Devlog 4!

It’s finally done.
After a lot of work, Glancer is finally feature complete. Before finishing everything off though, I decided to test it on an actual iPad instead of just my desktop browser. I’m really glad I did, because it immediately exposed a bunch of bugs caused by deprecated CSS. After a bit of trial and error (and Googling), I managed to iron them out.
The first new feature I tackled was the photo carousel. Originally my plan was to have the iPad handle everything locally, but I quickly realised that wasn’t a great idea. Since I already had a Flask server running, it made much more sense to let it serve the photos as well.
I ended up using what I’ve affectionately named the YOLO (You Only Load Once) method. The browser loads a photo, keeps displaying it until it eventually errors, then simply requests the next one from the server. It’s surprisingly simple, but it works really well. I also added photo shuffling and a photo counter, which rounded out the card nicely.
After that I moved onto the French card, my mot du jour. That one was pretty straightforward. The hardest part was actually finding a good word list. After spending way too long looking, I gave up and had AI generate one that I could use instead.
The final boss was the calendar.
Compared to what I expected, the frontend was easy. The backend definitely wasn’t. There were plenty of Python bugs, Apple Calendar quirks and recurring event weirdness to work through, but eventually everything clicked into place and I finally got today’s events showing correctly.
And with that…
Glancer is done.
There are still a few things I’d like to polish and test, but as far as the original vision goes, it’s complete. It’s honestly really satisfying seeing it all come together. What started as a simple dashboard idea is now something I actually use, and that’s a pretty cool feeling. Sure, i had to cut a lot of features, but i think what i lost, i gained thrice more.