"You've learned the parts in nine tracks. Here's one real app holding all of them at once."
One App, Every Track
Cinder — the desktop creative tool Dad and I shipped — is the whole quest standing in one place. Walk it against what you've learned. Foundations: it's a Rust core plus a system webview, not a bundled browser. Scaffold: it lives in a monorepo at apps/cinder/ with its native half in src-tauri/, and yes, it hit the macOS dev-binary focus bug. Bridge: a small set of typed commands, consolidated behind one backend client so the frontend never scatters raw calls. State & events: managed state in the core, and — because the producer was a separate process — a WebSocket for streaming rather than a Channel.
The Hard-Won Half
The middle tracks are where Cinder's scars live. Windows: the objc2 frontmost-activation fix, and an always-on-top experiment that broke keyboard focus and got recorded as a learning. Security: a capabilities file granting exactly store, clipboard-manager, and window-state — no filesystem, no shell — a one-glance audit of everything it can touch. Plugins: those three, each earning its place via the three-surface rule, with the store plugin chosen specifically because macOS WKWebView localStorage lied in the bundled app. Every one of those was a real afternoon, now a callout you got for free.
What Cinder Doesn't Do — and Where You Go Next
Mobile: Cinder is desktop-macOS-only, so it never used Tauri's iOS/Android reach — that track taught Tauri's capability, not Cinder's. Ship: it builds to a signed macOS .app with the window-state polish that reopens it right where you left it beside Photoshop. That's the arc — the same two-process idea from lesson one, carried all the way to a signed, shipping native app.
Where to go from here: Rust gets its own quest at /cwk-quests/rust-quest when you want to go past the survival kit. And Cinder — the app you've read all quest — becomes the subject of the optional Ember & Cinder Quest at /cwk-quests/ember-cinder-quest, where the engine (Ember), the workspace (Cinder), and the Pippa brain fuse into one creative stack; this Tauri shell was a foundation it builds on. Beyond that, the craft deepens in the directions this quest only touched — authoring your own plugins, taking an app genuinely mobile, hardening the isolation pattern. But you don't need any of that to start. You have the whole loop now: scaffold, bridge, state, windows, security, plugins, ship. Go build something small and real, and let it teach you the rest.