Posted by KA9NWM
The first couple days of June were spent finishing pieces that had been sitting half-done since May, and getting the first real marketing material ready for Huntsville Hamfest.
The Markets panel had been on the list for a while, and it turned into a good lesson in trusting your own data before trusting your code. The panel's MP and DP came up empty, and the actual cause was embarrassingly simple: my own watchlist had a typo, "APPL" instead of "AAPL." Once that was fixed, a second problem showed up right behind it: the quote provider's API rejected batched, comma-separated symbol requests outright, so I had to switch to fetching each symbol individually and let each one succeed or fail on its own rather than one bad symbol taking the whole batch down. I added DOW and NASDAQ index rows alongside the regular watchlist, tightened up the column widths so everything fit on the small MP tile, and dropped the "+" sign on positive changes since the arrow already tells you the direction.
Alongside that, I built out a settings backup and restore system. It needed to tell the difference between the kiosk browser itself and someone hitting the same page remotely from a laptop or phone, since a kiosk backup should save straight into its own Downloads folder while a remote browser needs an actual file download. That distinction turned into a real bug: the server strips query strings into their own variable early in the request handling, so a check I'd written against the wrong variable silently never matched. One-line fix once I found it, but it's the kind of thing that's invisible until you go looking for it specifically.
I also added an Alt+T hotkey to toggle the day/night terminator shading on and off across every map view, useful for anyone who wants a cleaner-looking display for a photo or a screen recording.
The bigger project that week was the first Huntsville Hamfest flyer. I built a two-page, print-ready piece with real screenshots (DX Cluster, solar activity, NEXRAD radar, the globe view, propagation forecasts) laid out against the same dark gold-and-cyan palette the app itself uses. Getting the layout right took a few passes, moving screenshots between pages so nothing repeated and the strongest features led each page. One thing I was firm about: HELIOCLOCK is always all-caps in anything customer-facing. It's a small detail, but consistency like that is part of what makes a solo-developer product look like a finished one.
By the end of those first couple days I had a cleaner Markets panel, a working backup system, and a flyer I could actually hand someone in August. Small, steady progress, the kind that adds up.
73,
Anthony, KA9NWM