Ten slots is not ten panels

glance-png-server hit v1.0.0 on the 16th and is public now. It serves PNGs at a URL the Glance Scroll polls, and most of the design falls out of a single constraint: every panel is 192×32 pixels and about 300 bytes on the wire.

The bit I keep turning over is the slot arithmetic. The device gives you ten private-app slots, which sounds like a hard ceiling of ten panels — so each slot became a carousel instead, and the ceiling went away. The constraint was real, it just wasn’t the constraint it looked like.

The other idea worth keeping is failing visibly. When a source breaks, the panel draws a card that says so, because the device caches the last good image — so a silent failure doesn’t look like a failure at all, it looks like Tuesday’s weather on Thursday. Loud failure is the only honest option when the display has a memory and you don’t.

Recent work has been unglamorous: weather icons staying inside their boxes, quantising the panels that were too busy, reminders editable in the browser without a restart. Roughly 74 commits over eleven days, which is more than I expected when I counted.

docs/ROADMAP.md still has packaging open, and I don’t think the current answer (run.sh, or Docker if you’d rather not have Python about) is the one it ends on.

Related: time-of-day-by-cycling-the-palette, which is the project this one quietly displaced.