Mockup · not the repo · 31 Jul 26

Two things the cover is missing.

A “To Reader” affordance so a note about the app doesn’t require opening a page first, and the page-turn swipe, bound to the hero image only. Tokens, type and furniture are copied from the shipped shell; every control below is live.

1 · Where “To Reader” lives

Baseline + three options

Current · 390 × 844

2 · Swipe, bound to the hero only

Live · real thresholds

Swipe lab · drag the hero image (thumb or mouse)

Gesture in progress

dx0 dy0

Horizontal travelthreshold > 64px

Vertical driftveto at ≥ 48px

Idle — drag the hero image

No gestures yet.

The open question · back-swipe from the cover

Forward (drag left) turns to the lead item. Backwards (drag right) has no obvious destination — the cover is the first page. Try both and pick.

Recommendation

(a) do nothing. A wrap makes the issue a loop with no edge, so “where am I” stops having an answer — and the cover is the one screen that should always mean the top. It also collides with the iOS edge-swipe-back gesture at exactly the screen edge where a right-drag begins. The inert version still teaches the rule: the hero nudges and springs back, which reads as “nothing that way” rather than as a dead control.

Prototype instrumentation, not a proposal — the shipped plate does not move.

The rule being tested

Armed

.cover-hero only — a small, non-scrolling image region. Same reasoning as #itemPlate on an item page.

Dead

Everything below the hero. The “Also in this issue” list in the frame is marked and instrumented: swipe it and the log records the ignore, so the failure case is visible rather than assumed.

Thresholds

|dx| > 64 && |dy| < 48

Fidelity. :root and body.theme-studio are copied verbatim from the shell. Eksell Display is a local webfont that cannot load here, so the masthead falls back to Fraunces and reads a little warmer and narrower than the real thing. Cover photograph is CSS-generated (duotone plus SVG turbulence), not a hotlinked image; clamp() viewport units are swapped for container units so the 390 and 1024 frames both size correctly inside one page.
Implementation note for option C. .cover-lead is an <a> wrapping the whole lead, including the “Open the page” action. A button cannot nest inside an anchor, so C requires lifting the action out into a sibling .lead-actions row. A and B need no structural change.
Finding for the swipe work. The hero needs touch-action: pan-y. Without it iOS can claim the horizontal gesture for back-navigation near the screen edge, and the listener never sees the travel. #itemPlate may want the same declaration.
Desktop quirk, reproduced not fixed. Switch the frame to 1024. With an image cover the lead lives inside the hero, so .cover-body holds only .also — and the shipped 1.7fr 1fr grid then drops the list into column one, still wearing the left hairline that was meant to separate it from the lead, leaving column two empty. That is what the shell does today; it is copied here rather than corrected, and it wants a separate look.
Not touched. Nothing in ~/code/jc-review and nothing in Working/mockups/ was modified. This file is the whole output.