Home / The Casebook of the Site Itself
📜 Changelog
What has changed at Elementary Tools, entry by entry — newest first, grouped by the feature it touched. The site is worked on continually; this page is its casebook.
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Look & feel
- A more polished finish across every tool and game page: new display headings, raised cards with soft shadows, sculpted buttons, inset text fields that light up when you type, and a glassy title bar in the full-screen tools. It works in all eight themes.
- Full-screen tools now open with a short line saying what they do, and their input sits on its own raised panel.
Tools
- New: Deduction Studio, the next deduction board. Paste any text (a mystery, an email, a strange situation) and Holmes investigates in three stages: observation, with every clue quoted and highlighted in your own text; reasoning, which tests competing explanations against every clue and strikes out the impossible; and a cross-examination by Mycroft. You get a verdict with an honest confidence, a board tracing the reasoning from clue to conclusion, the test that would settle it, and the chance to question Holmes about the result. The original Deduction Board is unchanged.
- New: Porlock's Book Cipher. Encode and decode book ciphers against a passage from the canon or any text you paste, follow Holmes step by step as he cracks Porlock's message in The Valley of Fear, read the hidden note in The Gloria Scott, and flash the candle code from The Red Circle.
- New: Sherlock Holmes Reading Order. All sixty stories in publication order, in the order the cases happened, or as a twelve-story starter path, with a checklist that remembers what you have read and a link to share your progress.
- The Dancing Men page is now a working translator: type a message to see it in dancing men, click the dancers to decode one, copy a link to send to a friend, and read the full A–Z alphabet chart. There is also a guide to how Holmes cracked the code in the story.
- Tool and game pages gained guides, common questions, and links to related games. Sherlock's Mind Palace explains the method of loci and how to build your own palace.
Stories & Games
- New 3D game: 221B Baker Street. Holmes is out, and Mrs Hudson needs seven things found in his famously cluttered sitting room before he gets back: the Persian slipper full of tobacco, the cigars in the coal-scuttle, the letters pinned by a jack-knife, the V.R. in bullet-holes and more. Every object comes with its line from the stories. Walk the room in first person by firelight, with Baker Street in the fog outside the windows. Works on phones too.
- New 3D game: The Speckled Band. Investigate Helen Stoner's bedroom and Dr Roylott's room at Stoke Moran by dusk (the bell-rope that rings nothing, the ventilator, the bed clamped to the floor, the safe and its saucer of milk), answer Holmes's questions, then keep the night vigil in the dark and strike with the cane when the low whistle comes.
- The Game Room is now grouped into 3D games, arcade and puzzle games, and mystery and trivia games.
- Story pages link to every game built on that story, so The Hound of the Baskervilles leads straight to the Grimpen Moor and the Hansom Cab Chase.
- The Characters page now lists more than sixty names from the stories (clients, culprits, Scotland Yard and allies) and answers common questions, such as how tall Holmes is and who his parents were.
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Tools
- Sherlock's Mind Palace, redesigned as an architect's floor plan: walled rooms with parquet floors and doorways, corridors with footprints marking the route, a compass rose, and rooms that list their memories as you zoom in.
- Memories can now be edited in place, and ✨ Vivify writes a vivid scene for any single memory. Rooms get an emblem picker, and the plans can be saved as a file.
- Walks are now memory by memory: the room is spotlit, you recall each item before revealing it and grade yourself, and the end card lists what you missed. The palace remembers your last walk and suggests when to walk it again.
Stories & Games
- Pigeon Post, redrawn: a hand-painted London by moonlight (St Paul's, the Westminster clock tower, rooftops of lit windows), brick chimney stacks trailing soot, fog rolling in front, and a proper pigeon with a beating wing and Watson's dispatch tied to its leg.
- The flight now follows a route to Baker Street, with landmarks along the way. A crash scatters feathers, and the sound can be switched off from the top bar.
- Moriarty's Minions, redrawn by hand: the Professor's web now hangs over a moonlit Baker Street, and his garrotters, masked cracksmen and top-hatted lieutenants lower themselves into it on silk threads. Holmes holds the pavement below in his deerstalker and Inverness cape, behind balconies piled with his case-books that chip away under fire.
- New in the chase: minions drop on their threads to strike, Colonel Moran drifts over in a balloon with his air-gun, and every fourth web the Professor comes down himself, a spider at the heart of it, head swaying as in the story. Watson's revolver, the violin and Mrs Hudson's tea fall as power-ups, and the sound can be switched off from the top bar.
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Stories & Games
- The Grimpen Moor, rebuilt in full detail: weathered granite tors with their boulder fields, tussock grass that moves in the wind, heather, bracken and gorse, drystone walls, a prehistoric stone row, old tracks, drifting ground fog, torn cloud across the moon, and moonlight casting real shadows.
- Baskerville Hall now stands battlemented with its twin towers, lit windows and ivy, at the end of a true yew alley whose moor gate stands open. Merripit House smokes from its chimney with Stapleton's nets by the door, the watcher's hut is a ring of stone under a fallen roof, and the tin mine's engine house rises from an island in the mire. The island is firm ground, as in the story.
- The hound is finally a hound: a black beast outlined in phosphorescent fire, galloping across the ridge. A ✨ High / ⚡ Fast graphics switch sits in the top bar.
- The Gaslight Study, rebuilt in full detail: a partners' desk with tooled leather and a banker's lamp, a bookcase of some two hundred volumes, an open japanned safe, a black-marble fireplace with a living fire, a gasolier and sconces, a twelve-pane sash window onto moonlit London rooftops, velvet drapes, a Persian rug, and real shadows from the moon and the lamp.
- Evidence now glints as it catches the light instead of glowing; furniture blocks your path; and a ✨ High / ⚡ Fast graphics switch sits in the top bar for slower machines.
- Baker Street Nights, rebuilt in full detail: Georgian terraces with sash windows, fanlit doors, basement railings and chimney pots, and lived-in rooms glowing behind the glass — 221B's blind even carries the famous silhouette. The gas lamps now shine in rain-wet setts and puddles, drizzle glints in their light, fog rolls down the street, and a church clock glows at the far end.
- The hansom has a proper horse and a cabman who watches you pass, Speedwell's has a real shopfront with loaves in the window, the walk now starts facing down the street, and a ✨ High / Medium / Low graphics switch sits in the top bar.
- Hansom Cab Chase is now a proper Holmes pursuit. "Follow that cab!" You drive from behind the horse down foggy, gaslit London streets, keep the suspect's cab in sight, and close in until Watson has read its number one figure at a time. Four cases from the canon run from the famous No. 2704 on Regent Street to one of Moriarty's agents on Ludgate Hill, and then the Professor's men keep coming.
- Everything in the chase is painted by hand in code: hansoms and their horses, omnibuses, brewers' drays, constables, a stray cow and a flock of sheep, Regency shopfronts, Brixton villas, the Strand's theatres, and St Paul's over the rooftops. Crack the whip to close the gap, gather the clues Holmes spots on the road, and press Space when his deduction is ready to lift the fog and take a shortcut.
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Accounts
- Signing in is now required to use any of the site's AI — the board, every tool, and voice calls. It stays free and takes seconds; signing in also raises the daily allowance over the old anonymous tier.
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OOP Deduction Lab
- A new tool where Alan Kay's idea is taken literally: every clue becomes an object with its own AI mind — it introduces itself in character, states a belief, proposes joint inferences, deliberates in recorded transcripts, and votes on the verdict, dissent preserved.
- The lab convenes on the fast Lite model by default (a case is a dozen calls) with a ⚙️ to choose another; one-click starter cases, Ctrl+Enter to convene, a kept draft, a message counter on the record, a live API-call and token meter, and Copy/Download/Print for the whole session.
- Mycroft now knows the committee's outcome — verdict, votes, dissent, every deliberation — in both his text chat and his telephone calls; two buttons under the verdict ask his view or ring him directly.
- Every item can be put to Mycroft: 🗨️ icons on each object card, each line of the deliberation record, the verdict, every vote, and the dissent — spoken straight into a live call, or opening his chat when the line is idle.
Deduction Board
- The old Object-Oriented mode is retired: it duplicated the board's reasoning with keyword matching, and its one honest ambition — clues as thinking objects — now lives properly in the OOP Deduction Lab.
Site
- Scrollbars now dress for the occasion: thin, quiet, and coloured by the active theme's own borders — on every page, every tool, and the board.
- The AI's occasional passing fault ("Internal error") no longer fails a request: every tool quietly retries it, and the OOP Lab waits it out mid-committee and presses on.
- No AI call without your say-so: the board's technique hint now comes free from the deduction's own reading (one call fewer per Deduce), and the 🧵 coverage check runs only when you open 🧾 How I read it.
- Fixed: deducing a new case over an old one no longer flashes the previous board for a blink between the reading animation and the fresh clues.
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Deduction Board
- Every deduction now begins with a logician's reading: the account's intent, subjects, objects, facts, hidden assumptions and formal syllogisms are extracted — and the account rephrased — before Holmes deduces, so the clues and conclusion start from parsed logic rather than raw prose.
- The reading now reasons like Holmes end to end: it reflects through his catalogued techniques, hunts the unstated assumptions (who does what, and what each action leaves behind), pins the goal's necessary conditions, and tests every option against them — an easy option that fails the goal is eliminated, not recommended.
- The board now knows who is asking: the name and bio from your profile (Settings) travel with every reading, deduction, and Deduction Space build, so a first-person case is read as YOUR case — subjects, assumptions, and verdicts name you, not "the writer".
- A coverage guard now checks the reading against your account, sentence by sentence: 🧾 How I read it shows a 🧵 thread-by-thread list, and any sentence the reading may have dropped is flagged so you can reword and deduce again.
- The 🚦 options test is now always part of the reading: when a case names no alternatives, the leading candidate answers are derived and tested — a course of action must meet the goal's requirements, a candidate explanation stands until a fact contradicts it.
- Clues with a second reading toggle in one click: click the ⇄ orb itself to adopt or return the alternate (right-click still works).
- See that breakdown yourself: the 🧾 "How I read it" button in the technique hint (or Case ▸ How the case was read) opens the full brief — and it travels with saved and shared cases.
Deduction Space
- "Build from my clues" now reads the whole case before inferring: the account as you wrote it, the logician's brief (goal, conditions, tested options, Holmes's methods), the clues with their evidence markings, and the board's own verdict — so its rival readings argue with the full record, not just the clue labels.
- New "Deduction Space only" mode: hide the case clues and conclusion to study the inferences alone — threads to hidden nodes tidy themselves away.
- The Deduction Space window can now be dragged anywhere by its title strip, and the board no longer pans or zooms beneath it.
Site
- Fixed: /deduction-board/ answered 403 on the live site — a stray folder on the host was shadowing the route. Routes can no longer be shadowed, and addresses with a trailing slash now serve the page directly.
- This changelog page — every visible change to the site, by date and feature, linked from the footer.
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Voice & Consultants
- Every AI feature now knows the real date and time, so conversations and deductions reckon from today rather than from the model's training data.
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Deduction Board
- Alternate clue readings: clues that honestly admit a second interpretation carry a ⇄ twin orb — adopt the other reading and the verdict re-weighs itself. Each configuration keeps its own conclusion, so switching back is instant.
- Deduction Space nodes are draggable, and building inferences now shows staged progress with a synapse animation.
- A markings key under Help explains every badge, pip, and thread on the board.
Voice & Consultants
- Voice calls no longer end at ten minutes: sessions carry across connections seamlessly, with context preserved.
- Professor Moriarty received a proper male voice, and invented consultants are now cast with a fitting voice and gender by the AI itself.
Tools
- Analysis tools (Moriarty's Web, Reichenbach Timeline, Induction Engine, Eliminate the Impossible) keep a drawer of past analyses — reopen any of them instantly, no AI call spent.
Accounts
- Clearer usage meters on the account page, including an unlimited band for administrators.
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Deduction Board
- Case files: every board autosaves and resumes; save, rename, duplicate and share cases by link.
- Nine starter cases and a Case of the Day — authored mysteries that open instantly with the board already built.
- The chain of reasoning: click the verdict to see its derivation step by step, each step lighting the clues it stands on.
- Contradiction audit: red tension threads mark clue pairs that cannot both be true, with resolve actions.
- Evidence markings: every clue carries a kind (testimony, physical, motive, alibi, absence, observation) and a weight the verdict must honour.
- A sketch layer: pencil strokes and sticky notes that save, share and undo with the case.
- Undo and redo across the whole board (Ctrl+Z / Ctrl+Y).
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Voice & Consultants
- Live captions on voice calls: the character's words stream into the chat as they are spoken, typewriter-style, paced to the audio.
Tools
- Interactive canvases arrived in the tools: Moriarty's Web became a draggable argument graph, Toby's Trail a winding trail map, and the Reichenbach Timeline a pannable ribbon.
Themes & Design
- A proper masthead: brand, a canon epigraph that changes daily, and a sticky navigation rail.
- Character profiles rebuilt as dossiers — full-size portrait beside the reading, with quick facts.
- The image gallery: every illustration on the site in one place, viewable full size.
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Themes & Design
- Three new themes — Scarlet, Blueprint, and Gaslight — joined the five originals, every one styling the whole site and the board's own canvas.
- All full-screen tools received the shared title bar and status bar, with theme switching everywhere.
Stories & Games
- Story Play began: each canon story carries its own hand-built game and analysis tool.
Deduction Board
- Right-click context menus, proximity-revealed node buttons, and complete verdict text on the board.
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Admin
- The admin console: dashboard, live visitor view with country flags, member management, and health checks.
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Accounts
- Supporter subscriptions with clear benefits on the account and support pages.
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Deduction Board
- The board became an application: a title bar with menus and a status bar with live case vitals.
Stories & Games
- Three new arcade games: The Grimpen Moor, The Seventeen Steps, and The Torn Photograph.
- The Gaslight Study gained a reconstruction finale and smoother investigation flow.
Tools
- The Think Like Sherlock campaign: a seven-case training curriculum with AI-graded examinations.
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Site
- The great expansion: the character roster, the Lore Codex, techniques of deduction, the reading room essays, and the Baker Street chat widget with Holmes and Watson.
- New tools for goals, writing, and analysis — including Watson's Case Files and Toby's Trail.
Something here you have not tried yet? The 🔎 Deduction Board is where most of it lives — or browse all the tools.