Daily Dial

What’s new

Daily Dial is developed in the open. This is the project’s changelog, unedited.

All notable changes to this project are documented here.

The format follows Keep a Changelog, and this project adheres to Semantic Versioning. The version here always matches manifest.json.

Unreleased

[1.40.2] — 2026-09-03

Fixed

• The Firefox listing showed a generic puzzle piece instead of the dial. AMO renders a listing icon at 32, 64 and 128px, and takes it from the manifest on the first submission only; the icon set went 16, 32, 48, 128, so the size AMO leads with was the one size missing and it fell back to its placeholder. There is now a 64px icon, carrying the full five wedges since 64 is well clear of the size where they stop being legible.

[1.40.1] — 2026-09-03

Fixed

• “Send a test reminder” now says which signal to watch for. It sent the same “Sent.” either way, so the advice to watch the toolbar icon silently did not apply on a day that already had time logged — the badge keeps the score there rather than showing the !, and the flag was raised invisibly. The toast now reads back what the icon actually shows and reports that case distinctly, and the FAQ says the ! is only visible on an empty day.

[1.40.0] — 2026-09-03

Added

• The toolbar icon carries the reminder when your system will not. A due reminder now puts a ! on the extension’s badge and “Time to log your day” on its tooltip, until you open the day or log something. Notifications travel through the operating system, which can refuse them without telling the extension or the user; the badge costs no permission, is already on screen, and on the days a reminder matters it was blank anyway — a day with nothing logged has no score to show.
• It clears the moment you open the dial, and never survives into the next day.

[1.39.0] — 2026-09-03

Added

• “Send a test reminder”, in Settings → Reminders. Reminders arrive through your operating system’s own notifications, so when they never show up the cause is usually there rather than here — and there was no way to tell the two apart without waiting until one o’clock to find out. This sends one now.
• Settings says when the next one actually lands — “Next reminder: tomorrow at 13:00”. Turning reminders on at 2pm with a 1pm time schedules the first for tomorrow, which is correct and looks exactly like nothing happening.

Changed

• The note under the reminder times now says plainly that notifications pass through the system’s own, and that a test which never appears means Chrome is blocked there rather than broken here.

[1.38.0] — 2026-09-03

Added

• Every category can have its own colour. The swatch in Settings → Categories is the picker: click it, choose, and the ring, the pens, the week strip, the breakdown dots, the bars, the History calendar and the shared image all follow at once. A ↺ beside it hands the slot back to the default, which also puts it back under the theme’s control so it follows light and dark again.
• Only a real six-digit hex is accepted. A colour goes straight into a style, and a value that is nearly a colour is how a category ends up rendering as nothing at all.

Fixed

• The page scrolled sideways on a phone. Holding the top bar’s right-hand group to one row at desktop widths also stopped it shrinking at narrow ones, so the wrap that was supposed to catch it never fired and the whole page ran 62px off the edge instead — in every language. The History month nav had gained a control too many for one line on a small screen, and its calendar column could not shrink.

[1.37.0] — 2026-09-03

Added

• Four more category slots, off until you switch them on: Exercise, Sleep, Social and Errands. Six was a deliberate cap — a palette you can tell apart at a glance, and a list short enough to pick from without reading — but the app’s own advice is to repurpose an unused category for a life area going untracked, and someone already using all six had nothing to repurpose. Nothing changes for anyone who does not want them. Keys 1–9 pick a pen; the tenth is a click.
• Hovering a pen shows what else it answers to. Aliases have always existed for typed entry and lived three clicks deep in Settings, where you could not see them at the moment you needed them: “Deep Work — also typed as: dw, focus, deep”. A pen without aliases shows its number key instead.
• The History calendar can be coloured three ways — by score, by hours logged, or by the category the day led with. A green-to-red scale answers “how did it go” and cannot answer “when did I actually log anything” or “what was this month made of”, which are the other two reasons to look at a month. The choice is remembered.

[1.36.0] — 2026-09-03

Added

• A challenge now has a goal, and tells you whether you are keeping it. It was a day counter: “day 14 of 21” reads exactly the same whether every day was kept or none were. Set what a day has to contain — anything logged at all, so many minutes of a category, or a daily score — and the side panel shows how many days you have kept, how many you have missed, whether today counts yet, and, for a challenge with a length, whether it can still be finished at all.
• A challenge is consecutive. Twenty-one days means twenty-one days in a row: one missed day ends the attempt, and the block says which day it ended on and how long the best run was. A run that tolerates gaps is a weaker thing wearing the same name — if breaking it costs nothing, committing to it meant nothing.
• “Restart from today” appears when a run breaks, so a broken attempt does not mean retyping the name and re-picking the goal.
• The goal is stated on the card — “Each day: 2h of Deep Work” — and the day line carries the number behind its verdict: “This day does not count — 1h of 2h”. A judgement with its reason withheld tells you nothing about whether you are ten minutes short or have logged nothing at all.
• A challenge with a length now ends. Past its last day the counter stops at the finish line instead of reporting “day 25 of 21”, and the verdict is settled: Complete if the full run was ever reached, Ended if the days ran out first. Both offer a restart.
• Today never breaks a run. It is not over yet, and a tracker that marks your morning as a failure is one you close. It can only ever add to the run.

Fixed

• The challenge block now says what its own numbers mean, by stating the goal it is judging days against.
• It describes the day you are looking at, not always today. Stepping back to yesterday and being told “today does not count yet” is a sentence about a day that is not on screen. It also stayed frozen on whichever day was open when the page loaded, because it was never redrawn when the date changed.
• The top bar wrapped to two rows again as soon as you stepped off today. The “Today” jump button appears then, and the row needs about 1138px against the 1080 the layout allows — at every window size. While a challenge is running the streak’s “· best: N” now gives up its place, which is the least load-bearing thing in the bar and exactly the moment the space is needed.

[1.35.4] — 2026-09-03

Fixed

• The keyboard shortcut never worked. Ctrl+Shift+D / Cmd+Shift+D is Chrome’s own “Bookmark all tabs”, and Chrome silently declines a suggested key that collides with one of its own — no warning, no error, the command simply arrives with no shortcut attached. It has been dead since it shipped in 1.32.0. It is Ctrl+Shift+Y / Cmd+Shift+Y now, confirmed assigned by asking chrome.commands.getAll() in a real loaded extension rather than by reading the manifest and assuming. Rebindable as before at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

[1.35.3] — 2026-09-02

Fixed

• The note marks around the outside of the ring drifted off their blocks. A note keeps the boundaries it was written against, and the list already knew that — it matches a note to a stretch by midpoint, so resizing a block never orphans its note. The ring did not, and drew the stored range instead. So every resize left a grey arc sitting off the block it belonged to, and a day edited a few times ended up fringed with marks lining up with nothing. Both halves of the screen now find a note the same way.
• The top bar fell apart once a challenge was running. It laid out five loose children with space-between, so the extra chip overflowed the line and dropped the date nav onto a row of its own, left-aligned under the wordmark — the primary control of the screen, marooned from the buttons it belongs with. It is two groups now: identity on the left, everything you operate on the right, wrapping as one piece and keeping the right edge. A long challenge name truncates rather than setting the width of the whole bar.
• The dial card hung out of the panel on a narrow window. Once the layout stacks, .dial-row becomes a column — and its main axis becomes vertical, so flex: 1 and min-width: 0 stop governing width and align-items: flex-start sizes the stack to its content: 320px of ring inside a 289px card, 31px over the edge.
• The note column was unusable on a phone. The fixed columns added up to more than the card was wide, and the note lost — squeezed to 13px, a single character of whatever you had written. Below 560px the duration column now gives way, since “00:00–02:45” already says 2h 45m and the note is not recoverable from anywhere else on screen. The note field goes from 13px to 98px.
• Text you wrote now keeps its own direction. A note, a reflection, a category or a challenge name can be in any script regardless of the interface language, and in a right-to-left UI a Latin name was being reordered — “#4application_1_lab_contact” rendered as “…lication_1_lab_contact#4”.
• The note field showed no focus ring when reached by keyboard, the only tab stop on the day view without one.

[1.35.2] — 2026-09-02

Fixed

• The typed-entry dropdown never followed the pen. Selecting Applications left the dropdown on whatever it showed before, so typing a range added the wrong category unless you noticed and changed it. The code kept the previous value and only fell back to the active pen when the control was empty — which happens once, on first render — while its own comment claimed it followed the pen. It does now.
• Seams are easier to grab on a touch screen. The window for “drag this boundary” rather than “paint here” was about 11px of arc at full size, and proportionally smaller on a small screen. A mouse can find that, helped by the handle appearing and the cursor changing; a finger has neither, and no hover to hunt with. It is wider on coarse pointers now, the same reasoning as the 44px hit areas elsewhere.

[1.35.1] — 2026-09-02

Fixed

• A drag could only ever grow. Dragging back over your own stroke to shorten it did nothing, so a block painted a couple of hours too long had to be let go of and erased rather than simply pulled back. The stroke was being extended from the previous pointer position, which meant dragging backwards repainted the same category onto itself — invisible, and indistinguishable from the app ignoring you. It is now the span between where the press landed and where the pointer is, so it follows in both directions until you let go.

[1.35.0] — 2026-09-02

Changed

• “Share as image” now photographs the view itself rather than building a card that resembles it — the dial, the week, the read-out, all of it, as it appears on screen. The browser asks permission each time, which is the whole cost: it needs no manifest permission, so nothing new appears on the extension’s listing. A tab capture only sees the viewport, so anything scrolled out of sight is not in the picture, exactly as with any screenshot.

• The generated card remains as the fallback for a browser that cannot capture, and it now carries the day’s breakdown rather than a bare ring and a number.

• The week strip shows what was in each day, not just how it scored. Every bar is now made of the category colours, sized by time, so a week reads as seven small compositions — a red block is a lost day, a long blue one is a day of deep work, and you can find “which day did I actually study” without opening any of them. It was a single bar tinted green through red, which told you a verdict and nothing about what produced it. Bar length is still a share of the whole 24 hours, so it stays an honest measure of how much of a day was logged at all.

[1.34.1] — 2026-09-02

Fixed

• The shading over hours that haven’t happened yet was frozen at whatever time the day last re-rendered. The 30-second timer moved the needle and the centre clock but never redrew the future arc, so a tab left open all afternoon showed the needle sitting well inside its own shaded “future” — and hours that had already passed still looked unavailable to paint. The arc is a function of the current time in exactly the way the needle is, and now refreshes alongside it.

[1.34.0] — 2026-09-01

Changed

• “Share as image” now carries the day’s breakdown, not just a ring and a number. It shows where the time went, bar by bar, with untracked time included — the part of the panel actually worth handing to someone else. On a quiet day the old card was a near-empty circle beside the word “score”.

• The daily score is measured against a target, not against itself. It used to divide productive time by however much you had logged, so logging less raised it: two good hours and a blank day read +100, the same as a flawless twelve-hour day and better than an honest one with a bad hour in it. The number rewarded exactly the behaviour the app exists to discourage. It now divides by your daily target where you fall short of it, so two productive hours against a four-hour target read 50.
• Neutral time no longer counts against you. Only productive and distraction minutes are in the fraction. Dividing by everything logged would have meant four productive hours plus four hours of break scoring the same as two productive hours and nothing else admitted to — honesty about a break costing exactly what hiding half the day would. Breaks are free; distraction is not, because that is how you weighted it.
• The target comes from your own daily goals on productive categories (Settings → Goals), summed, and falls back to four hours when none are set.
• Score bands re-cut for the new scale. Under the old ratio they sat at 40/10/-15, which suited a number that hit 100 on two clean hours.

Fixed

• The share card drew Distraction in green. Its palette was a second copy of the category colours, and it had drifted from the stylesheet: five of six were subtly off and --cat-5 was a green where the app shows red. Wrong for months on the one picture that leaves the device. A test now reads dial.css and fails when the two disagree.

Added

• An observation when the target and your typical day drift apart — a median day well clear of the target in either direction, after three weeks of history like every other pattern. It states both figures and leaves the advice to the suggestion, which is the only one in the catalog about the app rather than about you, and names no tool at all.
• A Firefox build. npm run build:firefox produces one from the same sources, submitted to addons.mozilla.org.
• npm run firefox:redirect prints the Google OAuth redirect URI Firefox uses. It is derived from the add-on id and differs from Chrome’s, so Drive backup fails on Firefox alone until it is registered.

Fixed

• Google Drive backup worked only for the developer. The OAuth app’s publishing status was left on Testing, which is not a milder setting but a hard allowlist of 100 accounts — so every real user was refused at Google’s own consent screen, on Chrome as much as Firefox, where it read as a broken extension rather than a switch in a console they cannot see. Invisible to the obvious test, since the developer is always on the list.

Notes on the Firefox build

• It declares data_collection_permissions: ["none"] and raises its floor to Firefox 140 (142 on Android), which that key requires. AMO rejects a new extension without it, as an error — where addons-linter reports only a warning, at every version, since only AMO knows an extension is new. That failure cannot be reproduced locally at all: a clean lint is necessary and not sufficient.
• The higher floor turned out to cost nothing and pay for itself: runtime.getContexts ships in Firefox 140, so four compatibility warnings went with it. The build lints at 0 errors, 2 warnings.

[1.33.0] — 2026-08-31

Added

• The ring can start at your waking hour instead of midnight (Settings → Appearance → Ring starts at). Midnight at the top is the convention, and it spends the top of the circle — the part your eye reads first — on hours you were asleep. Turning it puts your actual day across the top. Midnight remains the default.

[1.32.0] — 2026-08-31

Added

• A keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+Shift+D (⌘+Shift+D on a Mac) opens the dial from anywhere. On a tracker you fill in yourself, the thing that decides whether a day gets logged is how little stands between remembering and recording. Rebindable at chrome://extensions/shortcuts.

Fixed

• Small controls are now properly tappable on a touch screen. Buttons sized for a mouse were as small as 19px. Their hit areas are 44px on touch devices, while they look exactly as before with a pointer.

[1.31.1] — 2026-08-31

Fixed

• The page had no viewport tag, so on a phone it rendered at 980px and zoomed out — the responsive layout never engaged. Invisible inside the extension, which opens in a desktop tab, and very visible in the playable demo on the website, which is the same file and is exactly what someone taps when a link reaches them on a phone.

[1.31.0] — 2026-08-31

Changed

• The hours that haven’t happened yet are now shaded on the dial. Painting them was already refused, but nothing said so until you tried: the ring looked available all the way round, you dragged into the evening, and got a message explaining why nothing happened. A refusal you can’t see coming reads as a broken control rather than a rule. The needle now sits on the boundary between the two, which is what it was always marking.

[1.30.1] — 2026-08-31

Fixed

• The occasional review request disappeared as soon as you did anything. It showed on opening, then the first edit made it vanish — while still counting as one of the two times it is ever allowed to ask. It also shifted the dial upward as it went. It now stays until you answer it.

[1.30.0] — 2026-08-30

Added

• A way to report a bug from inside the app. Settings → About now links to the project’s issue form, with the version and browser already filled in — the two questions people are least able to answer and most likely to get wrong. Nothing from your day is attached; only what you type is sent.
• A theme button in the top bar, beside the settings menu. One press cycles system → light → dark and back. Theme is the one appearance setting people change by mood rather than once, so it no longer lives three clicks deep — and Settings → Appearance still has it, with the two kept in step whichever you use.

[1.29.1] — 2026-08-30

Fixed

• Reminders now arrive in the language you chose. Picking a language set it for the dial but not for notifications, which kept following the browser — so the app could be in Hindi and its evening reminder in English.
• The two notification titles were never translated at all, in any language.

[1.29.0] — 2026-08-30

Changed

• Painting no longer writes over time you have already logged. A stroke that runs into an existing block now stops at its edge and says what is there, instead of quietly replacing it. Overshooting a drag by a few minutes used to eat the neighbouring block with nothing to show for it but a changed colour.
• To replace a block on purpose, press it twice. That swaps the whole stretch for whichever pen is selected, and ⌘Z still undoes it. Hovering a block that a different pen would replace says so before you click.
• Empty time is unchanged — one click or one drag, as before. The eraser is unchanged too: removing something is visible and reversible, which is the whole point of it.

[1.28.1] — 2026-08-30

Changed

• Switching between 24h and AM/PM no longer moves the clock. The AM/PM pair sat between the header and the ring, so leaving 24h inserted a control above the dial and pushed the face down. It now lives in the header row beside the layout switch, and keeps its place there when unused, so the ring stays put at every window size.
• The typed-entry row sits under the clock, rather than spanning the whole card with half of it beneath the category column.

[1.28.0] — 2026-08-30

Added

• A language setting. Settings → Appearance → Language. It was following your browser and there was no way to say otherwise, which left anyone whose Chrome is set to one language unable to read the app in another. Automatic is still the default. Changing it reloads the page, and never touches a word you have written.

Fixed

• A challenge name typed before its start date was silently erased. The form saved on every edit, an incomplete form is not a challenge, and saving “no challenge” wrote itself back over the field you were still filling in. Filling the form in the obvious order — name, then date — could not work.

Changed

• “Fill multiple days” moved from Data to Categories. It paints your time with a category; Data is for export, import and backup.
• The welcome tour’s third card now mentions choosing your language, since that is where you would look for it.

[1.27.0] — 2026-08-30

Added

• Nine more languages: Arabic, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian and Spanish. Chrome picks whichever matches your browser’s language; anything else still gets English. This translates the app’s own words — labels, buttons, tooltips, the score, the sentence under the dial, the observations and their advice. It never touches a single word you wrote: your notes, intentions, reflections and category names are yours, in whatever language you wrote them.
• Arabic reads right to left. The layout mirrors — the pens and the week move to the right, the panel to the left. The dial does not: a clock runs clockwise in every language, and 15:00 is 15:00.
• On a fresh install the six starting categories arrive in your language. If you have already renamed them, or logged anything at all, nothing changes — they are your data from the first edit onward.

Fixed

• Counts that stayed plural when they meant one. “You met 1 of 1 intentions”, “sits in just 1 categories”, “Filled 1 days”. Five of them, wrong in English before they were ever wrong anywhere else.
• Dates and weekday names follow the app’s language rather than the browser’s — a fully translated page was still saying “August 2026”.
• The streak now reads correctly in languages that put the number in the middle of the phrase rather than at the front.

Changed

• The pens moved into a column to the left of the dial, with the eraser below a divider rather than sitting among them — it isn’t a category, and it was moving every time the real ones did.
• The week strip sits under the pens, and its labels size themselves to the language, so long weekday names are not cut off.
• Less empty space between the intentions, avoid and reflection fields.
• The welcome card and the first-run hint now point at where the categories actually are — they still said “below the dial”, with an arrow pointing down.

[1.26.0] — 2026-08-30

Fixed

• The other four ways to paint the future. 1.25.0 stopped the three painting paths — dragging the ring, the keyboard, and typed entry — but the rule was written into each of them separately, so everything else that writes slots still wrote whatever it liked. Filling a gap from “The day, end to end” would happily claim the rest of tonight; “Copy yesterday” and applying a template stamped a full 24 hours onto a day that had only had ten of them; and a multi-day fill of “9–5 all week”, run on Monday morning, recorded the whole week as already worked. All four now stop at now, and the rule lives in one place instead of four.
• Multi-day fill reports the days it actually wrote. It counted the days in the range, so a range reaching into next week claimed days it had skipped.

Changed

• The week moved to the left of the dial. Below it, it was a long scroll away from anything; above it, it pushed the pens and the note field off a laptop screen. Beside the ring it costs nothing, because the days now run top to bottom with each bar running left to right — seven of them fit in something narrower than the dial is tall. On a narrow window it goes back to a band above the ring.
• Breakdown rows for hours later today read “Not yet” instead of offering a category dropdown. The row stays, because the day does continue — it just no longer offers a control whose every use would be refused.

[1.25.0] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Time that hasn’t happened yet can no longer be painted. Stopping the date arrows at today only covered future days; you could still paint this evening at nine in the morning, which inflated the day’s tracked total, its score and the streak from something imagined. A stroke that crosses “now” paints up to it and stops, rather than refusing entirely. Erasing is unaffected — it can only ever remove something that shouldn’t be there.

Changed

• Writing a note no longer means scrolling away from the dial. The field offered after a stroke sat below the pens and the typed-entry row, which on a laptop put it off the bottom of the window: you painted, scrolled down, typed, scrolled back. It now sits directly beneath the ring, so painting and annotating happen in the same place.
• The week strip moved below the dial. It’s reference rather than something acted on each session, and at the top it was pushing the pens and the note field off-screen. With both changes the whole loop — ring, note, pens, typed entry — fits on one screen.

[1.24.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• The interface can now be translated. All 454 of the app’s own strings — settings labels, buttons, tabs, tooltips, placeholders, toasts, status lines, and the accessible names screen readers read — moved into _locales/en/messages.json, with the manifest, extension name and Store description alongside them. Adding a language is now a data file and no code: copy that file to _locales/hi/, translate the values, keep the keys. Chrome picks the language from the browser, and any key a translation is missing falls back to English, so a half-finished translation still works.

  Uses Chrome’s own chrome.i18n rather than a library — it’s what the Web Store reads for localised listings, and it keeps the extension at zero runtime dependencies with no build step, which is what makes the published build checkable against this source.

  Your own words are never translated. Notes, reflections, intentions, to-avoid lines, template names, challenge names and renamed categories only ever pass through as values, never as anything looked up. Verified by seeding distinctive text and confirming it renders byte-identical through a full storage round-trip.

  Strings carrying values use whole-sentence messages with named placeholders rather than concatenated fragments, so a translator can move a number or a category name to wherever their language puts it. Singular and plural are separate messages, since Chrome’s format has no plural support.

Note

• The insight sentence, the score labels and the six “Worth noticing” observations still come from lib.js, which is deliberately pure — no chrome.*, so its 200 tests run under plain Node. Translating those means having it return keys rather than finished sentences; worth doing when a second language actually exists, and harmless until then.

[1.23.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Automatic Google Drive backup, off by default, in Settings → Data. Roughly once a day it quietly updates the same backup file, so “your data lives only in this browser” stops depending on you remembering.

  Every part of it is deliberately silent and deliberately limited:

  • It can never raise a sign-in window. A background alarm asking for Google consent, with no action to explain it, would be alarming. It uses a strictly non-interactive connect, so it can only ever update a backup you made by hand — turning it on before connecting Drive does nothing at all rather than surprising you.
  • It never reports failure. A skipped run is logged to the service worker console and nothing else. Manual “Back up now” stays the place errors are worth raising, because there someone is waiting for an answer.
  • Demo days are excluded and an empty backup is refused, exactly as with a manual backup.
  • The alarm exists only while the setting is on — an alarm that fires and does nothing still wakes the service worker for no reason.

[1.22.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Day templates. Most days rhyme, so save the shape of one and stamp it onto another: Settings → Goals → Templates. A template carries painted time only, never notes, intentions or a reflection — it’s the shape of a day, not its content, and copying someone’s words onto a different day would be wrong. Applying to a day that already has painted time asks first, and is undoable with ⌘Z like any other stroke.
• Multi-day fill. “I was away Monday to Friday” is now one action rather than five days of clicking: Settings → Data, pick a date range and a category, optionally narrow it to part of each day. Before anything is written it tells you exactly how many days will change and how many of them already have painted time in that window, then still needs a second click. Capped at 92 days, and an inverted range is refused rather than silently reversed. Notes and reflections on the affected days are left alone — only painted time is replaced.

[1.21.0] — 2026-08-29

Changed

• A day with barely anything logged no longer gets a score. Thirty minutes of Deep Work and nothing else divided 30 by 30 and read +100 — the same as a flawless twelve-hour day, and better than an honest one with a bad hour in it. Below two hours logged, the day now reads “Too little logged to score” with a dash instead of a number, on the dial, in the month heatmap, in the log, and on the toolbar badge. The score is still computed and stored; this governs how it’s presented, not what it is, so nothing historical is rewritten.

Fixed

• You could walk forward into future days and paint them. There was no upper bound on the date arrows, so days that hadn’t happened could be filled in, carried a score, and sat in History looking like something you’d done. The forward arrow now stops at today.

[1.20.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• The calendar marks days you wrote up but didn’t paint. A day can hold notes, intentions or a reflection with no time on the dial — an imported journal is made entirely of those — and the heatmap showed every one as blank, which reads as “nothing happened here” about days you demonstrably wrote about. They now get a solid outline and a dot, clearly different from the dashed cells of a day with nothing at all, and a “Written only” entry in the legend. Deliberately not given a score colour: those mean painted time, and borrowing one would imply a score that doesn’t exist.

[1.19.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• The pen you last used is remembered. Every session started on Deep Work regardless of what you actually log most. The eraser counts as a pen worth remembering too, and a saved pen whose category has since been hidden still falls back to the first visible one.
• Changing a category’s weight now says so where you change it. Colours encode the default weights — Distraction red, the productive ones cool — so setting Break to +1 leaves it pink while counting toward your score. The category editor now notes that on the row you edited, and the note goes when the weight goes back. Colours themselves stay put: a category’s hue is its identity on the ring, and recolouring on a weight change would make the day unreadable at a glance.

Fixed

• Painting didn’t update the table directly beneath it. “The day, end to end” only refreshed on a full view redraw, so a stroke changed the ring and left the rows under it stale until you switched tabs — on the surface that is now the main way to edit a day.
• “14 stretches · 15h logged · 9h not” — the trailing fragment was ungrammatical and got clipped on narrower cards. Now reads “14 stretches · 15h logged, 9h unlogged”, and a single stretch is a “stretch”.

[1.18.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The extension stopped opening from the toolbar — clicking the icon went to dial.html[object Object], which doesn’t exist. Introduced in 1.17.0 when the recap notification gained a deep link: openDial grew an optional hash argument, and chrome.action.onClicked hands its listener the Tab object, so every toolbar click passed a Tab where a string was expected and concatenated it into the URL. The listener is wrapped now, the suffix is resolved through a function that only ever returns a hash it recognises, and there’s a test covering the exact shape that broke it.

[1.18.0] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Distraction was green, the same family as Study. One counts for your score and the other against it, which makes them the worst possible pair to render alike — and the colourblind-safe palette in 1.11.0 made it worse by optimising numeric distance without ever checking that opposite weights shouldn’t share a hue. Distraction is red now. The new colour still clears the same floors: no pair confusable under deuteranopia or protanopia, and 3:1 contrast against the panel.

Added

• A note field appears right where you paint. Writing a note about the stretch you just painted meant scrolling past the pens and the whole breakdown table to find its row — so the note usually didn’t get written. A finishing stroke, or a typed entry, now offers a labelled field in place; Enter saves, Escape dismisses.
• Each painted row in “The day, end to end” can be cleared from the table. Removing a stretch previously meant going back to the ring, finding the same range, and painting over it with the eraser. Shown on hover rather than always, since a column of crosses turns a day’s summary into a list of things to delete.

[1.17.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• A single switch for “Worth noticing”, in Settings → Goals. Per-item silencing already existed, but the feature was meant to be optional and had no way to turn the whole thing off. On by default — an observation is arithmetic on your own data rather than an opinion — but it is still something watching your habits and saying so, which not everyone wants.
• The weekly recap notification opens History, where the numbers it just quoted actually live, instead of dropping you on today’s dial. An already open dial is focused and told to switch view rather than reloaded, since a reload would throw away unsaved edits.

Fixed

• Imported history was invisible. Bringing in a journal — days carrying notes and intentions but no painted time — left History looking empty and the import looking failed. Two independent causes: the month cursor sought the latest month with painted days and so never moved, and the log defaults to “This week” while the import was months old. The cursor now falls back to the latest month with anything written at all, and the log opens on the narrowest range that actually contains something.
• The month summary read as a row of zeros next to a full log. Every figure up there counts painted time, so a month of written-up days showed “0 days logged · 0m tracked” directly above the entries themselves — which looks exactly like a failed import. It now says how many days are written up without painted time, and where to find them.

[1.16.2] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The weekly recap summarised the wrong week. It was scheduled on weeklyRecapDay but its window came from weekStart alone, so the two disagreed the moment either setting moved off its default. Set the recap to Saturday evening and it reported the week before the one you had just lived through — up to seven days stale, with numbers that looked current. Worse than no recap, since it’s the one thing that reaches out unprompted. It now reports the most recent week that has actually ended, counting the current week as ended when the recap fires on its final day — because choosing that day is exactly how someone asks to hear about the week they just finished. The default (recap on the same day the week starts) behaves as it always did.

[1.16.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The v1.16.0 zip would not have loaded. npm run package lists its files by hand, and suggestions.js — added in 1.16.0 and imported by both dial.js and history.js — was never added to that list. The extension ran fine from source, so nothing caught it; a packaged build would have died on a module-resolution error, and the release workflow builds from the same script, so it would have gone straight to a GitHub release.
• Added npm run check:package so this can’t happen again. It walks the real import graph from the two entry points Chrome loads (dial.js and background.js) and fails if anything reachable is missing from the zip. Deliberately not a second hand-written list, which would be the same problem wearing a different hat. Now part of npm run check, so CI enforces it.

[1.16.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• “Worth noticing” — patterns from your own data, at the top of History. Six things it looks for: setting more intentions than you finish, two weeks with no rest logged, the hour you’re most productive in going unprotected, distraction climbing week over week, logging thinning out, and everything sitting in only a few categories.
  • Observations only. No advice unless you ask. Each one states a fact with the numbers behind it; “What people do about this” is a click, and stays closed until then. An observation is arithmetic on data you entered and can’t really be wrong — unprompted advice reads as a lecture, and a tracker that lectures is one people stop opening. Then the data stops too, which costs far more than the advice was worth.
  • Nothing fires on a single bad day. Every detector needs three weeks of history and eight logged days, and looks for a sustained trend.
  • “Don’t show this again” is permanent, not “for now”. If you’ve decided your answer, the app has no business asking again.
  • Suggestions are bundled and static (suggestions.js), never fetched — downloading them would end the “makes no network requests” guarantee, which is the strongest claim this extension has. Two of the six recommend no software at all, and several recommend leaving the computer. Tools are named as examples of an approach, platform-tagged, and explicitly not endorsed or affiliated.

Changed

• CONTRIBUTING.md now states the project’s boundary. What the job is (see where your time went, including what no software can see, and decide what to change) and what it isn’t (blocking, enforcing, capturing automatically, task management, coaching) — with the reasoning, so the obvious drift here (“we detect distraction, why not add a block button?”) has an answer written down before someone asks it.

[1.15.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• “The day, end to end” — the whole 24 hours as rows, gaps included. Replaces the old note box, which only worked while something was selected on the dial: a note could be written at the moment of painting and never afterwards, when you actually remember what you were doing. Every stretch now has its own always-live note field — no clicking “+ note” first, just tab down the day and type. Uncapped on purpose: the point is seeing all 24 hours, and a scroll box would hide exactly the gaps this exists to surface.
• Unlogged gaps are rows too, with a category dropdown to fill them. An hour you forgot is now something you can see and act on in one place, rather than something invisible you’d have to go back to the ring and re-drag to fix. You can write the note on the same row while filling it, which the paint-then-annotate flow never allowed.

Changed

• The typed-entry category is a dropdown. It was the only half of 9-11 deep work you could get wrong by misspelling. Typing a category still works and still wins, so aliases and 9-11 leetcode are unaffected — the dropdown fills in when the box holds a bare time range.
• “Share as image” moved to the top-left of the dial card, opposite the layout switch. It was below the pens, off-screen on shorter windows.

Fixed

• The journal never rendered on first load. boot() loaded the day with its own inline copy of the day-loading code, which set slots and the reflection but not notes, intentions, or the avoid list — so they appeared blank until you navigated to another day and back. It now loads through the same path a date change uses.

[1.14.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The Chrome Web Store name never actually changed. The name decided earlier this session (“Daily Dial – Time Tracker & Focus”) had only been written into the submission planning doc, not manifest.json — and the Store, chrome://extensions, and every notification title all read the name from the manifest, not from a doc. The in-app wordmark stays plain “Daily Dial”, as intended; only the manifest’s store-facing name changes.
• The Store submission doc’s permission justifications and review notes still only described the drive.appdata scope — stale since v1.14.0 added userinfo.email to show the connected account. Both now mention it, and the data-usage guidance now flags that “personally identifiable information” likely needs to be ticked, since an email address is one of Google’s own listed examples of PII, even though it’s never transmitted anywhere beyond local display.

[1.14.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Settings → Data now shows which Google account is connected, and how much space the backup is using. Previously there was no way to tell “am I about to back up to the account I think I am” once connected. Showing the account required one new, narrow OAuth scope (userinfo.email — the address only, nothing else about the profile); read once per connection, shown locally, and — like everything else Drive backup touches — never included in an export or a backup file itself. PRIVACY.md and SECURITY.md describe exactly what this does and doesn’t do. Existing users will see one extra line in Google’s consent screen the next time they connect.
• The Store submission doc reflects the store-facing name decided earlier this session (“Daily Dial – Time Tracker & Focus”), which had been decided but never actually written down.

Changed

• “Welcome tour” and “Demo mode” are one section in Settings → About, not two. Both answered the same underlying question — “show me what this looks like” — and splitting them across two headings just meant reading twice to find the one you wanted.

[1.13.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• A “to avoid” list per day. The other half of setting out a day: what you mean to steer clear of. Deliberately not a checklist — these are things to notice yourself doing — and they sit beside what you actually did in the History log.
• A named challenge with its own day counter. For anyone running a “#100days”-style stretch: give it a name and a start date and it shows as #100days · day 19 / 100 beside the streak. Unlike the streak it doesn’t break — it counts from the start date, which is what a personal challenge actually is. Set it under Settings → Goals.
• The weekly recap now reports how your intentions went — “you met 2 of 3 intentions” — and ends by asking what to adjust, rather than reporting numbers and stopping. A review that doesn’t prompt a decision is just a statement.

Fixed

• Undo silently lost other days’ history. One shared stack was popped until it found an entry for the day on screen, so painting Monday, switching to Tuesday and painting, then returning to Monday and undoing discarded the Tuesday entry along the way — the stroke stayed on screen but could never be undone, with nothing said about it. Each day now keeps its own history.
• The History tab was hidden entirely unless something had been painted, so a day carrying only intentions or a note — which the new log exists to show — made the whole view disappear.
• The month heatmap was around forty consecutive tab stops. It’s now a single stop with arrow keys moving between days, which is how a grid is supposed to behave.

[1.12.2] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The keyboard cursor stopped dead at midnight instead of going round. The ring is a circle, so hitting an invisible wall at the top read as the cursor being stuck. Arrows now run round and round in either direction, and a selection can cross midnight — it draws as two arcs and paints both sides as one block, matching what a mouse drag across the top already did.

[1.12.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Editing still froze the tab, claiming another tab had changed the data. The previous attempt fixed one cause; the guard itself was the deeper problem. It froze on any write it hadn’t recorded, so a single missed write path — or two structurally identical objects whose keys happened to be in a different order — stopped a perfectly healthy tab mid-edit. It’s now narrowed to what can actually be lost: only the day currently on screen, and the shared settings and categories, are worth freezing over. A change to any other day is simply adopted, so two tabs sitting on different days now work together instead of fighting. Comparisons ignore key order, and the banner names what actually conflicted.
• The Settings dialog resized every time you switched tabs, because it sized itself to whichever tab was showing and they hold very different amounts. It now keeps one height and scrolls its body.

Added

• The week strip says which month it’s showing. It listed bare day numbers, which is ambiguous at any month boundary — and it names both months when the seven days span two.

[1.12.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• A written log, not just a measured one. The dial could tell you a day was six hours at +100 and nothing about what those hours were. Three additions close that:
  • Intentions — the day’s list of what you meant to do, ticked off as they land. They’re kept whether or not you do them, because a week later the ones you didn’t are the interesting half.
  • Notes pinned to a stretch of the day — select a range on the ring (drag it, or focus the ring and hold Shift with the arrows) and write what happened between those hours. A day used to hold exactly one note for all 24 hours; it now holds up to forty, each anchored to its own stretch, and each marked on the ring so you can see where the writing is.
  • “The log” in History — every day with anything written on it, newest first, showing what you meant to do, what you ticked off, what happened in each stretch, and the line you left at the end. Filter to this week, this month, or everything.
• Notes and intentions travel in JSON backups and Google Drive backups.

Fixed

• Editing froze the tab and claimed another tab had changed the data. The multi-tab guard added in 1.10.0 compared each change event against live state — but a day’s slot array is shared by reference with the in-memory day, so painting again before the first event arrived made the tab’s own write look foreign. It now matches events against what was actually written, which has no such race. A genuinely foreign write is still caught.
• A stray box appeared on the ring when painting with the mouse. The keyboard cursor added in 1.11.0 showed on any focus, and clicking the ring focuses it. It’s now shown only for keyboard focus, and returns the moment an arrow key is pressed.

[1.11.0] — 2026-08-29

Accessibility. Two of these locked people out of the app completely.

Added

• The dial can now be used without a mouse. It was pointer-only — not focusable, no key handling — so anyone who can’t use a pointer could not log time at all. The ring now takes focus and carries a cursor: arrow keys move it (hold Alt for hour steps), Shift+arrows extend a selection, Home and End jump to the ends, Enter paints with the active pen, and Delete clears. It runs through the same fill-and-commit path the mouse uses, so the two can’t drift apart.
• Typed entry can erase. 9-11 erase (or clear, untracked, none, empty) clears a range. Previously typed entry could only add, so without a pointer the only way to fix a wrong block was Clear day — wiping all 24 hours. A category you’ve named “Empty” still wins over the reserved word.
• Screen readers are told what happened. Painting and score changes were completely silent: the toast is the only live region and it never fires for an edit. There’s now a live region announcing each change, and each dial’s label lists the day’s actual blocks instead of being a fixed string on an unlabelled shape.

Fixed

• Two default categories were the same colour to a red-green colourblind reader. Study and Break sat at a colour difference of 5.9 under deuteranopia — indistinguishable — and they’re on opposite sides of the score, so an unreadable day was also a misleading one. The palette was re-picked against simulated deuteranopia and protanopia: the worst pair now separates at 18, and every category also clears 3:1 contrast against the panel, which four of them previously failed.
• Muted text failed contrast throughout the light theme. Section labels, hints, stat captions, the dial’s hour numbers and the import summary all sat near 3.4–3.9:1 against 4.5:1. Muted ink is darker, and status colours now have separate text-weight variants, since a colour bright enough to fill a shape is too light to read as a word.
• The focus ring itself failed contrast in light mode at 2.42:1 against a 3:1 requirement — the indicator telling you where you are was the least visible thing on screen.
• The welcome dialog wasn’t managed like a dialog. It claimed aria-modal but Tab walked straight out of it, Escape did nothing, focus was never restored, and the shortcut keys still changed the pen behind it.
• The dial layout switchers announced nothing useful. They used role="tab" with aria-pressed, which isn’t valid together, so which layout was active simply wasn’t conveyed. They’re button groups now.

[1.10.0] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Two copies of the dial open at once could silently destroy a day’s work. The page reads everything into memory when it loads and writes back a whole day — or the whole settings object — at a time, and nothing told it when another copy had changed something. So a second tab holding an older snapshot would overwrite the newer data on its very next write, and merely typing a note was enough to trigger it. Nothing errored: the write succeeded, and the losing tab carried on displaying work that no longer existed anywhere. Two copies wasn’t exotic either — a restored pinned tab or a Ctrl+Shift+T was enough, because the “reuse the open tab” logic remembered a tab id in session storage, which Chrome clears on shutdown. Now: the dial notices when another copy writes, stops writing itself, and says so with a Reload button rather than quietly clobbering. And it finds an already-open dial by asking the runtime instead of remembering an id, so a restored tab is reused rather than duplicated. (Nothing here needs the tabs permission — that constraint still holds.)

Changed

• The README leads with the Chrome Web Store link. It previously described only the unpacked developer install, along with a warning about moving the folder that doesn’t apply to a store install at all.
• Added a section on verifying the published build. All the JavaScript is unminified and dependency-free, so anyone can diff the installed extension against the matching git tag rather than taking the privacy claims on faith — worth spelling out, since nobody thinks to try it.
• Getting-started guide no longer says the extension isn’t published yet.
• README’s test count, file table, and feature list were behind the code — History had no entry at all despite being a headline feature.

[1.9.9] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Drag the seam between two blocks to move it. Hovering where two blocks meet shows a handle and a resize cursor; dragging it hands time from one to the other. Previously the only way to change where a block ended was to paint over it, and starting that stroke a slot early quietly ate into the block you meant to keep. A seam drag can squeeze either side down to nothing but never reaches past into a third block, and the tooltip shows both sides of the trade while you drag — 08:00–09:00 Deep Work | 09:00–12:00 Applications — so you can see what you’re giving up as you give it up.
• Durations in the dial tooltip. Hovering a block now reads 08:00–10:00 · Deep Work · 2h rather than making you work the length out from the endpoints. It follows the cursor while painting, so a stroke reports its running total instead of leaving you to guess.

Changed

• In AM/PM mode, the half that doesn’t contain the current time no longer shows a dead --:--. It shows how much of that half is logged, and ticks up as you paint into it — so both rings carry information instead of one being a placeholder.

[1.9.8] — 2026-08-29

Rough edges from the same audit — none of these lose data, they just make the app feel unreliable.

Fixed

• After restoring a backup made with a different dial layout, the wrong rings stayed on screen — and clicking the right layout button did nothing. The imported setting was live while the old layout was still rendered, so the switcher thought it was already on the mode you were asking for and returned early. Restoring now applies the layout it restored. An import made while History was open also left the heatmap and summaries showing pre-import data until you switched tabs.
• Hiding a category and reloading left the first brush stroke painting that hidden category. The pen defaulted to the first category and was only re-pointed when one was hidden mid-session — so after a reload no pen showed as selected, the dial still read “pen: Deep Work”, and painting used a category missing from the pen row whose keyboard shortcut was refused. It now falls back to the first visible category.
• History opened on the current month even when every logged day was somewhere else — after a gap, or restoring an older backup — showing four panels of zeros with only a bare “‹” hinting the data existed. It now opens on the most recent month that has something in it, and keeps wherever you navigate afterwards.
• “Current streak” in the month summary read 0 for almost every month in progress, while the streak card on the Day view showed the real number. It measured the run ending on the last day of the calendar month, so days that hadn’t happened yet counted as missed. It now measures the run ending today, and an unlogged today doesn’t break it — the same rule the Day view uses.
• Week over week showed a green “▲ 5h” in your first week, comparing against a week that doesn’t exist. It now shows a dash, with a tooltip saying there’s nothing to compare against — matching how the score and percentage rows already behaved.

Changed

• Two month-summary tests were silently dependent on the date the suite ran on. They now pass an explicit date.

[1.9.7] — 2026-08-29

Date and time correctness, from a dedicated audit of that area. The first one affects anyone who works past midnight, which for a tool aimed at deep work and study is not a rare case.

Fixed

• A tab left open across midnight wrote everything to the previous day. The viewed date was captured once when the page opened and only ever moved by explicitly navigating, while the 30-second timer refreshed just the needle and the clock. So at 00:20 the header still said “Today”, the clock face still showed the live time — and painting silently overwrote the previous day’s early morning. The new day stayed empty, so it broke the streak, and the toolbar badge never saw the entry. The dial now notices the date changing (on the timer, on returning to the tab, and before any edit), rolls the view forward if you were sitting on today, and says so. Anyone who had deliberately navigated to a past day keeps their place.
• An overnight typed entry folded the post-midnight half back onto the same day. 11pm-1am study painted 23:00–24:00 and 00:00–01:00 of one day — destroying whatever was already in that early hour, leaving the next day empty, and splitting a two-hour session into two blocks so “longest focus” read 60 minutes instead of 120. The part after midnight now goes to the next day, where it happened.
• CSV import silently dropped every block that wasn’t on a 15-minute boundary. A row like 09:07,10:07 produced a fractional array index: the day imported completely empty while the import reported success and counted it — and under “Replace everything” that empty day overwrote a real one. Any CSV that had been through a spreadsheet, or came from a 10-minute-grid tracker, imported as nothing. Times now round to the nearest slot, exactly as typed entry already did, and a block too short to represent is rejected with a message saying so.
• Streaks were permanently one day short in timezones where the clocks go forward at midnight (Havana, Santiago). The day-by-day walk normalized to 01:00 on the transition and never returned to midnight, so the final day was never counted — every streak, personal best, and weekly recap read one short from that day on, forever.

[1.9.6] — 2026-08-29

Found by auditing the demo/onboarding flow as a whole rather than fixing the reported symptom — several of these are considerably more serious than the bug that prompted the review.

Fixed

• Merging a backup while demo mode was on silently destroyed the days it was supposed to restore. A merge keeps the day already in place on any date collision, and demo mode occupies most of the last three weeks — so every real day in your file that landed on a demo date was skipped, the toast still said “Backup merged in”, and leaving demo mode afterwards deleted those same dates. The data was neither imported nor kept, and the confirmation screen counted overlaps against fabricated days, so its numbers described an import that wasn’t the one about to happen. Demo data is now cleared before any import is applied, and the confirmation counts only real days and says when demo data will be cleared.
• Demo data could permanently contaminate your real history through a backup. Exports and Google Drive backups serialized every day in storage, sample days included, and nothing in a backup file marks a day as fabricated. So: turn on demo mode, back up (the “you haven’t backed up in a while” nudge sits right below the demo banner, actively suggesting it), turn demo off, and restore later — and seventeen invented days come back indistinguishable from real ones, with no way left to identify or remove them. Backups now exclude sample days, so a backup is always a copy of your data and only your data.
• Editing a day while in demo mode, then leaving demo mode, deleted the edit. Painting on a sample day left it on the sample list, so exiting demo removed the day you had just worked on. Editing a demo day now makes it yours, and leaving demo mode never touches it.
• CSV export leaked demo days that JSON export had started refusing. Both exports and the Drive backup now apply the same rule.
• You couldn’t revoke Google Drive access without first uploading to it. “Disconnect” and “Delete backup” were shown only once a sync time existed, which only an upload sets — so restoring on a new machine linked the account, stored a file id, and then hid both controls permanently. The only way to earn the right to disconnect was to upload, the exact thing a privacy-minded user is avoiding, and the file lives in Drive’s hidden app folder so there was no way out through Drive either. Both controls now appear whenever the account is linked at all, and the status line distinguishes “restored from” a backup from “synced to” one.
• Google Drive backup no longer runs the whole Google sign-in flow just to upload an empty file. Both file exports already refused to write an empty backup; Drive didn’t, and reported success afterwards.
• Skipping the welcome tour, or clicking outside it, left a new user on a blank dial with no guidance at all. Only “Let’s start” showed the first-run hint, so the two other ways out of the tour led straight back to the problem the tour exists to prevent. Every exit now leaves the hint (it’s one dismissible line, not a lecture).
• The first-run hint retired itself while the dial was still empty. It keyed off “does any day record exist”, but saving a reflection or clearing a day writes a record with nothing painted in it. It now uses the same “has anything actually been logged” test as the heatmap, streaks, and History’s own empty state.

[1.9.5] — 2026-08-29

Changed

• Demo mode is now a two-way door, at any point in an account’s life. It was previously offered only while you had logged absolutely nothing, so the most common way people actually ask for it — “let me see what this looks like once it’s full” — was the one request it couldn’t answer: paint a single real block and the option disappeared forever. It’s now always available, and made safe by construction: sample days fill only dates that hold no day of your own, so entering and leaving demo mode can never touch, overwrite, or lose anything you logged. The round trip is verified byte-identical across repeated cycles.
• Demo mode is now visibly signposted while it’s on. Sample data rendered identically to real data, so a 6-day streak or a +65 average gave no clue which it was. A banner now sits above every view for as long as sample data is loaded, saying so plainly and carrying its own one-click “Exit demo” — previously a three-level trip into Settings → About.
• Settings → About no longer files a guided tour and fake data under one heading. “Welcome tour” and “Demo mode” are separate sections with their own explanations, since replaying an intro and loading three weeks of fabricated days have nothing to do with each other.

Fixed

• “Let’s start” no longer hands a new user a blank screen. The only guidance after it was a toast that erased itself in 2.6 seconds, plus a line in the stats column on the opposite side of the window from the thing it was describing — so the tour ended by dumping you on an empty dial with nothing to act on. A hint now sits directly above the category pens, which is what it’s pointing at, and stays until the first block is painted (or is dismissed outright).

[1.9.4] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• “Let’s start” on the welcome overlay could silently do nothing. Two compounding bugs, found via a full click-through re-audit rather than just re-testing the one reported button: (1) the overlay’s footer sat in the same scrolling block as its content, so on any browser window shorter than ~780px tall, “Let’s start” could render past the panel’s clipped visible area — a click there landed on the backdrop instead and just closed the dialog, with no error and no toast. The footer is now sticky to the bottom of the panel, so it’s always in reach regardless of scroll position or window height. (2) Even when the click did land correctly, the confirmation toast used that day’s slots (not any day’s data) to decide whether to speak up, and stayed silent whenever today happened to be blank — which is common for a returning user replaying the tour from Settings on a fresh day. It now always toasts, and checks the same “has this person ever used the extension” signal the sample-data link itself uses, so the message is consistent everywhere it’s asked.

[1.9.3] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Sample data is now discoverable where it actually matters, not just buried in Settings → About → Demo mode: the welcome overlay itself has a “Prefer to see it with real numbers first? Load sample data instead” link that loads it and jumps straight to History in one click, and History’s own empty state has the same shortcut inline, re-rendering in place with no tab switch needed. Both stay hidden the moment real data exists, same as every other sample-data entry point.

This follows a full re-audit of the whole onboarding/demo journey end to end, not just the individual reports that prompted it — walked as a genuinely new user would, in one continuous 7-step session (fresh boot → sample data → Day view → Settings → clear → History’s own link → replay with real data present), verifying every transition rather than only the one button in question. All 15 checks passed with zero exceptions.

[1.9.2] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Clicking “Let’s start” on the welcome overlay closed it into silence — a dead end right when someone’s most likely to need a next step. It now shows a one-line nudge (“Pick a category below, then drag around the ring to paint”) — but only when the visible day is still genuinely blank, so replaying the tour later doesn’t lecture someone who’s clearly already painting. “Skip” and clicking outside stay silent, both meaning “I don’t need the help.”

[1.9.1] — 2026-08-29

Changed

• Moved “Load sample data” / “Clear sample data” from Settings → Data into a new “Demo mode” section in Settings → About, next to “Replay welcome tour” — the two exploration features now live together.

Fixed

• Once real data existed, the “Try it with sample data” section stayed visible with both its buttons hidden — a section header and description pointing at nothing, which read as broken rather than inactive. The whole block now hides together whenever it has nothing reachable to offer, and reappears if sample data is later loaded or cleared.

[1.9.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Sample data mode (Settings → Data → “Load sample data”): fills in three realistic, varied weeks — a mix of strong and rough days, a couple left deliberately unlogged, a running streak, a couple of reflections — so History’s heatmap, week-over-week, category trends, and the streak counter all have something real to show on a genuinely empty install. Only offered while there’s zero real logged history, so it can never overwrite anything real; “Clear sample data” removes exactly the days it wrote, tracked by their own keys, regardless of what’s been logged since.

[1.8.3] — 2026-08-29

Changed

• Replaced the static, stale hero screenshot (docs/screenshot.png, predating the current topbar/streak layout) with docs/demo.gif — a real recorded sequence of painting the dial, a typed entry landing, and the score updating live. Embedded at the top of the README and GETTING_STARTED.md.

Removed

• docs/screenshot.png — superseded by the demo GIF above, and no longer referenced anywhere.

[1.8.2] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Replay welcome tour (Settings → About): brings back the same first-run welcome overlay on demand — for showing someone else around, or just a refresher, without needing to clear real data or dig through DevTools. Also linked the written Getting started guide from the same spot, next to GitHub and Privacy.

[1.8.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The new first-run welcome overlay would have shown to existing installs too — anyone who already had logged history, on their very next reload after updating — since the “seen” flag never existed before this version. It now also treats any existing logged day as “already seen,” so the welcome screen only ever greets a genuinely empty, brand-new install. Verified with a pre-seeded day: overlay stays hidden.

[1.8.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• First-run welcome overlay: shown once, the very first time the dial opens with nothing dismissed yet — three short cards covering painting, reading your score, and where settings live (Settings, reminders, goals, Drive backup). Dismiss with “Let’s start,” “Skip,” or by clicking outside it; never shown again after that, tracked by its own flag rather than by whether any days are logged, so clearing your history later doesn’t bring it back. See also docs/GETTING_STARTED.md for the written version.

[1.7.4] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• The category alias field’s placeholder showed the identical example — “also match: leetcode, resume, mock interview…” — under all six categories, including Break and Distraction, where it made no sense. Now shows other words for "<category name>"…, staying correct even through a rename.

[1.7.3] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Consolidated Drive backup onto a single OAuth client with both redirect URIs registered — the local dev extension ID’s and the published Web Store ID’s — instead of juggling separate clients per ID. Verified for real this time, not just mocked: a live Google account connected, backed up, and restored correctly (round-trip confirmed the restored day count matched exactly what was logged). One client now covers both testing and the eventual published build.

[1.7.2] — 2026-08-29

Changed

• Switched Google Drive backup’s sign-in from chrome.identity.getAuthToken() to chrome.identity.launchWebAuthFlow(). The former kept failing with a bare 400 invalid_request / “Custom URI scheme is not supported on Chrome apps” error — confirmed not a configuration mistake (extension ID matched the OAuth client’s Application ID exactly, scope was registered, Drive API was enabled) but a rough edge of that mechanism under Google Cloud Console’s current OAuth client setup. launchWebAuthFlow talks to Google’s plain OAuth endpoint directly through a standard “Web application”-type client with https://<extension-id>.chromiumapp.org/ as an authorized redirect URI, sidestepping the extension-specific client type entirely. manifest.json no longer has an oauth2 key; the client id now lives in drive.js instead, and token caching moved from Chrome’s internal cache to an in-memory one in drive.js, cleared on every restart. Every exported function dial.js calls kept the same name and signature, so nothing outside drive.js changed. Updated docs/GOOGLE_DRIVE_SETUP.md to match. Verified with a mocked launchWebAuthFlow + fetch: backup, cached-token reuse on a second backup, restore, and disconnect all behave correctly.

[1.7.1] — 2026-08-29

Fixed

• Wired in a real Google OAuth Client ID for Drive backup, in its own dedicated Google Cloud project (kept separate from other, unrelated projects so the consent screen correctly identifies itself as “Daily Dial” rather than borrowing another app’s branding). The consent screen is registered under Testing status, so — until a future OAuth verification pass — Drive backup only works for Google accounts explicitly added as test users, not the general public who may have already installed the extension. Everyone else’s “Back up to Google Drive” click fails the same way it did with the placeholder client id, no worse.

[1.7.0] — 2026-08-29

Added

• Optional Google Drive backup (Settings → Data): sign in with Google to back up to, and restore from, a private folder in your own Drive (appDataFolder — invisible in your regular Drive, unreachable by any other app). Off by default; nothing about the extension’s other behavior changes unless you connect it. Restoring reuses the exact same merge/replace confirmation as a local file import. A separate “Delete Drive backup” action permanently removes the file itself, since disconnecting only revokes access and doesn’t touch it. New identity permission, exercised only once you connect an account; still zero host permissions, since the Drive API calls are plain authenticated fetch() requests. See docs/GOOGLE_DRIVE_SETUP.md for the one manual step this needs (creating your own OAuth Client ID) and PRIVACY.md for exactly what this does and doesn’t send anywhere.

Changed

• Rewrote PRIVACY.md, SECURITY.md, README.md, and the Chrome Web Store submission doc to accurately describe the new optional Drive backup feature — this is the first version where the “no network access” claim needed a stated exception rather than being unconditionally true.

Fixed

• npm run package (and the release workflow) produced a broken zip. Both hardcoded a file list that predated the History feature and never picked up history.js or historyLib.js — every packaged build since then was missing modules dial.js actually imports, and would have failed to load entirely if uploaded to the Web Store or downloaded from a GitHub release. Added the missing files plus this version’s new drive.js, and pointed the release workflow at npm run package instead of maintaining its own separate, driftable copy of the list. Verified by building the zip, extracting it, and loading it in a real browser: no failed requests, no exceptions.

[1.6.0] — 2026-08-28

Added

• Share as image: a “Share as image” button next to Copy yesterday renders the current day — dial, score, top category, and streak — as a 1000×560 PNG and saves it. Nothing is uploaded anywhere; the image is built and rasterized entirely on-device, the same way CSV/JSON export already work, so you can attach it to a message, email, or post however you like. Always renders the fixed dark-theme palette, regardless of your own theme setting, so a shared image looks the same for everyone who receives it.

[1.5.0] — 2026-08-28

Added

• Category aliases: each category can now have a handful of personal alias words, set under it in Settings → Categories (e.g. “leetcode”, “resume”, “mock interview” all linked to Applications). The typed-entry box matches on these the same way it already matches a category’s own name — exact match wins, an ambiguous partial still asks you to be more specific — so you can type however you actually think about your day while it still paints in that category’s one weighted colour. Included in JSON backups.

[1.4.0] — 2026-08-28

Added

• Waking hours, in Settings → Appearance: the “still unlogged” line in the day’s insight now only counts untracked time inside this window, so a normal night’s sleep no longer reads as a logging gap. Defaults to 7:00–23:00; set either end to change it.
• A toolbar badge showing today’s score (e.g. “+42”, “-15”) right on the extension icon, coloured to match the same good/warning/critical bucket the dial’s own score badge uses — no new permission, since badge APIs are part of action, which the extension already declares. Refreshes on every change to today’s data and every 30 minutes (to catch the midnight rollover), and clears once a fresh day starts.
• A quick dial-layout switcher right on the Day view, above the dial — the same three layouts as Settings → Appearance → Dial layout, one click away instead of four. Both controls stay in sync with each other.
• Weekly goals, alongside the existing daily ones: Settings → Goals now has a second per-category target for a week’s total rather than each individual day, for things that don’t happen daily (e.g. “5h of Applications per week”). Shown in a new “This week’s goals” panel next to “Today’s goals”.

Fixed

• The day’s insight could count a normal night’s sleep as “still unlogged” — see Waking hours, above.

[1.3.0] — 2026-08-28

Added

• AM/PM dial modes: two alternatives to the single 24-hour ring, chosen in Settings → Appearance → Dial layout —
  • Two 12-hour rings, side by side: AM and PM as two full clock faces at once, sized to whatever room the card actually has.
  • One 12-hour ring, with an AM/PM switch: a single dial at full size, with a small AM/PM toggle above it to flip which half you’re looking at. Both reuse the same 12-hour engine, so painting, undo/redo, the typed-entry box, and the live needle work identically to the 24-hour ring; the needle and the centre clock only show on the half that actually contains “now” (the other reads --:--, rather than both claiming the same time). All three layouts share the same underlying day, so switching between them never loses or duplicates anything.
• History view: a month heatmap (colour by score, with unlogged days shown as visibly empty rather than scored 0), a month summary (days logged, tracked time, average score/productivity, best day, in-month streak), per-category weekly trends as small inline-SVG bar charts, a this-week-vs-last-week comparison, and a search over your reflection notes. Pure calculation lives in historyLib.js; the view is history.js.

1.2.0 — 2026-08-28

Added

• JSON backup export/import, so “export as backup” is finally a real promise. Export writes every day, category, and setting with a schemaVersion; import is a pure, never-trust-the-file parseBackup that validates and normalizes everything before it touches storage. Choose Merge (keep existing days, add missing ones) or Replace (wipe and restore exactly what’s in the file) — Replace requires a second confirming click and names how many days it would erase first.
• CSV import (parseCsv), reading back exactly what buildCsv emits, matched against your current categories by name.
• A backup nudge: a dismissible line in Settings → Data and on the day view once it’s been over two weeks since your last export and you have at least a week of history.
• A ☰ Settings panel — Categories, Reminders, Goals, Data, Appearance, and About in one keyboard-accessible modal (Esc closes, focus stays trapped inside). The day view footer now holds only Clear day and ☰; category and reminder editing moved in, unchanged.
• Streaks — 🔥 a day counts once it has one painted block, shown prominently with your best streak. One missed day per rolling 7 days is forgiven as a streak freeze rather than resetting you to zero; a second gap in the same window still breaks it. An at-risk hint appears when today isn’t logged yet and it’s getting late.
• Weekly recap notification (off by default) — total tracked time, productive %, top category, best day, and streak for the week just gone, on a day and time you choose.
• Daily goals — an optional per-category minutes target, edited in Settings → Goals, with progress bars (and a ✓, not just colour, once met) in the side panel.
• Personal bests in Settings → About: longest streak, best single-day score, most productive day.
• Faster entry: number keys 1–6 pick a pen and 0/E picks the eraser (ignored while typing); ⇧⌘Z / Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes an undone stroke; Copy yesterday fills today from the previous day (confirms before overwriting, undoable); a typed entry field reads things like 9-11 deep work or 9pm-11pm study via a forgiving pure parser (parseTimeEntry) that understands 24h and 12h clocks, -/to, partial category names, and short overnight ranges.
• Appearance settings: theme (System/Light/Dark, applied via data-theme), 12h/24h time display, and week-start day (Sun/Mon).

Changed

• CSV export now also records lastExportAt, which the backup nudge reads.

1.1.0 — 2026-08-28

Added

• Undo — ⌘Z / Ctrl+Z reverts one stroke at a time, up to 30 deep. Entries are tagged with their date, so navigating between days can’t drop a stroke onto the wrong one. “Clear day” is undoable too.
• Extension version is shown beside the wordmark.
• Unit tests (31) over the pure logic, using node’s built-in test runner — no test framework dependency.
• ESLint config, npm run check, and a package script for producing a Web Store zip.
• README covering install, data handling, permissions, and layout.

Changed

• Split all calculation out of dial.js into lib.js — geometry, stats, CSV, and reminder scheduling are now pure functions over plain data, shared between the page and the service worker, and covered by tests. dial.js keeps only DOM and storage work.
• Stored data now passes through validating normalize* functions on read; a malformed or hand-edited value falls back to a default instead of rendering a broken day.
• Reminder times are validated before being saved and scheduled.
• Storage write failures surface as a toast rather than failing silently.
• Pending reflection text is flushed on page unload instead of being lost.

1.0.0 — 2026-08-28

Initial version.

Added

• 24-hour dial: click or drag around the ring to paint blocks of time, with a live “now” needle and per-block tooltips.
• Six categories, each with a colour and a weight (+ productive, · neutral, – distraction). Rename, reweight, or hide them; days store the slot index so renaming never rewrites history.
• Daily read: tracked time, productive percentage, longest unbroken focus stretch, a weighted score with a plain-language summary, and a per-category breakdown including untracked time.
• Seven-day strip for spotting patterns; click any day to revisit or backfill it.
• A one-line “why” note per day.
• Two configurable daily reminders (off by default). The evening one reports how much of the day is still unlogged.
• CSV export — one row per block, shaped for a spreadsheet pivot, with a UTF-8 BOM so Excel reads it correctly.
• Local-only storage: no account, no server, no analytics, and no host permissions. tabs is deliberately not requested.