Activity Feed
The Activity Feed on Desktop is a time-ordered list of the six most recent edits across your whole project. Documents, outline nodes, lore entries, and plotlines all stream into the same list, sorted by modification time descending. Each entry is clickable — click a document edit and you land in the editor. Click a lore entry edit and you land on that entry. Timestamps refresh on a 30-second heartbeat, so “Edited 20 minutes ago” becomes “Edited 21 minutes ago” while you’re looking at it. It’s the closest thing Desktop has to a pulse check on the project as a whole — when you open Ishvana after being away for a few days, the Activity Feed is the view that tells you what you were last doing and where to pick up.
What shows up in the feed
Section titled “What shows up in the feed”Four entity types are tracked: writing documents, outline nodes, Legendry entries, and plotlines. Everything else is invisible to the feed. Settings changes, formula edits, Magic System rulesets, research bookmarks, marketing assets — none of those show up here. The feed is specifically about the creative content of your project, not the configuration around it.
Each entry displays:
- Entity type icon — document, outline, lore, or plot
- Title — the name of the thing that was edited
- Module context — which book or category it belongs to
- Relative timestamp — “Edited 45 minutes ago,” “Edited 2 hours ago,” “Edited yesterday”
- Direct link — clicking navigates to the item in its home module
How it’s computed
Section titled “How it’s computed”Desktop queries the four tables and pulls the ten most recent rows from each, merges the results, sorts by modified_at descending, and returns the top 20. The feed panel displays the top six by default, with a “See all” link that expands to the full 20-item list in a modal.
There’s no separate activity log table. Ishvana doesn’t keep a history of every edit — it just reads the modified_at timestamp that each entity already stores, and computes the feed live on every Desktop load. That means the feed is always current and never goes stale, but it also means it only shows the most recent edit to each entity. If you edit a document five times in one afternoon, it still appears once in the feed, not five times.
This is the right tradeoff for what the feed is for. You don’t need to see every keystroke. You need to see “you were working on this document” with enough recency to pick up where you left off.
Timestamp refresh
Section titled “Timestamp refresh”The relative timestamps update on a 30-second heartbeat driven by the Desktop tab’s own timer. That means the first time you glance at an entry, it says “Edited 10 minutes ago,” and if you’re still looking at it 30 seconds later, it’ll update to “Edited 11 minutes ago” without any action from you.
The heartbeat is also what drives the staleness warning on the sidebar — if the Desktop data is more than 30 minutes old, the sidebar shows a quiet “refresh recommended” indicator. The feed timestamps are part of the same refresh cycle.
The “See all” expansion
Section titled “The “See all” expansion”Click the “See all” link under the feed and a modal opens with the full 20-item list. Useful when you’ve been away from the project for longer than a couple of hours and the top six entries don’t cover enough ground. The modal shows the same information per entry, plus a “Jump to” button that does exactly what the inline click does.
You can’t filter the feed by entity type. You can’t search within it. You can’t restrict it to a specific book. The expanded view is just “more of the same list.” If you need something more sophisticated — like “show me every edit to this specific book in the last week” — that’s what the module-level views are for. The feed is a glance surface, not a history browser.
What the feed is for
Section titled “What the feed is for”Three specific uses:
-
Returning to the project after a break. You’ve been away for a day or a week. You open Ishvana and you don’t quite remember what you were last working on. The feed shows the last six edits and you pick one to jump back into.
-
Seeing what other modules have been touching. You’ve been in the editor for two hours and you haven’t looked at the Legendry or Plot Studio. The feed shows whether anything changed in those modules — maybe you remember making a Legendry edit earlier that conflicts with a scene you just wrote.
-
Context switching within a writing session. You’re working on Book One, you stop to check something in Book Two, you come back an hour later and you need to remember exactly which chapter of Book One you were in. The feed points you there.
None of these are revolutionary uses. They’re the small, invisible things that make a writing tool feel like it has memory instead of amnesia. You don’t notice the feed when it’s working. You notice it when it’s missing — when you open a different writing app after being away, and the app has no idea where you were, and you have to rummage.
What the feed is not
Section titled “What the feed is not”It’s not a changelog. It doesn’t tell you what changed in each edit, only that an edit happened. It’s not a collaboration log — Ishvana is a single-user desktop app, and the feed doesn’t attribute edits to anyone. It’s not a version history either — that’s what the document forking system is for.
It’s just what was touched, and when. That’s all it needs to be.