Six ways to build the bar

What both apps have now, made one thing. Controls left, the track in the middle taking all the width there is, the numbers and options right. The only decisions are the ones the button page already made: one radius, one ink ladder, 44px bought as padding, the head a 2px hairline that grows under the pointer and thickens held. Boring on purpose — this is the control group.

What it costs. Nothing is wrong with it and nothing is learned from it. Loop and rate sit as furniture at the end of every bar whether or not anyone is about to change them, and the frame counter has to be read from two numbers and a slash.

The number is the object. A broadcast slate: the frame count at 22px, tabular, is what the bar is for, and the track is a hairline underneath it that the head rides at 8px. The clock sits under the count as a caption. Play is an icon at the left; loop and rate recede to quiet caps at the right, one line, because they are settings and not readings. Morf turns the same slate to the build's own name — #4 · Aug 27 — with build 5 of 11 as its caption.

What it costs. Height — 64px, and the track is small enough that scrubbing is a precision act. The counter changes sixty times a second at 22px, which is a lot of moving ink in the corner of the eye; it wants the imperative write WORDMAKE already does, not a re-render.

The track is graduated. WORDMAKE's has a tick every second, a minor every half, and the seconds numbered along the bottom — the clip is 24 seconds and you can see all of them. The head is a full-height hairline with a flag riding it that carries the frame and the time together. Morf's ruler has one tick per build with every label written under it, alternating baselines so eleven names fit; the head's flag says which build. Play is set into the ruler's left cap as its origin.

What it costs. Width, and it does not degrade — at 600px the second-labels collide and Morf's eleven names stack into a third row. It also decides the visual scale of the whole footer: a ruler is loud, and both apps' floors are meant to be quieter than what is above them.

The footer itself is the track. There is no track element: elapsed fills the whole 44px strip from the left as a lighter surface, the head is a hairline the full height, and pressing anywhere on the strip that is not a control seeks there. The controls sit on the fill. In Morf the fill steps — it jumps a build's width at each beat and the hairlines between beats show as seams — so the strip reads as a stack of eleven panels, one per drawing.

What it costs. The controls sit on a surface that is also a target, so a miss on the play button is a seek — the hit areas have to be exact and the gutters between them can't be track. And the fill is the same surface-hi the pressed button uses, so "playing" and "held" share a color.

The unit made visible. WORDMAKE's bar is twenty-four cells — one per second — that fill as they play, the current one in full ink; the frame count stays as a number because a cell per frame would be 1440 of them. Morf's bar is eleven cells, one per build, which is the honest picture: a beat is a discrete thing, and this is the only schema where the scrubber has the same grain as the content. The current cell wears its label above it. Loop is not a button: when it is on, a repeat mark closes the row.

What it costs. WORDMAKE loses the frame as a scrub target — a cell is a second, sixty frames, and the fine seek moves to the arrow keys. In Morf the eleven cells only stay legible up to about thirty builds; a font with a year of beats needs the log, not the bar.

The bar is on the picture, and it gets out of the way. The live-broadcast register: a translucent strip over the bottom edge of the stage that shows on hover or focus and sinks away a moment after play begins, so the clip is seen the size it will ship at. It carries a LIVE dot that is lit while playing, a measured frame rate — the actual number the engine is achieving, not the one selected — and the progress as a full-ink line along the top edge that grows a head only under the pointer. For Morf the same strip lies over the specimen, with the build's name where the counter was.

What it costs. Discoverability, and a fixed relationship to the stage: it only works where the bar can lie on the picture, which in both apps means giving up the floor as a floor. The measured-fps readout is the one honest broadcast affordance here, and it is also the one that will read 58.9 on a laptop on battery and start a conversation nobody wants.