SnowSignal v1.0.0-beta.4 — seasonal polish

[DawsonCodes]

SnowSignal v1.0.0-beta.4 — seasonal-polish beta (not a stable release)

The last planned visual-polish pass for a while, on the existing transparent, deterministic engine. No engine changes, no backend, no framework, no build step, no analytics/tracking, no new runtime dependencies. Stays fully static under GitHub Pages /snowsignal/; all beta.2/beta.3 preferences, saved/recent locations, and share links keep working.

What changed

1. Seasonal palette (Appearance → Seasonal palette): Auto / Winter / Spring / Summer / Fall / Custom.
   • Auto follows the location's latitude + local date (Southern Hemisphere inverts; browser date fallback before a location is chosen) and shows a read-only Auto palette: <Season> badge.
   • Restrained accents: Winter icy blue/cyan, Spring soft pink/lavender, Summer fresh green, Fall amber/orange, each with a matching ambient glow. Persisted in localStorage.
   • The existing constrained hue slider stays; adjusting it switches the palette to Custom, and Reset restores Auto. Semantic warning/success/error colors are fixed and never follow the accent.
2. Time-of-day ambient intensity (Auto only): subtle day/evening/night variation of the ambient glow and particle brightness from the location's local time (browser fallback) — brighter by day, softer/slightly warmer evening, deeper/dimmer night. Not separate themes.
3. Atmosphere refinement: varied drifting snow, swaying spring petals, firefly-like summer motes (restrained brightness pulses), slowly rotating fall leaves. Low counts, pointer-events: none, no layout impact, disabled under reduced motion, tuned for light & dark.
4. Settings-tab motion polish: ~160ms fade + 4px slide-in of the selected panel and a smoothly animated active-tab underline. Keyboard focus, tab semantics, Arrow/Home/End nav, focus trap, Escape/X/click-outside close all preserved; switching tabs doesn't replay result animations; zeroed under reduced motion.
5. Hourly forecast scrolling: smooth horizontal scroll, subtler scrollbar, optional desktop-only prev/next arrows, no horizontal page overflow.
6. Empty state: clearer prompt ("Search a location to check tonight's forecast.") with one restrained seasonal icon.

Compatibility & persistence

Preserves theme, accent hue, atmosphere, motion, temperature unit, saved/recent locations, school settings, estimate counter, clean URLs, explicit share-link generation, beta.2/beta.3 share-link restoration, geolocation friendly-label fallback, and relative paths under /snowsignal/. New seasonalPalette preference added to localStorage (defaults to auto).

Tests

node --test → 112 passing (was 94). New/updated coverage: seasonal-palette resolution + persistence, Southern-Hemisphere inversion, Custom-hue persistence, manual-adjust→Custom and Reset→Auto end-states, daypart bucketing, tab semantics, atmosphere/tab/scroll CSS guards, semantic colors independent of the accent, beta.2/beta.3 share-link restoration, and the beta.4 version stamp.

Manual checks

Served locally: ES-module MIME text/javascript, CSS text/css, all assets resolve via relative paths; no console errors or debug leftovers in source.

Limitations / notes

• Daypart/season use the location's UTC offset + latitude from the forecast (browser fallback before a forecast loads).
• The accent stays on the constrained hue slider by design (no raw color picker); status colors are intentionally fixed.
• Seasonal CSS :has()-based pill highlighting needs a modern browser; selection remains fully functional without it.