Draft. Written against the spec, ahead of the code. The words are the intent; the software is not there yet.
The menu bar app
A popover over whatever you are doing. Every stream with an arm toggle, one Record button, and a mark in the menu bar that tells the truth about the take.
Rheocles.app has no window and no Dock icon. It lives in the menu bar, opens
as a popover, and is a thin client of rheocles-core over the same API you
get. Nothing in it is a feature the API lacks; nothing in the API is a
feature it lacks.
The mark
The mark is the state. It is a template image, so it takes the menu bar’s
colour, and it is drawn from shapes rather than a SwiftUI view — a bare view
as a MenuBarExtra label renders with no colour at all, which Sonocles paid
to learn.
| state | the mark |
|---|---|
| idle, nothing armed | the whole mark at 40 % |
| something armed | the strokes in outline |
| recording | the strokes filled |
| a stream joined late | a shorter stroke that starts to the right of the bar |
You can read the take from across the room without opening anything, and — the case the ochre exists for — you can see from across the room that six cameras are still armed.
The popover
Streams. Every camera, microphone, display and system audio, each with an arm toggle. Armed rows are ochre. Audio streams show a level meter while armed. Windows are listed only when Show windows is on in settings.
Preview, on demand. One stream at a time, behind a button — not a wall of
thumbnails. A preview is a low-rate GET /preview/{stream}; opening another
closes the first.
Record / Stop. One button. Record is POST /record: create and start
together. The current take’s name and elapsed time sit beside it.
Settings. Output root, codec (HEVC or ProRes 422, one global setting), Show windows, and the bearer token — shown as a pairing code, with a rotate button.
The daemon
The app bundles rheocles-core and launches it if nothing answers on 7447;
if something does, it uses what is running. Two front ends on one machine —
the menu bar app and the NativePHP app, or a future Pteroprompter — share one
daemon. There is no LaunchAgent in the MVP: the daemon lives as long as
something is talking to it.
Reviewing the UI without a screen
Rheocles.app/Contents/MacOS/Rheocles --render-preview ./previewsrenders every popover state to PNG offscreen, as Sonocles does, so a change can be reviewed from a build log. AppKit-backed controls do not rasterise this way; anything in the popover that needs to appear in a preview is drawn from shapes.
Style
The app follows docs/BRAND.md and this site, not Pteroprompter, and it is
not a dark theme: the same limestone ground and ink text as this page,
aegean for the signature, ochre armed, oxide recording, olive
complete, script for a value it does not have. The only dark surface is a
code or data block, as here.