Two treatments said "selected" and neither said it well.
A selected cell got a 2px border and a lifted fill. The border is drawn
on the outside of a cell whose content sits 6px in, so it ate into the
thumbnail: selecting appeared to nudge the photograph. Inside it, a
second thin ring marked the anchor — the end a shift-click measures from
— and that ring was the clearest thing on the cell, so it read as *the*
selection to everyone who had not written it.
Worse, the ring outlived what it described. An anchor survives a
deselection, so a thin box sat around the last photograph touched with
nothing selected at all, indistinguishable from a cell that had stayed
behind. That is the one thing a selection cue must never be: ambiguous
about whether something is selected.
So the ring is now what it already looked like. One mark, drawn inside
the cell and 4px clear of its edge, so it never touches the thumbnail and
never changes a dimension — selecting adds ink and moves nothing. Two
pixels rather than one, because it is now carrying the whole cue across
forty cells at arm's length against a thumbnail of any brightness. The
outer border is hover alone.
The anchor keeps no mark, and loses nothing it was earning: the bar says
"Tap the last photograph" while a range is armed, which answers the
question the ring existed to answer. The ordinal still lives in the
controller and still decides where a range extends from; what is gone is
the claim that the user needs to see it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
dtourolleandClaude Opus 5
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