Ooloi is now a running desktop application on macOS, Windows, and Linux. Splash screen, platform-native menus, animated notifications, settings dialog, window state persistence, orderly shutdown. The Ordinary Work describes what it felt like to build this after nineteen months of invisible infrastructure.

The settings dialog is worth noting separately: it auto-generates its entire UI from registry metadata. No layout code is needed per setting – theme, locale, autosave interval, anything. It's All Greek to Me shows this live: switching locale with every open window following in real time, while setting out the sequence of work that leads from here to the first collaboration demo.

The Ooloi Librarian is now live on the Documentation page – a RAG system answering questions about Ooloi's architecture from the full corpus of ADRs, guides, and blog posts, refusing anything outside that corpus by construction rather than by prompting. Ask the Librarian describes the setup. For newcomers, A Reading Path now organises the documentation in conceptual dependency order: nine phases, each building the vocabulary the next requires.

Two new guides: The Frontend Architecture Guide covers window lifecycle, event architecture, the rendering pipeline, fetch coordination, localisation, and the testing model. MIDI in Ooloi explains why Ooloi accepts MIDI input but produces no MIDI output, and what it does instead.

Three longer essays. Where the Freedom Comes From traces the genealogy behind the design: a Dutch mainframe in 1973, the BYTE Lisp issue in 1979, CLOS, Igor Engraver, and the return to Clojure – fifty years of accumulated experience producing things that a sprint methodology cannot. The Piece Window explains why the central window from Igor Engraver will reappear, and why that is not nostalgia: it follows from the semantic model, as it always did. The Lens We Can No Longer Take Off examines how a historically contingent development methodology came to present itself as engineering common sense, and what it cannot see. Surface Tension sets out what comes next.

— Peter Bengtson
ooloi.org