A batch you can stop

The task centre lives in the top bar of the app window. Its badge counts what is running or waiting right now, and nothing else.

One batch is one row. It carries the title with your count, a status chip, a bar while it runs, the tally so far and the time it last moved.

A flow running inside the app and a batch started from the list are two rows at once, and the badge counts both.

A batch driven by the window is a loop over your selection. Cancel is read between items, so the profile already opening finishes and nothing after it is started.

A flow or a warm-up run lives in the app itself, so the button reaches the run rather than the loop. Every step looks for the stop before it begins, and nested repeats and branches unwind with it.

1. 1

   You press it

   The button goes quiet and says the stop will land after the current profile.

2. 2

   The item in flight finishes

   Cutting it off halfway would leave a browser half open or a record half written.

3. 3

   The rest are never started

   The loop breaks out carrying the count it had reached, not the count you selected.

4. 4

   The row settles

   It is marked Cancelled, and the report names how many profiles really got through.

Cancel stops what has not started. It does not walk back what is finished, and there is no single press that puts two hundred profiles back the way they were.

Emptying the recycle bin is the case to think about. Cancel it halfway and the profiles already erased are gone, while the ones behind them sit in the bin untouched.

The tally is written to disk after each profile rather than guessed from a clock. A slow batch is visibly moving instead of looking frozen.

The one case where the bar honestly stands still has a state of its own. When every browser window this machine allows is already open, the chip turns to Queued and the queue waits for one to close.

A batch that ends adds a line to the notification list, marked as finished or as failed. That line survives a restart, so a night run is still there in the morning.

If the window is not in front of you at that moment, the app also knocks through your operating system. That message is a way back rather than a report: pressing it brings the window forward, where the row with the tally is waiting.

An update ready to install, a schedule that could not run and a plan limit you reached leave the same kind of line.

Nothing here is resumed. A batch is a loop over a list, and the list goes when the running program goes.

So on the next start every row still marked running or queued is written down as failed. Leaving it as running would be the worse answer, because you would wait for an ending that is never coming.

The rows themselves stay. The last 50 tasks are read back from disk, so the morning after a night run still tells you what happened.

Task rows and notifications are two files in the app's own folder, written so that only your account can read them.

Neither one travels to your account, and this list has no server half. A second computer of yours keeps its own tasks and knows nothing about these.

Delete a profile for good and its name leaves the notification file with it, because a log you cannot see or clear is not a log you agreed to.