Widget visual redesign: host render evidence

Host-rendered screenshots, not board or QEMU evidence. Produced by cargo run --example render_widget_evidence -- <out-dir> <dark-wallpaper> <light-wallpaper> (nix/rust-shell-client/examples/ render_widget_evidence.rs), which calls the real, unmodified render::paint_home offscreen (a Cairo ImageSurface, no Wayland, no compositor) against two synthetic AppearanceSnapshot themes built directly from appearance.rs’s own public fields — a Catppuccin Mocha-derived dark palette and a Catppuccin Latte-derived light one — rather than a live Omarchy IPC session, which this host has no compositor to run.

I looked at every image myself before writing this and iterated until they read as genuinely designed, not debug output.

Revision history

Round 3 (this one): board review on the deployed build, verbatim: “the widgets don’t have to have a background like they do and the clock looks like shit browse the web find dope clock widgets plz.” Every widget’s card background is gone entirely — no fill, no border, no corner radius; each one now paints straight onto a real theme wallpaper image (see below), with legibility coming from a halo/glow computed from the glyph’s own color (dark glyphs get a light halo, light glyphs get a dark one). The Clock widget was rebuilt from scratch after docs/design/ clock-widget-research.md’s survey of Pixel/Nothing OS/iOS/Samsung/Material You/Braun/desktop-rice clock designs: four styles now (Bubble, Thin, Dot matrix, Analog), the first two set in a genuine Inter static face (nix/shell.nix’s clockDisplayFont, Thin through Black) instead of DejaVu Sans’s Book/Bold pair, Dot matrix drawn procedurally with Cairo circles (no font at all), and Analog stripped of its dial fill/ring entirely per Braun/Dieter Rams’s “no dial background, just markers and hands.” Battery and Weather kept their round-2 content/layout, just moved onto the same no-card/halo treatment.

Round 2: dropped a card-border bug (corner-leaking tint, boxed-in borders), rescaled the battery ring, adjusted clock breathing room and forecast legibility. Superseded by round 3’s “no card at all” — see git history for that intermediate state if needed.

Round 1: the original widget redesign (cards, three clock styles, weather forecast strip).

Real wallpapers, not flat color

Every screenshot composites over a genuine Omarchy theme background image, decoded through the same background_decode::BackgroundCache (crop-to- cover) the production wallpaper layer uses, not a flat swatch — this matters this round specifically because a flat background would never exercise the halo/glow legibility mechanism the “no card” redesign depends on. The two images are real files from this repo’s own pinned theme data (nix build .#handheld-theme-default’s output):

• Dark: catppuccin’s 2-waves.webp (an abstract line-wave illustration, genuinely busy in places — a real legibility stress test, not a gentle gradient).
• Light: catppuccin-latte’s 1-color-fade.webp (a soft warm-to-cool gradient).

render_frame renders the wallpaper and the Home content onto two separate Cairo surfaces before compositing them, mirroring the real client’s own Wayland layering exactly: render::paint_home always clears its own surface to transparent first (so a real compositor can show the wallpaper surface underneath it), so painting both onto one surface would have that clear wipe the wallpaper out again.

Font: what’s actually on screen

The Bubble/Thin styles are set in “Inter” (the classic static collection, Inter.ttc, not the variable font — see nix/shell.nix’s clockDisplayFont doc and docs/design/clock-widget-research.md’s own “Font decision” section for why the variable weight axis isn’t reachable from this client). These screenshots were rendered with that exact font file installed into this host’s own fontconfig (~/.fonts/, fc-cache -f), the same file the image ships, so what’s on screen is the real face, not a host substitute.

What this captures

Ten distinct captures, each in both themes (dark-*.png/light-*.png, 20 files — the two drag-mechanic captures are theme-independent mechanics and are only captured once, in the dark theme):

• clock-bubble.png — hour and minute each their own huge line, Inter at its heaviest weight, both lines the same color, centered.
• clock-thin.png — one line, Inter at its thinnest weight, centered.
• clock-analog.png — ticks and hands only, no dial fill or ring at all.
• clock-dotmatrix.png — a procedural 5x7 dot-matrix HH:MM readout (Nothing OS-style), digits in the theme’s foreground, the colon in its accent.
• battery-present.png / battery-absent.png — the ring (with a soft ambient backdrop for contrast) and the muted outline glyph, both now straight on the wallpaper.
• weather.png — current temperature, a Cairo-drawn condition glyph over its own soft backdrop, location, high/low, and a 3-entry forecast strip.
• overview.png — Bubble clock, Battery, and Weather together on one Home page over the wallpaper, plus a populated dock.
• widget-picker.png — the widget-picker sheet, all six entries (four clock styles plus Battery/Weather) each previewing their own live content.
• drag-edge-indicator.png / drag-no-room.png (dark only) — the same live-drag mechanic evidence from round 1/2, driven through HomeScreen’s real public API; with no card behind the lifted widget any more, the red dashed “no room” highlight is now actually visible next to it (round 2’s version was mostly hidden behind the lifted card).

What this does not prove

This is host software rendering, not the board’s panel, not real-finger touch, and not a full Sway/compositor frame. It proves the widget-drawing code paths run and look the way described, including against a genuinely busy wallpaper image; it does not prove daylight readability, real touch-latency feel, or on-device color/font reproduction. Physical-board acceptance remains open (see the change’s tasks.md).