Work offline, and pick it back up
Asks made without signal queue up and send in order, exactly once. Jobs keep running with the app closed, and the session follows you across devices.
Playgrounds and field trips are where the signal goes. Sunny is built for that being normal, not exceptional.
No signal: asks queue
Ask something with no connection and it doesn't fail. The status line reads offline · 2 queued, and your ask appears as a dashed bubble marked QUEUED · SENDS WHEN BACK, with its place in line and a Cancel.
Four things hold:
- Order is kept. They send in the order you made them. If you log an inhaler use and then file a permission slip, the second one arrives as the follow-up it was.
- Exactly once. Every queued ask carries its own key, minted when you queued it and never re-minted. A flaky reconnect can retry as many times as it likes and still produce one job, not two.
- Cancel is always there, including while it's retrying. Retry is automatic, with a backing-off delay, so you never have to babysit it.
- Photos queue too. A photo attached to a queued ask is compressed and stored on the device with it, so it survives the app being closed or killed and the days an ask might sit parked in a bag.
The moment you're back, the queue drains and each bubble fills in solid.
Jobs keep running with the app closed
An ask runs as a job on our servers. The live view you're watching is a window onto it, not the job itself. Close the app, lose the signal, let the phone kill the app in the background: the job carries on.
Come back and it's simply there: the receipt at whatever step it reached, or finished, with any draft waiting for you. Reconnecting picks the stream up exactly where it left off, with no gap and no repeated steps.
If you want a job to stop, Stop on the Working card cancels it. It asks a second time first, because stopping work you're waiting on deserves a second tap. The receipt persists either way, marked as cancelled by you.
The session follows you
The conversation lives on the server, keyed to you and your school. That means:
- The same thread on your phone, the office iPad and the web app.
- Nothing lost to an app kill, a reinstall, or your login quietly refreshing overnight.
- Approve a draft on one device and it goes solid on the other within a few seconds, without anyone refreshing.
When you open Sunny after being away, anything that arrived meanwhile sits below a while you were away line, and you land at that line rather than at the bottom of the history.
The overnight shape of it
Hand off the newsletter at 9pm. Sunny gathers the week's photos and room logs, writes the draft, checks the names against the roster, and finishes overnight. At 7:15 the brief is waiting, the draft is in Ready for you, and you read it with your coffee and approve it at 7:43.
Nothing sent while you were asleep. That's the whole design.
Related articles
- Sunny's tray: where the work waits
Sunny opens on a tray of work, drafts waiting for you, jobs running, a few suggestions, and what you can ask for.
- Work receipts: what Sunny did, and who approved it
Every job Sunny runs leaves one receipt, the steps it took, what it read, the outcome, and the name of the person who approved it.
- Scan a paper form
Photograph a permission slip, an allergy form or a handwritten note. Sunny reads it, shows you the fields it's unsure about, and files it once you approve.
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Recurring work and notifications
Set a job once ("every Friday at three, draft the newsletter") and control when Sunny is allowed to interrupt you.
Scan a paper form
Photograph a permission slip, an allergy form or a handwritten note. Sunny reads it, shows you the fields it's unsure about, and files it once you approve.