The first modern-style rollout translated each widget's existing classic
layout into HTML/CSS -- same gradient headers, same rounded-shadowed
card, prettier chrome around an unchanged composition. This actually
redesigns weather (current/daily), calendar (all four views), tasks, and
battery: no card/shadow anywhere, a slim accent-colored rule instead of
a full gradient banner (and only that rule dithers at the richer accent
amplitude now, not the header text sitting on it), and a dominant hero
value (temperature/percent) instead of a centered icon+number of equal
weight. Padding and type sizes scale as a clamped proportion of widget
size instead of fixed pixel values. Text and static/whiteboard are left
alone -- text already had zero chrome and its styling is user content,
not this system's to redesign; framed_image's card was already minimal.
Direction was picked from three divergent mockups reviewed with the
maintainer, then verified against the real render pipeline (actual
Chromium render, actual ordered dithering, actual theme system) rather
than just eyeballed -- that caught a day-section/month-grid divider
color (#e2e6ec) that's nowhere near this panel's 6-color palette and was
dithering to invisible white; fixed with a real black hairline in the
one place (month view) that still needed one.
Frame.theme (7 presets in app/theme_tokens.py) drives font family,
corner radius, drop shadow, and an accent hue for every modern-style
widget's header/accent region. Rich accent colors (not just the 6 flat
panel inks) are approximated via denser Bayer stippling confined to just
that region (html_render.ordered_dither_regions), so icon/text content
elsewhere stays exactly as crisp as it is today -- verified directly
against real Chromium renders, both in unit tests and via run-server.
"classic" is a byte-identical no-visual-change default: weather's header
keeps its original fixed blue gradient, tasks/calendar keep their flat
THEME_* ink.
Themes are purely stylistic -- battery's charge-level color, calendar/
tasks' per-owner event chips, and text's own per-widget font choice are
never touched.
The weather widget's icons/layout are hand-drawn PIL primitives -- clean
under quantization but flat, no gradients/shadows. Adds an opt-in
render_style="modern" (current/daily modes only) that instead renders a
Jinja2 template through a persistent headless-Chromium browser
(app/html_render.py), following the approach of Tesserae, an open-source
e-ink dashboard targeting this same panel family.
Key design points:
- The Chromium dependency (Playwright) is lazily imported only when a
weather widget actually uses "modern" style, and the background browser
itself only launches on first use -- every other widget type, and this
one's own classic/hourly/multi_city paths, never pay for it.
- No Frame-level dithering setting needed: html_render dithers its own
rendered widget to exact palette colors (Bayer/ordered, not
Floyd-Steinberg) before compositing, so the shared whole-canvas
Floyd-Steinberg pass sees zero quantization error there and leaves it
untouched -- same trick draw_text/hand-drawn icons already use. Floyd-
Steinberg keeps working unchanged for photos and every other widget.
- A "Load calibrated Spectra 6 preset" button in Advanced configuration
offers a community-measured palette (data ported from
paperlesspaper/epdoptimize, Apache 2.0) as an alternative starting
point to the existing idealized DEFAULT_PALETTE_RGB -- fills the
existing palette table, doesn't save by itself.
Known open risk, not resolved here: a headless Chromium binary is far
larger than the ~100MB single-layer limit that already forced this
project's pip/npm installs into split layers, and (unlike those) is a
single ~180MB file that can't be split across layers by ordinary
Dockerfile restructuring. Flagged prominently in server/Dockerfile and
docs/widgets.md -- treat this render style as experimental/local-only
until that's resolved.