The car, the tablet, and the instrument look
The whole notebook on the car screen, a tablet in landscape with three resizable panes, and a new design that looks like an engineering instrument.
The second and third days were about where Sketchbook is used, and how it looks while you use it.
The notebook in the car
On 7 October Sketchbook became an Android Auto navigation app, which lets it draw the notebook directly on the car’s screen instead of being limited to a short list. You can walk the folder tree, open a page, tick a checkbox, record a voice note and ask Claude a question by voice. The answer is shown and spoken. Sketchbook adds no driving lockout of its own and does not get around any limit that Android Auto or the car sets. A question asked from the car has its own time limit, so a slow transcription plus a full answer still fits, and when the server says no, the car shows and speaks the reason.
0.9: a tablet in landscape
The same evening the tablet app was turned on its side. On a tablet it now runs in landscape with three panes: the sidebar, the page, and a right panel holding Ask Claude and History, just like the web app. You can drag the dividers to change the widths and they stay where you leave them. Phones keep portrait, because a notebook locked sideways is hard to use with one hand. The web app got the same draggable sidebar and right panel, with the widths remembered by each browser.
Dark became the default everywhere, with a toggle. Pages shared publicly with a link are always dark.
Choosing a design
The owner’s verdict on the interface so far was that it felt flat. And the stakes were spelled out: this is “going to be my companion going forward as well as my showcase”. It has to show what can be built to a stranger, at a moment’s notice.
Three design directions were drafted side by side: a drafting table, an engineering instrument, and an editorial gallery. The engineering instrument, Design B, was picked.
1.0: the instrument look
Design B arrived on the web and the tablet on the night of 7 October and the morning of 8 October.
- A proper design system: a dark palette with a light variant, four levels of surface, a type scale in Inter and JetBrains Mono, and motion that is used sparingly.
- The canvas as an instrument: rulers marked in sheet units at the real zoom level (honest ticks, not decoration), grid paper, a floating pen toolbar, a lasso that tells you what it has selected and can delete it, redo, and a status strip showing the zoom. Sketches gained shapes, snapping and a CAD-style trim.
- A Home bench: recent pages with thumbnails of their first sketch or picture, the Inbox, files saved from the file-share page, open sketch requests from Claude, and counts.
- A live status rail: which devices are online, who is on which page (Claude included, while it is editing), and whether everything is in sync. When a folder is renamed, even directly on disk, every device’s sidebar refreshes by itself.
- History that names people: a version reads as the person and the device it was made on, or as Claude, rather than as an internal identifier.
- New sketch opens the canvas straight away on a fresh page named after the moment it was made. You can rename it later.
The version number 1.0.0 appeared in the sidebar on 8 October.
Every feature on every device
Later on 8 October the phone and the tablet caught up with the web: delete, archive, restore and move; search, the graph and Claude on the tablet; a Claude screen on the phone; restore an old version, rename pages, new folders and pages from templates; the page as the web shows it, and Listen for narration; voice notes, drawing over photos and PDF pages; and the editor’s toolbar, slash commands, table editing, rich paste and tags.
That became a standing rule for the project: every feature on every device, web, tablet and phone. A feature missing from one of them is a bug, not a choice.