Devlog 3 — The floating glass popup and a full day chasing a black box
The popup window itself was the easy part. It spawns at my cursor, reuses itself on repeat triggers instead of opening a new one every time, and the captured text streams into it with a little typewriter effect. That whole thing took maybe 20 minutes.
Then I tried to make it look like frosted glass and that ate the entire rest of the day.
Every time I turned on Tauri’s built in blur effect the window just rendered as a solid black box instead. I went around in circles on this for hours. I killed the native window shadow which fixed one version of the black box but it came right back the moment I re added the blur. I tried a community plugin that promised glass on Windows turned out to be Mac only. Then I found a github repo with a slick demo video claiming real glass, read the actual source and it was just CSS faking it. At that point I genuinely thought maybe its just not possible on Windows.
Then I found the thing that explained so much of my pain. My CSS file had never been imported anywhere in the app. Not once. Every single style change I made all session had just been silently ignored, no error no warning nothing. I just sat there for a second. All that why isnt this working was me editing a file the app wasnt even reading.
Even after fixing that Tauri’s built in blur still refused to work so I stopped using its wrapper entirely and called the underlying Windows blur library directly from a small Rust command. It worked immediately. Real native glass, no black box, first try. After a whole day of that seeing it finally render was such a relief.
One more dumb one ill note so I dont forget it. My rounded corners werent showing up and it turned out the browser paints the page background across the whole window and ignores the corner radius if you put it on the root element. Moved it onto a normal div and it was fine.
Next up is hooking the actual Groq API call in so the popup shows a real summary instead of just the copied text.