Home Holds Still Now
A month of work on the least glamorous thing in the app: making the first screen appear instantly, stop jumping, and stop flashing blank while you use it.
Nobody opens a calorie counter for fun. You open it because you just ate, and you want to be done in ten seconds.
That makes the first screen the whole product. If it takes a beat to appear, jumps while you are reaching for a row, or blanks out the text you were reading, those ten seconds turn into thirty and you start skipping meals.
We spent a month on it. Here is what changed.
It paints from cache on launch
Home used to wait for the network before it drew anything. Now it draws what it already knows the moment you open it, then quietly reconciles with the server. On a cold launch you see today's numbers instead of a spinner.
It stops jumping on the first paint
Two things used to arrive a beat late: the Autopilot banner and the card carousel at the top. They would pop in and shove everything below them down, usually right as your thumb was landing. They now hold their space from the first frame, so what you reached for is still where you reached.
Text stops flashing blank
This is the one that annoyed us most. Saving a meal, deleting an item, or moving to another day made every line of text on Home blink out and come back.
The cause was ugly in a satisfying way: Home was rebuilding every row from scratch to repair a problem that the rebuilding was itself causing. Saving a meal gave its rows brand new identities, so the list could not tell an edit from a replacement and redrew the lot, at the exact moment it was busiest. Rows keep their identity across a save now, and the text stays put.
Adding a meal opens faster
The log screen used to load assistant data before showing you anything, even if you never asked it a question. It does not any more. Food search also keeps up while you type instead of stuttering on longer lists, and results now match the word you finished typing rather than the one you typed a moment ago.
Scrolling back is smoother
Paging back through your history used to get heavier the further you went. That work is off the scroll path now.
None of this is a feature. You will not see a new button anywhere. You should just notice that logging a meal takes the ten seconds it was always supposed to take.