Same face on every page, and a few other promises we finally kept

This week we mostly fixed things we had broken ourselves, which is the most common kind of work and the least advertised. Three of them are worth telling.

Keeping the same face on every page

A storybook has one hard rule: the child on page one is the child on page twelve. We check this book by book, and lately fewer books passed every page than we would like. Things are moving the right way. Not yet the kind of progress you frame.

So we traced the bad pages back to what went in: the photo, the reference drawing, the scene, the wardrobe. The surprise was where the mistakes came from. In our own test books, some of the worst slips were caused by our safety checks, not by the drawing step.

Here is the shape of the worst one. A check looked at a photo, decided the hairstyle in the drawing was wrong, and quietly ordered a fresh drawing of the main character. The fresh drawing was further off than the first, and the book always kept the fresh one. So a perfectly good likeness was swapped for a worse one on every page, with full confidence and no apology.

In another test book, the check that confirms a drawing matches the art style turned away a family member's drawing more than once. With nothing to look at, the pages drew that person from a written description, and partway through the book a different-looking person showed up in their place. When we ran the same check again on drawings that were plainly fine, it did not always give the same answer. A judge who changes his verdict when you ask twice is not much of a judge.

What changed:

• No more automatic redraws of the main character sheet. If something looks off, we log a warning instead, and you can see the sheet and edit the character before the book is finished.
• Side characters we create for a story keep their first drawing.
• The pages get those characters' look from the drawing, not from words that might disagree with it. When the drawing said one thing and the text said another, a character could wear an accessory on the cover and nowhere else.
• The style check now only asks the big question (painted, 3D, or photo?) instead of arguing over line weight.

We will keep checking books page by page. That is the only review we trust.

Holding on to less

We tightened how long we hold on to things we no longer need, and we keep the details to ourselves on purpose. Privacy works better when the people trying to get around it have less to go on.

Making phones behave

Phones have opinions. On an iPhone, swiping back from the screen where you add a supporting character dropped you on the homepage, as if you had asked to leave town. Now each of those screens leaves its own step in history, so back means back. Pressing back on an empty Build Your Star screen also no longer asks "Leave the story builder?" when there is nothing to leave behind.

To catch more of this before you do, our tests now run on WebKit, the engine behind Safari, and on phone-sized screens with picture comparisons, not just one desktop browser.

And the Christmas pages got lighter. We swapped seven images to a smaller format and cut their total size by 42%, with no visible change, and fixed a floating chat button that sat on top of the main button.

Smaller sweeping

The alert that tells us a book has stalled stopped crying wolf over guest drafts that never asked for a story. A slow outside service can no longer leave us waiting forever. And one new command runs every check script we own, so nobody has to remember the list.

What is finished and what is live

Finished is not the same as live. Everything above is finished. Our latest release includes all of it except the run-all-checks command, which came just after.

Up next: more page-by-page checking, and more of the quiet housekeeping nobody sees.

• Mark Twain