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An open PureRef, twice

PureRef is the program artists keep open next to their work: an endless dark wall you throw reference pictures onto, push around, scale and forget about. It is closed source and costs money. This is how the desktop half of Tack started:

I find it strange that pureref isn't open source or that they are even making money with it. let's create an open source alternative starting with Windows

A browser version already existed by then. The autopilot had built it the night before, and I took it over in another window a few hours earlier:

I love the product, let's launch it. one idea for later: signups and paid tier for syncing and sharing links to boards etc.. collaborating and whatnot. for now, a free pureref for the browser.

So for two days there were two Tacks being built side by side, and on the 28th they were moved into one folder.

A dark canvas with a thin toolbar along the top reading Tack, Add, Note, Pack, Crop, Fit, 80%, 12 items, Untitled board. Below it twelve museum pictures packed edge to edge in three rows: a portrait of a violinist, a porcelain parrot, a white plaster head, a charcoal drawing of a seated woman, a black-figure Greek vase, a still life of fish and oysters, a stormy sea with a sailing boat, a suit of armour, a bronze lion, a red and gold damask, a bronze cast of a face and two hands, and Hokusai's Great Wave
The live web app today, with twelve open-access pictures dropped in and packed with Ctrl P.

What it is

You drop images on the wall: from the desktop, from another browser tab, or pasted from the clipboard. Then you move, scale, rotate, crop, flip, grey them out, and double-click empty space to write a note. Pack tidies everything into a tight rectangle the shape of your window. Every board can be saved as one file with the pictures inside.

The browser version keeps its boards in the browser and works offline once it has loaded. There is no account and no image goes anywhere. It installs as an app if you want it to.

The Windows version is native, drawn on the graphics card, one executable. It has no title bar, because PureRef has none either:

one thing that is reallz cool about pureref is that it doesnt have a top bar... you know the one with the application name etc... can you get rid of it?

Without a title bar or menus, a new user has nothing to look at to find out what the program can do. The answer was the right-click menu:

things like how to move the window hotkeys will be self explanatory in there and also help show all the features off

The same packed board of twelve pictures, with a dark context menu open over the armour. It lists Add images, Ctrl O; Paste, Ctrl V; New note, N; Pack everything, Ctrl P; Pack to equal heights, Ctrl Shift P; Fit all, F; Zoom 100%, 1; Export board as PNG, Ctrl E; Save board file, Ctrl S
Right-click in the web app. Every command, with its key next to it.
web app
1,837 lines of JavaScript, no framework, no build step, no dependency; MIT
desktop app
5,411 lines of Rust with its tests, on wgpu, Windows only
test walk
123 checks in a headless browser, plus 5 for the offline update
live build
tack-v10, 16 October

The file

Two programs that open each other's boards need a format, and on the 28th it had a made-up name, .openref. I asked whether that was a real thing:

ok so... .openref is just as made up, right? I mean I would love to invent a data format that becomes the de facto standard

It became .tack: a ZIP with a one-line marker, a board.json, and the original image files, byte for byte as they were dropped in. Rename a board to .zip and the pictures are just there. Every file inside is dated 1 January 1980, so a board you save twice without touching it comes out identical.

A week later I gave it two real PureRef boards to convert and asked:

what can we do better in our fileformat that .pur got wrong?

The best answer is in the spec now. A .pur file stores the full path of the folder it was last saved in. Send someone your board and you send them your user name. A .tack stores nothing about the machine, the user or the time. It does store where each picture came from, which is half of what a reference is for, and the spec forbids a reader from ever downloading it.

The rule that keeps the two apps safe on one file: anything you do not understand, you keep. The web app has notes and the desktop app cannot draw them yet, so the desktop app carries them through a save untouched. A board saved by each side is checked into the other side's tests.

The name was nearly a domain:

yeah tack.art is only a measly 1900$ per year haha... any other ideas?

Still rough

It never got its launch. On the 28th I said why I was waiting:

as I do with all aps I publish, I first use them for one or two weeks myself and only then release just so I can test it well enough

The verdict a week later was first of all it works great! committable!, followed by a list: zoom in finer steps, and two fingers on a trackpad should pan. Both went in. The launch page and its pictures are finished, but nothing was posted anywhere.

The desktop app is not published. It is installed on one laptop and has no public repository yet. Crop, notes and packing are still missing from it.

The public repository stops at 28 August. Everything since, including the written-out format spec, is live on the site but sits on a branch that has not been pushed.

The landing page says not one image leaves your machine, which is true. It also says there is no server to send anything to, and since 30 August the page counts visits. That sentence needs fixing.

Open Tackdrop a few pictures on it The landing pagethe launch that did not happen yet Sourcethe web app, MIT