Diagnostics

Diagnostics are metadata only: status strings, event names, and bounded error messages, never captured text or note bodies. Storage rules are in Permissions. The Settings rows that display this material are in Settings. Glyph rendering tests are in Build.

The only always-visible surface is a purpose-designed monochrome mark: a geometric lowercase "b" (a vertical stem plus a circular bowl, one stroke weight) with a solid bullet centered in the bowl. The bullet is the captured thought — every capture becomes a bullet in the vault. AppKit tints the template image for light and dark menu bars, Liquid Glass wallpapers, and the highlighted (menu-open) state, with no bundled assets.

Ready: the bullet-b. Tooltip and accessibility label are Bob Mac Capture.
bob unresolved: the bullet becomes a "!". The tooltip reads Bob Mac Capture — bob is not resolved. Check Settings., and the menu gains a bob Not Resolved — Open Settings… row above the healthy items.
Capture landed: after every successful submit, the bullet briefly swells and settles (420 ms). The pulse is skipped when Reduce Motion is on.

Settings diagnostics and Recent Activity¶

Settings › Diagnostics shows the current status string (selectable; starts as Starting), the signing diagnostic (Not checked until inspected), and a Recent Activity disclosure of the last 20 timestamped entries (HH:mm:ss message). Each status change appends one entry; the list is in-memory only and never contains captured text.

A hotkey registration failure reports Hotkey conflict with the Carbon status, or Refs hotkey conflict: …. Recovery is in Resolve a Mac Capture hotkey conflict. Target/route completion problems report Target cache stale with the scan error; recovery is in Fix Mac Capture when bob is not resolved.

Timeouts¶

Every bob invocation is bounded by a 20-second timeout (BobProcessClient.defaultTimeout) that terminates and reaps a wedged process instead of leaving the panel waiting indefinitely; a fired timeout surfaces as an actionable BobClientError.timedOut that names the timed-out command and never the captured text. Quit cancels every outstanding invocation via cancelActiveProcess(). A Bob Refs scan uses its own refs-scan lane with a 300 s timeout and never cancels another lane's work. Required commands and guard retries are in Protocol.

Copy Diagnostic¶

Capture errors keep the complete draft on screen. Copy Diagnostic next to the error copies the exact bob error message to the pasteboard (BobClientError.description redacts the trailing draft argument).

In Bob Refs, Copy Diagnostic on the load-failed card copies the refresh failure's bounded message; an open-error banner copies its own diagnostic first. Problem scans raise a banner: a warning with Copy Diagnostic for per-PDF failures (the footer can say +N more · Copy Diagnostic lists them all), an error with Scan Again and Copy Diagnostic for hard failures.

Signposts¶

The app emits os_signpost intervals/events (subsystem org.bobs.bob-mac-capture, category capture) around hotkey receipt, panel ordering, editor focus, parse, completion, preview, submit, the settled capture-related lane, block-ID focus claims, plain-text paste (paste-plain-text), notification scheduling, install-restart notification requests (install-restart-notification-requested), the idle agenda (intervals agenda-refresh, agenda-measure, agenda-plan; events agenda-unchanged, agenda-published, agenda-hold-released), Bob Refs (intervals refs-pull, refs-refresh, refs-scan, refs-panel-show, refs-panel-prepare, refs-panel-order, refs-library-publish; event refs-today-skipped), and the Ctrl+Tab panel switch (interval panel-switch; event panel-switch-key), visible in Instruments' Points of Interest / os_signpost templates. Capture show and hide add intervals capture-prepare and capture-dismiss; the template shelf refresh adds interval templates-refresh; the related lane adds interval capture-related and metadata-only events capture-related-unsupported, capture-related-failed, capture-related-publish (settled response changed the visible rows), and capture-related-empty (settled response had no matches). These, and the bounded Recent Activity list in Settings, are metadata-only by construction — see Permissions.

Inspect them with:

log show --signpost --predicate 'subsystem == "org.bobs.bob-mac-capture"'

refs-rank¶

swift run refs-rank ranks a bob ref list snapshot with the same ranker the panel uses. Ranking rules, NEW, and the Newest timeline are in Bob Refs. The binary is never bundled: Scripts/bundle.sh copies only the BobMacCapture product.

swift run refs-rank [--plan plan.json] [--opens open-log.json]
[--new-marks refs-new-marks.json] [--scope chats]
[--now 2026-10-08T09:00:00] [--tz America/New_York]
[--newest] [query...] < ref-list.json

--now accepts a full ISO 8601 time with an offset or a local date-time without one, interpreted in --tz (default: the current time zone). Browse mode prints the sections; search mode prints rank tier score (m P W L F R) state kind title with padded columns (rank 4, tier 9, state 8, kind 7), each followed by its why-here line. --newest prints the Newest timeline. --new-marks loads Mac-local NEW marks.

bob ref list -R all -A -f json -g | swift run refs-rank --newest