Dress the bird
The Trident Exchange has had plumage tints, drone paint, trails and name plates since yesterday. It did not have a hat.
It does now. Ten new items hang off the bird itself: aviators, round glasses and a monocle for the eyes; a captain's cap, a pirate bandana, a bucket hat and a crown for the head; a flying scarf, a bow tie and a gold chain for the neck. They are worn together, one slot each, so a crowned gull in sunglasses is a thing you can be.
These are mounted on the bird's actual skeleton. The realistic gull ships with a 60-bone rig, and the cap is a child of the head bone, so it rides every animation the model's author made: idle, walk, take-off, the wing beat, the landing flare. Nothing is hand-posed and nothing floats a frame behind. The classic box bird wears the same props at its own scale.
One thing we could not do: paint a stripe on the wings. The model's two wings share a single patch of texture, byte for byte, and the patches for head, body and legs overlap. Anything drawn into that atlas bleeds onto parts of the bird it was never meant to touch. Plumage stays a tint until somebody paints proper texture variants by hand, which is an art job rather than a code one.
A portrait of what you fly
Your profile now shows your craft wearing what you have equipped. The craft is the avatar here, so the career section shows the bird or the quad rather than a doll. It loads only when you scroll to it, and only when there is something to show: a visitor looking at a pilot with nothing equipped gets no portrait and no download.
The shop is a page now
The Exchange used to be a box floating over your profile, 560 pixels wide at every screen size. On a tablet that is one very long column with half the screen wasted beside it, and worse, the craft you were dressing scrolled off the top while you read the rows. The preview was defeated by a scrollbar.
It lives at /my/exchange now, with a link in the account menu, so it is somewhere you can go rather than something you can only open. From 760 pixels up it is two columns with the craft pinned beside the catalogue. Below that it is one column with the craft pinned above it. Either way it stays on screen while you read.
Tabs carry a count of what you own out of what is in stock, and under them are jump chips straight to a group, so reaching Neck does not mean scrolling past Head. Both go in the address: /my/exchange#wardrobe opens the wardrobe and #g-neck opens it at the scarves.
The shop shows you the thing, and lets you turn it
The Exchange used to be a list of names next to prices. Hovering a row now tries the item on, live, on the craft above the list; the items are grouped into Craft, Bird wardrobe and Name; and what you are wearing right now sits at the top with an ✕ on each piece, because taking something off should not require hunting for the row you bought it from.
That last part came out of a measurement rather than a hunch. When the first wave shipped, two accounts owned cosmetics and not one person had anything equipped. A shop can be full and still fail to say what any of it looks like.
The craft on that stage turns by itself, and you can take over. Drag it to turn it, wheel or pinch to move in close, double-click to hand it back to the slow automatic turn. The grab wins for good once you use it, because a turntable that grabs the camera back a second after you let go is the carousel everybody hates.
Taking over matters for gear more than it does for a plumage tint. A tint reads from any angle. A cap does not: the automatic turn answers "is there something on its head", and only a side view answers "does the peak point at the beak". The same stage is on your profile, so the same drag works there.
Prices sit between 25 and 80 Tridents, with the crown at the top. Nothing here touches how you fly, now or later.