Using FLAM with one thumb

FLAM now works on a phone with one thumb. Four tabs at the bottom of the screen — Setup, Make, Yours, Explore — with the chat in the middle of them, and the room you are in named at the top. Nothing scrolls sideways. Nothing you can press is too small for a finger. It is the web app in your browser, with nothing to install.

What was wrong before

On a desktop, FLAM's rooms sit in two columns down the side. On a phone those two columns used to turn sideways: two rows you scrolled left and right to find a section, with most of the sections off the edge of the screen at any moment. You were not navigating; you were hunting.

Worse, the chat sat on top of the very thing it was changing. Ask the house to develop something and you had a choice: close the conversation to watch the work, or keep the conversation and see none of it. Every technical check we run was green while this was true, because each row rendered correctly and the chat opened. No check we have can hold a phone in one hand, so no check ever failed.

The four tabs

The tabs are the same rooms the desktop has, in the same order — not a second, smaller FLAM. Setup holds your models, poses and backgrounds. Make holds packshots, lookbooks, workflows and the single tools. Yours holds your collections, the darkroom and your pieces. Explore holds work from outside your house. The top bar names the room you are in, and tapping that name opens the full list, with your own collections under it. Your settings, billing and invitations are behind your picture in the top bar, which is where every phone you have ever owned puts them.

The chat sits in the centre of the bar, one thumb from every screen, because on a phone the chat is how most of the work gets asked for.

The chat steps aside

This is the part we spent the most time on. A phone has one screen, so the chat and the work have to share it, and we did not want to hand you that problem.

When the house starts building something you asked for, the chat sheet drops on its own, so the work is visible while it happens. It does not disappear: one line stays on the sheet's edge, telling you what just landed, so you never wonder whether anything is happening. The sheet rises again only when there is a price for you to answer — the house never takes the screen just to talk.

And there is one rule above all of it: if you move the sheet with your own hand, the house stops moving it. Your hand wins, every time, until you ask for something new.

A run you can watch

A workflow on a desktop shows every frame in a grid. Twenty-four frames in a grid on a phone is a wall of thumbnails the size of rice. So the phone shows a run differently: it draws the workflow's shape once — each step in order, the split where one piece becomes four colourways, the point where they rejoin — and the frames travel through that shape as they develop. You can see which step is running, how far through it is, and where each frame is on its way.

When the house skips a frame, the flow says why, in that spot. A skipped frame is never charged.

Tap instead of drag

On a desktop you drag pieces onto the chat. A phone has no drag — press and hold means something else there, and half-finished drags drop things in the wrong place. So on a phone you tap the pieces you want, the count appears on the chat's button in the tab bar, and one more tap hands them over. Nothing is sent, and nothing is charged, until you say what you want done with them.

The small things

The keyboard never covers the box you are typing in — not in the chat, not in the room search. Everything you can press measures at least a fingertip. And the layout respects the edges of every device, notch and home bar included. You would not put any of this on a pricing page, but without it the studio does not hold up in a hand.

Related

• How it works, step by step: using FLAM on your phone.
• What shipped, and when: /changelog#one-thumb.