, priority, gate) with the dashboard owning render order.
- Whether the Mac renders battery cards at all — H1.1's probe decides.