Files and photos on the go, and a lock on memory

Sketchbook can now show its owner’s own files and photos on the web, the tablet and the phone, with pinned files on the home screen. Personal and finance folders, the photos and Claude’s memory sit behind the same PIN as the private journal.

The request, on 17 October: “I need to be able to grab files that I need on the go. files like my terms of trade (doing a rewrite as we speak), personal files, and photos.” And in the same message: “we need to put memory behind a lock screen like the journal as well”.

Files

A new Files section lists the folders of the file store the business already uses, on every screen size and in the Android app. It can:

• browse the folders and search them by file name;
• preview a file: photos and pictures, PDF documents, plain text, and the text of Word and OpenDocument files;
• download a file, or open it on the device;
• pin a file, so it sits on the home screen;
• send a file on, the same two ways a notebook page’s file already could: “Email”, which only makes a draft with the file attached (sending stays a person’s press, as always), and “Put on drop”, a link that stops working after seven days.

Sketchbook only reads. It never moves, renames, deletes or changes a file, and it has no way to upload one. A small home-screen card shows the pinned files first and the recently opened ones after them.

The Terms of Trade, one tap away

The business’s Terms of Trade are being rewritten this week, in a separate piece of work. Sketchbook does not touch that work. It reads the rewrite’s folder and pins its newest PDF to the home screen by default, next to the version that is in force today. When a new version of the rewrite appears, the pin follows it.

Photos

A Photos section shows the photo library and the camera’s folders as a grid of thumbnails, by folder or by date, with a full view that swipes from one photo to the next and a button to download the original. The thumbnails are made and kept by Sketchbook itself. Nothing is ever written into the photo folders, and a thumbnail carries no hidden information: no location, no camera details. The photos are only shown and downloaded. Nothing looks inside them.

One lock, for more than the journal

The reason, in his words: “the extra layer of security is for when I accidently leave my pc unlocked and an unauthorised user access my unlocked sevrvice”.

So the personal and finance folders, all of the photos, and Claude’s memory now sit behind the same PIN as the private journal. It is one lock: the same PIN, the same unlock screen, the same idle timeout, on the web, the tablet and the phone. Unlocking opens all of them, and locking, or walking away until the timer runs out, closes all of them and clears what was on the screen.

• Before unlocking, nothing from a locked folder appears anywhere: not in search results, not on the home screen card, not in previews or thumbnails.
• The business folders stay open, so the business documents are always one tap away.
• Which folders are locked is one line of configuration, so changing it is a one-line change.

The lock also applies to Claude. Someone sitting at an unlocked computer could ask Claude to fetch a file, so Claude’s own access to Sketchbook is refused for every locked folder and for the memory, whether or not the owner has unlocked them. Claude keeps reading its own memory the way it always has, from its own files, not through Sketchbook.

Not yet

Uploading into a folder is not part of this release. Neither is a photo search. Nothing has been tried on a real phone or tablet yet.