Working offline — how SceneMatch keeps a production on your device

Sets are where connectivity goes to die. A stage with a metal roof, a basement location, a tunnel, a field two valleys from the nearest mast, a hotel WiFi that four departments are already sharing. The moment that matters most — a continuity question at the top of a take — is reliably the moment the bars disappear.

So SceneMatch does not assume a network. Being offline is a normal way to use it, not a fault it recovers from: the production lives on your device, and a day can be worked through start to finish with the radio off.

Everything you open is kept

There is nothing to switch on. As you move around a production, every page you open is written to a local copy on that device — characters, scenes, looks, the screenplay, shooting days, props, vehicles, animals, wardrobe, set dress, sets, locations, documents and the team list.

Open a page a second time and it renders from that local copy immediately, then quietly checks the server for changes in the background. That is why the app feels faster the more you use it — and it is the same mechanism that keeps it working when the check cannot happen at all.

Images follow the same rule. Thumbnails, continuity stills, character and actor portraits and production posters are all kept once they have been shown to you, in a store of their own kept separately per production. A look you scrolled past this morning is still there this afternoon in the tunnel.

The catch is in the word "open". Caching is a by-product of browsing, not a background download. A scene you have never looked at on this device was never saved on it, so with no signal that page simply comes up empty — and starting the app fresh at an address it has never been given before lands on the Offline screen. Which is exactly the problem the next section solves.

Cache a shooting day before you leave

When you know where tomorrow is going, you do not want to rely on having browsed the right pages.

Open Shooting days, find the day, open its ⋮ menu and choose Offline. A progress dialog opens and pulls the whole day down in four passes:

It is scoped to the day, not to the whole production: the scenes on the day's units, plus the scenes connected to them through continuity timelines — so you get the scene before and the scene after, which is what a continuity question usually turns out to be about.

Three practical notes:

• You have to be online to start it. The Offline action is greyed out with no signal, which is the one time it would be useless. Cache the day the night before, on the hotel WiFi, not in the van.
• Leave the dialog open until it finishes. The last pass is the slow one — it is downloading real photographs — and closing early stops it.
• Do it per device. The copy lives in the browser you did it in. Caching a day on your iPad does nothing for your phone.

What you can do with no signal

Anything that only needs reading works. Anything that needs the server to agree waits.

Photos, notes and script marks are the important ones. On set you are usually not editing the breakdown — you are shooting continuity stills, writing down what changed and marking up the pages for the next set-up, and those are the things that must not wait for a signal. Add them as you normally would. Each one is stored on the device with a small wifi-off icon — under a note it reads Saved on device, then Sending… once there is a network — and the moment connectivity returns the queue starts moving on its own: no button to press, no list to remember, and closing the app or reloading the page does not lose them.

The queue does need SceneMatch open to move, though. Close the app in the van and whatever you shot or wrote stays on the phone until you next open a production — and until then it is on your device only, so the rest of the crew cannot see it. Once you are back in signal, open the app for a moment and let it send.

Notes do this with a signal too. Saving one never waits on the server: the dialog closes at once, the note is in the list straight away, and it is sent in the background — which on a weak bar that comes and goes is the difference between writing the next note and watching a spinner. A few details worth knowing:

• The time on a note is when you wrote it, not when it finally reached the server. A note written in the basement at nine still says nine after it goes out at six.
• A bad line cannot save a note twice. When the signal drops after the note arrived but before the answer got back, your device sends it again — and SceneMatch recognises it as the same note.
• A note that has not been sent yet can be thrown away with no signal, from the notes' Delete mode. Deleting a note that is already on the server waits, like every other delete.
• If the server turns a note down — someone deleted the note you had changed while you were out of signal, say — you are told at the time, and the note stays in the list with a red warning and the reason, so the words are never lost. Tap it to fix it and save it again, or delete it.

Marking up the script with no signal

Screenplay annotations queue the same way. Highlight a line, underline a cue, drop a note on a passage or point it at the coat it needs, and the mark is painted at once. Until the server has it, a small icon sits right after the marked text — the same wifi-off as a queued photo or note, an hourglass while it is on its way — and hovering it says so. The mark itself keeps its own look, so a yellow highlight still reads as yellow.

• A note mark takes its notes straight away. You do not have to wait for the mark to reach the server before writing on it: the notes wait for their mark, then follow it. Throw the mark away before it has gone and its notes go with it.
• References to items you already have work too. Start a reference and attach a prop, a vehicle, a set dress or wardrobe item from the list on your device, add more to it, take one off again. Creating a brand new item from that menu is a form the server has to answer, so it waits for a signal.
• Changing your mind before it has gone costs nothing. Toggle a mark off before it was sent and it is simply dropped, and taking the only item off a new reference drops the reference. A mark that is on its way cannot be taken back for those few seconds — you are told to try again once it has landed.
• Removing a mark the server already has also works offline. It disappears from the page at once and is removed everywhere once you are back.
• Queued marks show wherever marks are listed. A note mark made offline is listed, with its icon, in the scene's script notes; a reference is listed on the item's own page under its script references.
• A mark the server refuses stays on the page with a red warning in place of the icon, and hovering it gives the reason — most often that the item it referenced was deleted in the meantime. Toggle it off to discard it.
• The same bad-line protection applies. A mark whose answer was lost is sent again and recognised as the same one; it is never painted twice.

Everything else is hidden rather than broken. If the New, Edit or Export button is not where you expect it, that is the app telling you it currently has no way to save what you would do — not a permission problem.

How SceneMatch decides you are offline

There is an Offline badge in the header, and it is worth knowing that it does not simply mirror the phone's own connection icon. That icon reports whether a network interface is up, which on set is wrong in both directions: a VPN or a captive portal can show a perfectly healthy connection that reaches nothing, and a webview coming back from the background can insist you are offline on a device that is fine.

So SceneMatch decides by evidence instead. A request that came back from the server proves you are online. A request that never completed is a suspicion, checked with one cheap probe before anything is locked down. It is why the app stays fully usable on a production VPN, and why it does not offer you an action it cannot actually perform on a hotel WiFi that has stopped forwarding.

The things that are not obvious

The local copy is per browser, per device. It is not your account following you around. A day cached on the iPad is on that iPad.

Losing access removes the copy. When you leave a production, or it is deleted, or your access is withdrawn, its local data and its images are dropped from the device the next time the app runs. Offline access is not a way around being removed from a production.

Storage is finite, and the oldest photos go first. Browsers cap how much a site may keep. When the cap is reached, SceneMatch frees room from the production you are least likely to need — a wrapped show you have not opened in weeks — before touching the one in front of you. Anything dropped is re-fetched next time you have signal, so nothing is lost; it just is not there while you have none.

Cache the day again if the day changed. The copy is a snapshot. If the 1st AD re-orders tomorrow while you are already out of signal, you are reading yesterday's plan. When you get a bar back, the app catches up by itself — but if a day was rewritten late, run Offline on it once more before you head out.