Locked On. You put something on your WATCH list because you wanted to know the second it came back. Then it came back, and Squachy put up a card, said one quick line, wandered off to chat about something else, and ten seconds later the whole thing vanished on its own. If you were looking the other way, you missed it, which is the one job it had. So he put on a headset and took the radar desk.
A radar scope. The alert is a scope now. The beam sweeps round, the thing you're watching is a blip with its name on a tag, and a trail of dots shows where it has been. The nearer the middle, the nearer to you. Brackets close in on it, and under the scope it says LOCKED ON in letters you can read across a room, with the name, the signal and whether it's getting CLOSER, moving FURTHER away or HOLDING still.
Squachy explains. He sits beside the scope with a headset on, band over his head, mic at his mouth, and it moves when he does, because it's actually on his head. He talks you through it in three lines, seven seconds each, round and round until you're done: what came back, by name; what the radar shows it doing; and how to get out. Seven seconds is long enough to read a sentence. Three seconds, it turns out, is not.
It waits for you. No more timeout. The alert stays on screen until you tap it, however long that takes. Tap anywhere to close it. The REMOVE FROM WATCH LIST button along the bottom stops watching that device altogether.
Try it without a stalker. Type WATCHTEST on the serial console and the board watches the newest device in its log and fires the alert on the spot. It picks a Bluetooth one if it has heard any since boot, then a WiFi one, then anything left in the log from before. Handy for seeing the screen without waiting for something to follow you home.
The actually-useful part
Added
- LOCKED ON, the new watch-list alert: a radar scope with a trailing sweep, the target's approach as a line of dots, a name tag, lock brackets, and the name, signal and trend (CLOSER / FURTHER / HOLDING) under a large LOCKED ON headline.
- Squachy on a headset beside the scope. The headset is drawn as part of his head, so it moves with him.
- Three rotating explanation lines in his speech bubble, seven seconds each: what came back, what its signal is doing, and how to close the alert or stop watching.
- WATCHTEST on the serial console: watches the newest logged device (Bluetooth first, then WiFi, then from the saved log) and fires its alert.
Changed
- The watch-list alert no longer closes itself after ten seconds. It stays until it is tapped.
- The old watch-list alert card is gone, replaced by LOCKED ON on every board.