Tidying the Host's Side

Twenty small complaints about the dashboard, worked through in order — then two bugs that only a real phone could find.

This dashboard gets used one-handed, at a party, in bad light, by someone who has other things to do. Every field a host has to invent, every button that doesn't explain itself, every target too small for a thumb is a moment they're looking at a screen instead of at the room. Fixing twenty of those isn't glamorous, but it's the difference between a tool you tolerate and one you forget you're using.

The goalGo through the host's dashboard with fresh eyes and fix everything that made a host stop and think. Not new features — the twenty small frictions that add up to a tool feeling unfinished.

• Events can be deleted, and deleting means deleted. A host can now remove an event from the list — and it takes every photo shot on it with it, for real, out of storage. Nothing lingers after the event it belonged to. Deleting a live or already-shared event makes you type its name first, because those links are already in guests' hands.
• The clutter went into one menu. Sign out and the theme switch moved behind a single "⋯" in the corner. The theme also stopped being a button you tap repeatedly to cycle through options and became three plain choices: dark, light, or match the phone.
• The list says what's actually happening. Each event now shows how many cameras are genuinely shooting, next to how many shots each one gets — so you can see which party is alive without opening it.
• The host stopped being shown the plumbing. There was a "join slug" field — the bit of the web address a guest lands on. Hosts were being asked to invent one, and to sort out "that one's taken" themselves. It's now worked out quietly in the background, and it no longer changes if you rename the event, so a QR code already printed and taped to a door keeps working.
• "Save as draft" now does what it says — saves and takes you back to your list, instead of dropping you into an event that has nothing to do yet.
• Caught a real trap while in there: opening an event now saves any edits first. Settings lock the moment an event goes live, so an unsaved change used to be quietly thrown away at exactly the moment it stopped being changeable.
• The whole photo now responds, not a corner of it. Hiding or restoring a shot meant hitting a small icon in the corner of the thumbnail; now the whole picture is the target. On a laptop you can still drag photos into the order you want.
• Removed the Refresh button from the live feed. The feed already updates itself every twenty seconds, so the button was answering a worry it had already handled.
• The printable QR is actually printable — it downloads big enough for a sign on a table now, instead of a screen-sized image that fell apart when enlarged.

Then the phone found what the desk missed. Everything passed — the checks, the tests, the build. Then it got opened on an actual iPhone and the New Event form was sitting off the left edge of the screen, fields unreachable. Fixed that, and the next look showed the "Starts" and "Ends" fields overlapping each other. Turns out the combined date-and-time control simply refuses to be made narrow enough to fit two across a phone. So it became one date, then a start and end time side by side — which is how people describe an event anyway. A night that runs past midnight now just works: 9pm to 1am is a four-hour party, and the form tells you it ends the next day rather than deciding it behind your back.