Widgets had 22dp corners, rounder than the launcher's own widgets and
the app's cards. They now use 16dp, the Pixel launcher's widget radius,
on the surface, its frame and the picker previews.
The widgets drew every sender as initials, while the app and the
webmail show the contact's photo or the sender's logo first. The
widget avatars now follow the same order: an embedded contact photo,
then the logo of a non-personal sender domain when sender favicons are
on, then the initials.
A widget draws from the stored snapshot and cannot load anything while
it draws, so the pictures are fetched when the snapshot is built and
kept in it as small data URIs. Logos have a cache of their own (a week
for a logo, a day for a domain without one) that survives being
offline, and pictures over 40 KB or in a format Android cannot decode
stay out.
The picker previews still showed the layouts from before the fixes in
this series (Month's arrows, the Vacation switch, the old task rows and
triage header). Redrawn from the sample data at each widget's default
size, light theme, with the rounded corners and frame the launcher
draws.
The triage card kept its preview to two lines however tall it was
resized, leaving most of a large card empty, and Latest message showed
no preview at all. Both now use the room they have for the start of
the message.
Folder counts showed only its "Folders" heading when there was no
folder to list, which looks broken; it now says there are no folders to
show. A finished task past its due date still read "Overdue" on the
Tasks widget; it shows its date instead.
The Month widget drew back and forward arrows, and the Vacation widget
an on/off switch. A widget cannot page through months or switch the
vacation reply, so both only opened the app, which the rest of the
widget already does. The arrows are gone; the switch becomes a chevron,
and the Active/Inactive pill under the title still says which state
the reply is in.
Most widget buttons were 32dp tall (Archive, Delete, Reply and Next on
the triage card, Accept, Maybe and Decline, Send wishes, Mail my free
times), Up next's were 36dp and the round compose/new buttons in the
headers 28-32dp, all under the 48dp a finger needs, so taps landed
beside them and did nothing.
Button and Fab take a transparent tap area around what they draw
(`slop`), and the layouts give up the same amount of padding or gap
next to them, so the widgets look the same but the buttons take a 48dp
tap.
Checked every widget at its smallest size with long names, big counts
and German labels. What spilled over:
- the Inbox header at two cells: the count pushed the compose button
off the edge (search now goes at that width, the title truncates
first, and only the unread count stays);
- a long sender pushed the triage card's time and position out;
- German button labels were cut ("Archivie", "Lösc"); the triage
buttons now drop to icons, Archive and Delete first, when the labels
do not fit;
- five-digit counts overflowed Unread count, Tag and Mail and next, and
"/ 23000" wrapped a character per line; counts from 10,000 up are
shortened (10K, 12,3K) and the total goes where it does not fit;
- "ungelesen" was cut beside the number in Mail and next and moves
under it instead.
Every widget header now lets its title give way before the buttons on
its right.
The previous fix started the refresh as the app went to the background,
but it still stopped after its first request: fetch hands every response
over through a JS timer, and React Native pauses timers while the app's
activity is in the background, so the answer was only read once the app
came back. The widgets kept the previous account after a switch and
Home, and changes made in the app reached them late.
The refresh now runs as a headless task of its own,
BulwarkWidgetRefresh, started through BulwarkWidgetRefreshService. A
running headless task keeps the timers going, and the service keeps the
process from being frozen before the widgets are redrawn. Where Android
refuses to start the service the app refreshes in place as before. A
refresh started for a change also no longer joins one that began before
it.
The calendar, tasks, files and scheduled-send parts of the widgets only
refreshed while the app's UI was running, because they reuse the app's
stores, which are bound to its JMAP client. A widget event or push that
woke the app without its UI refreshed mail only, so invitations
answered elsewhere, tasks ticked on another device and new events
stayed as the app last left them. A tick or RSVP the server refused in
that state was also never undone, since nothing reloaded those parts.
When no UI has started in the runtime, nothing else uses that client,
so the widget refresh now signs it in to the active account and loads
calendar, tasks, files and scheduled sends the way the app does. Once
the UI starts it owns the client again.
Event links from the widgets named only the event (and the JMAP account
of a shared calendar), never the signed-in account it was shown for.
With another account active by then, the Calendar tab opened without
the event, or with an id both accounts use, on the other account's
event. The links now carry `appAccount`, and the app switches to that
account first, as it already did for message links.
An RSVP or task tick named only the item's id and looked it up in the
stored snapshot when the tap arrived, then used the snapshot's active
account. Between a refresh and the redraw that follows, a tap made on
the old drawing could reach a snapshot of another account, and JMAP ids
are short per-account sequences, so the lookup could match that
account's task or event with the same id. A tick also flipped whatever
the stored state was, so a quick second tap on a drawing that had not
caught up yet undid the first.
The tap now carries what the call needs: the item's account, its server
ids and, for a tick, the state the user asked for. The change laid over
the widget data only touches items of that account. Drawings made
before this keep working through the old lookup.
Leaving the app scheduled the widget refresh with a zero-delay timer.
React Native pauses JS timers while the activity is in the background
(timers in the bridgeless runtime have no immediate path for a zero
delay), so the refresh only ran once the app came back or a widget task
happened to start. Switching accounts and pressing Home left the
widgets on the previous account's mail. The refresh now starts directly
from the app state change.
A widget button whose JMAP call failed (offline, refused, the account's
credentials unavailable) only logged a console warning, so to the user
the button had simply done nothing, or had worked. The change is now
undone on the widget and a notice says what failed: "Couldn't archive.
Tap to try again." on the triage card, which goes back to the message,
and the same for RSVPs on the invitation card and task ticks on Tasks
and Today overview. Tapping the notice repeats the tap; any new tap or
ten minutes clear it.
The tick on the Tasks widget was a 22dp circle, and the rest of the row
did nothing: a tap on the title or just beside the circle was lost. It
now takes the row's full height and 50dp of its width, and the rest of
the row opens the calendar. Today overview's task rows grow from 32dp
to 48dp for the same reason; the widget fits fewer of them where space
is short.
Every widget tap runs as its own headless task in the same JS runtime,
and the tasks interleave at every await. Each one loaded the stored
snapshot, edited it and saved it back, then refreshed from the server.
That went wrong in three ways:
- two taps loaded the same snapshot and the second save dropped the
first change;
- the refresh of the first tap read the server before the second tap's
archive landed and was stored anyway, so the message came back (seen
on the emulator with a slow `Email/set`);
- a redraw of an older snapshot could land after a newer one, leaving
buttons that act on a message the widget no longer shows.
The snapshot now only holds what the server last said. A button's
change is kept as a pending op next to it and laid over it when a
widget draws; it stays until a refresh that started after the server
took it has been stored (calendar and task changes only count as caught
up by a refresh that loaded calendar and tasks). A call that fails
drops its op, which also undoes an archive made offline: before, the
failed refresh kept the edited snapshot and the message stayed hidden
although it was never archived. Reads, writes and redraws of the
widget data run one at a time, and every redraw draws the latest view.
Linus Rath