Daniel Chen

Pause is not a table. A pause ends the session; resume opens a new one that points back through continues_id.

Because every statistic stays a plain sum over sessions, and a pause chain is only a UI grouping.

Cost: the UI walks the chain to draw one bar, and resume is a write, not a flag.

Sync is last-writer-wins on (updated_ms, device_id), a server_seq cursor, and Postgres triggers. No Realtime.

Because three clients in two languages need one rule they can all implement and test against a fake server, and a five-second pull already shows a watch-started timer on the desktop.

Cost: a websocket would be faster, and pulls re-read the last 50 sequence numbers to cover concurrent commits.

Class time from an imported timetable stays out of the totals by default.

Because the ring is about time I chose. A lecture I had to attend is not that.

Cost: one more setting, and every total on five surfaces has to honor it.

Sub-activities go one level deep through activity.parent_id and take the parent's color.

Because one level covers Math → homework without turning the picker into a file browser.

Cost: a third level is a no.

Displace pixels inside hand-drawn masks instead of animating whole layers.

Because one illustration stays one image; the wind touches hair and leaves and leaves the wall alone.

Cost: every scene needs its masks drawn by hand, and a wrong mask edge shows at once. See the case study.

Scenes switch on local time, with no scheduler to configure.

Because a wallpaper should be looked at, not set up.

Cost: a night-shift worker sees the courtyard asleep while they are awake.

Ship a web page for Plash, not a native app.

Because about 930 lines of HTML, CSS and JS are enough, and the same page runs in any browser.

Cost: no wallpaper host on Windows out of the box.