A tour of the workspace
Everything in IngestDeck happens inside one window with a stable frame around it: a top bar that switches modes and controls runs, a live Disks rail on the left, your workflow in the middle, and an activity log along the bottom. This page walks the whole frame so the rest of the guide can say "the top bar" or "the log panel" and you know exactly what's meant.
The top bar
The top bar is mission control. From left to right:
- Mode toggle — Simple / Advanced / History. Simple and Advanced are the two working modes; switching between them never loses state — your Advanced tabs keep living in the background while you dump a card in Simple. History is a momentary action, not a third mode: it opens the global run-history browser as a sheet over whatever you're doing (see Results & media tools).
- Run controls. A Run button starts the queue (Simple) or the active tab's graph (Advanced). Next to it sits the auto-run button — labelled Watch in Simple and Arm in Advanced — which puts the workflow into Watch mode. While a run is active, Advanced also shows a Pause button (Simple offers Stop only).
- Account badge. A status dot plus text — Subscription active, Trial active, or Offline license active — and your account e-mail. Clicking it offers Sign in / Sign out and access refresh. Details in Account & working offline.
The Disks rail
The left rail lists every mounted volume, live. It's the same rail in both modes and it's the source of truth for what's plugged in — the instant a disk mounts, unmounts, renames, changes role or fills up, every row, node and panel in the app updates. No refresh button exists because none is needed.
- Disk rows show the volume's name, its capacity, and a role badge (a small up-arrow for Source, down-arrow for Destination; no badge means unassigned).
- Expand a disk with its disclosure triangle to browse folders Finder-style — the expanded tree live-updates via the filesystem (add files in the Finder and they appear here), and the watching never blocks an eject.
- Hover a row for quick actions: an eject button, an identify button, and a ••• menu that opens the disk detail panel (rename, role, format, speed test). Right-click offers the same.
- Drag anything out — whole disks, folders or single files — onto Sources, Destinations, or Advanced node cards. Finder-style selection works here too: click, ⌘-click, ⇧-click, arrow keys, and type-ahead (start typing a folder's name to jump to it, diacritics ignored).
- Collapse the rail with the header button when you want the full width for a big graph.
Roles gate drops everywhere. A disk remembered as a Source can only land in source slots; a Destination only in destination slots; unassigned disks go either way. Wrong-way drops bounce with a toast. Assign roles from the disk detail panel — see Disk management.
The workflow area
The middle of the window is whichever mode you're in:
- Simple mode — three columns: the Disks rail, a source-over-destination editor with the action panel, and the Jobs queue. Covered in Simple mode.
- Advanced mode — a tab bar of durable projects, a workflow bar with Build / Results / Info segments, and the node canvas with its detail panels. Covered in Advanced mode.
The activity log
Along the bottom lives a collapsible activity log — a running, timestamped timeline of everything operationally important: run started, files copied, verification results, disks mounted and ejected, formats, errors with their technical detail. When something goes wrong, this is where the full story is.
- Expand / collapse it with the toggle in its header; it's resizable.
- Older logs — each app session writes its own log file; the Older logs button lists previous sessions so you can read yesterday's run.
- Export — save the current (or an older) session's log as a JSON file, handy for support or production paperwork.
- Clear — clears the current session view.
Toast vs. log. IngestDeck tells you about outcomes twice: a short, human toast at the top of the window ("Copy complete — 214 files, 89.2 GB", or why a drop was refused), and the full technical detail in the activity log. If a toast flew by too fast, the log has the long version.
Outside the window
- Dock progress. While a run is active, the Dock icon carries a progress overlay — you can watch an offload from another Space without bringing the window forward.
- Global message banner. Important app-wide notices (for example a paused workflow or a pending device sync) appear as a banner above the top bar until resolved.
- Sleep prevention. While any run is active, IngestDeck holds off macOS idle sleep so an unattended offload never dozes off mid-copy. The display may still sleep, and a deliberate Apple-menu Sleep is respected. Logged in the activity log either way.
- Quit protection. Pressing ⌘Q or closing the window while a run is active asks first — you can cancel, or stop the run and quit. An idle quit is instant. See Settings & app behavior.
- The iOS monitor. Everything the workspace shows about a running job is mirrored, read-only, to your phone and watch — see iOS monitor.
The Settings window
App-wide preferences live in a native Settings window (⌘,): appearance, the default duplicate policy for new jobs and nodes, your Mac's display name for the monitor, the PDF report builder, thumbnail cache, and the analytics opt-in. The full walkthrough is in Settings & app behavior.