Say it before you drop the files

There's a box on the upload tray for the things that aren't printed anywhere on the set. The pool bath is out. Ceilings are 10 ft. The T-codes are on sheet A11. It's been there a while, and it steers the whole read.

The trouble was when it showed up. It only appeared once you'd dropped your first file, sitting below the row of file thumbnails — so if you opened the tray, looked at it and thought there's nowhere to say anything here, you were reading it exactly right. And on the Add schedule tray, which only ever opens with nothing in it, the box never appeared at all.

Now it's the first thing under the drop zone, before you've dropped a thing, and it's labelled for the moment you're in: Tell Biddy before it reads. Type your sentence, then add the files — or the other way round. Either works, and what you type is saved before the read starts, every time.

It's still the same box and the same note. Forgot to write it? It's under View sheets, exactly where it's always been, and a re-read picks it up.

A lay pattern is a pattern, not a room

Designers write the lay in the location column: Entry – Checkered Lay, Running Bond, Stacked, Herringbone. Up to now, words like that weren't a surface Biddy recognised, so it carried them through as one — you'd end up with a surface called Checkered Lay on the entry, sitting beside the entry's actual floor, and a question asking whether you were bidding it.

A row that names nothing but the lay is the floor, laid that way. The pattern lands on the floor as its pattern, where it belongs and where your pricing multipliers already look for it. No extra surface, no question.

A checkerboard needs two tiles, and a designer writes that as two rows with the same location and two different products. Those stay as two selections on the one floor, both visible when you open the room — so you can see the beige and the blue without the floor being counted twice.

And a lay written next to a real surface — Shower Floor Herringbone — still goes exactly where it always did. The surface wins; the pattern just rides along with it.