Home

Home is where ALMa opens. It is a daily research desk rather than a dashboard: it summarizes what arrived, selects a few explainable highlights, and hands each item to the page that owns it.

The brief uses the browser's local timezone. Refreshing Home never changes its counts or consumes unread state.

How the page is laid out

The page has two halves, and the split is meaning, not decoration:

• The blotter — one raised panel at the top carrying your whole situation: the greeting and date, the two workflow shortcuts, one slim status line, and today's figures. It is the pad you work on, and it is always the same shape.
• The desk — the research itself, as loose sheets below: one optional Signal Lab calibration, Inbox, Picked for you, Reading list. Each paper section is its own collapsible block — fold away what isn't today's business and the rest comes up to meet you.

Reading order follows urgency: what is my situation (blotter) → one cheap taste calibration when available → what did I send myself (Inbox) → what did ALMa find (Picked for you) → what am I already reading.

Signal Lab serves a deck of at least ten signed rounds immediately above Inbox when the feature is active and the super-region graph exists. Its distinct game board explains the task, shows deck progress, and adds quiet evidence rows for directions, boundaries, daily/total rounds, unique and fitted observations, fit freshness, and super-region/edge coverage. It never presents the combinatorial triplet universe as progress. Disabling the feature hides this section and ignores retained signals without deleting them.

The status line

One slim line under the greeting, with no heading of its own, carrying two groups split by a hairline:

• left — the machinery: one dot per core subsystem/capability (see System status below);
• right — what wants you: one chip per pending decision (see Needs you).

Both answer "what is my situation" before a single number is read, and a dot with a name says it without a label announcing it. Every item links to the surface that owns the fix. A chip that would read zero is absent, so the line's own length is information.

Today in ALMa

An editorial scoreboard — bare figures split by hairlines, not a grid of boxes. Six cells, and each label says its own scope, because the row mixes today's arrivals with what is standing on the desk:

Figure	Scope	Links to
new Feed papers (distinct papers)	today	Feed
new suggestions across active lenses	today	Discovery
alerts delivered successfully	today	Alerts → History
waiting in Inbox	now	scrolls to the Inbox below
on your reading list	now	Library → Reading
in the last 7 days	the week	—

The last cell is the inflow chart: one small stacked column per local day, Feed at the base and Discovery above it, with the week's total set as the cell's number and the exact figures on hover. It sits where the other cells put their numeral, so the week's shape reads as one more figure rather than a chart bolted on beside the heading. A zero-Feed morning means nothing on its own and everything next to six busy days; empty days are a tick on the baseline, because the absence is the information.

A monitor-mix ribbon under the row splits today's Feed intake across authors / journals / other, so you can tell an author-driven day from a journal-driven one at a glance. It renders only when something arrived.

Older, still-unreviewed Feed and Discovery items appear separately as carryover. Carryover clears only when you visit the owning Feed or Discovery lens. GET /home/brief is a pure read: Home has no “seen” endpoint and never stamps owner review state.

Picked for you

Home chooses deterministic, source-balanced highlights — one of each kind first:

• a monitored Feed paper;
• a top pending Discovery match;
• a paper representing an active followed author or journal;

then tops the row up with the next-best Discovery matches. The section is always exactly one row of the tile grid, so it is a shortlist rather than a truncated list and carries no "Show more".

Discovery tiles show their lens match score (0–100) as a bar. Feed picks show none: they are selected by what you monitor and when they appeared, not by a score, and Home does not invent one. Every tile carries a Why this is here popover stating the rule that selected it.

Every paper on Home renders as a tile in a grid. Tiles in a row share one height, so scanning is spatial and no paper wins by having a longer abstract, and the column count follows the measured width of the page — a narrow window or a phone gets fewer, full-width tiles rather than compressed slivers. Each tile states why it was selected and shows a short TLDR or abstract excerpt. Today's material is preferred. On quiet days ALMa may use the previous seven days, clearly labelled Last 7 days. The selection is structured curation, not AI-generated prose.

Home is navigation-only. Opening a highlight takes you to its Feed monitor, Discovery lens, or paper detail on the owner page; all save, rate, read, and dismiss actions remain there.

Home paper tiles deliberately read as calm sticky notes on the desk. One central category palette owns every use—tile paper, count pills, small chart marks, and title symbols: Inbox green, Reading violet, Picked gold, Discovery blue-cyan, and Feed magenta. The page title words remain navy; only the symbol before each section title carries category colour.

Inbox

Papers you sent yourself from another device — Slack today, any channel that honours the capture contract. See Inbox.

Home is the Inbox's owning surface, which makes it the one deliberate exception to Home being read-only: triage happens here, because there is nowhere else for it to happen. Captures render as the same measured tiles as every other section, each carrying the normal actions plus Not now (the ✕), which drops the paper out of the Inbox, keeps it in your corpus, and records no opinion at all — distinct from Dislike, which is how you tell ALMa a paper is wrong for you. Every button posts to the one canonical action route, and every outcome is confirmed by name: "Cleared from your Inbox, kept in your corpus" reads differently from "Saved to your library", on purpose.

Each tile shows where the paper came from — a channel chip (Slack today) and when you sent it. Captures are ordered by when you sent them, not by when the paper first entered your corpus: a paper your Feed collected two years ago, which you re-sent yourself this morning, belongs at the top of the queue it just joined.

The Inbox shelf remains in the page order with a zero count when empty, folded shut and without empty-state copy. Its position therefore stays predictable without nagging. Papers are not meant to accumulate here.

While a capture waits it is a full corpus member — enriched, embedded, mapped, deduplicated — but it is excluded from every preference query, so an untriaged paper cannot skew your recommendations.

Reading list

The most recently added reading-list papers, newest first, with Show more for the rest. Reading state is independent of Library membership, so an unsaved paper marked Reading still appears.

The section shows two full rows of the measured tile grid while collapsed — up to eight tiles on a wide desk and two on a phone — so it never ends on a ragged half-row.

System status

The left half of the status line carries compact pills such as Automation, Feed, Discovery, the active embedding stack, Inbox, and Alerts. Only the severity dot and owner name are visible; metric, explanation, and check time live on hover.

Inbox and Alerts are core capabilities, so Home never labels either pill “Slack”, “SMTP”, or another provider. Their provider-independent state is:

• green — at least one supporting integration is configured, active, and working;
• red — configured but the direction is failing;
• grey — no integration is configured.

Provider controls remain under Settings → Plugins. Every status pill links to the page or Settings section that owns its remedy; where no owner route exists, Home uses the shared popup primitive for the repair action.

States come from local configuration, domain state, and the operation ledger, not from live probes. Home therefore says what happened the last time ALMa used a capability. A cancelled operation sets no health verdict. This keeps GET /home/brief a pure read.

Needs you

The right half of the status line — the other half of "what is my situation". Chips appear only for user-fixable decisions or blockers, ordered by severity rather than by which part of ALMa raised them, so something broken and staying broken outranks a queue that is merely waiting:

• actionable critical Health findings;
• Feed monitors that need relinking (a broken monitor silently stops delivering, so it is a break, not a pending decision);
• captured messages that resolved to no paper (a link with no DOI, or an upstream failure) — recorded rather than dropped, so they ask for a human here;
• author identities that need a decision;
• imported papers that need review.

Each chip is the same one Health uses in its system-status band — a severity dot, what it is, and how many — in a slimmer weight, so a component-and-its-state reads identically on both pages. No heading announces them: a chip reading "Health · 1 critical issue" already says it.

Routine background work and healthy-state reassurance stay off Home.

Start a workflow

The header offers two shortcuts: Find papers and Follow author. They use ALMa's primary action treatment, open the corresponding owner workflow, and do not duplicate its controls on Home.

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Home is the default route: an empty address (#/) lands here, and every section links back to the page that owns its data and actions.