The app opened on Tracks — an alphabetical list of everything, which is
the one entry point that is identical every time and therefore gives the
user nothing to start from. Home is listed first in the nav and is the
page built to answer 'what should I play' (H-8).
Two things had to be true before that was an improvement.
An album with no cover rendered as a small dim icon on a surface the
same colour as the page, so a shelf read as having holes in it, while
the Albums and Artists grids both drew a letter tile (H-9). It draws the
same tile now.
And a shelf that repeats the one above it is suppressed, the way an
empty one already is — 'On repeat' was 'Pick up where you left off'
reordered. The rule fires only when the shelf is not showing the whole
library: a repeat is a fault only if a different row was possible, and
measured against a fixed shelf size instead this let an 11-album library
keep three identical shelves while a 13-album one lost them.
The first two versions of that rule were wrong and the *existing* Go
tests caught both — it collapsed a four-album library to a single shelf.
Nine e2e specs assumed the app starts on Tracks and now navigate there,
and one new spec freezes the landing itself. Home's page-header action
is 'Shuffle suggestions': 'Shuffle' alone was two different controls
with one accessible name, which only became reachable together once a
cached Home was always in the tree.
The sidebar had a Home item that fell through to "Coming soon". What
was missing was not another view of the library — four of those exist,
sorted and complete — but the opposite: a complete, sorted library is
exactly what gives you nothing to play, because every entry point into
it is alphabetical and identical every time you open the app.
So a shelf is a *reason*, not a filter. Each one answers a different
question you might be asking when you do not know what you want (what
was I listening to, what is new, what do I keep coming back to, what
have I forgotten, what fits, what would I never pick myself) and each
says which question it answered — a row of covers with no explanation
is just another grid.
Two consequences run through it. Shelves are built from what the user
actually did — play counts, last played, import order — with random
sampling only where there is no signal to use, so randomness is the
fallback rather than the design. And a shelf with nothing behind it is
omitted instead of rendered empty: a fresh library legitimately gets
three, and an empty row labelled "on repeat" would be a lie.
The queries return album ids and nothing else, joined back to
GetAllAlbumsWithDetails in Go, so the album projection keeps having one
definition rather than one per shelf.
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