The Planner gets a Photo Gallery, and Pal heads to TestFlight
Last post I said I’d write here once getting ParQ Wish Pal in front of Apple’s review was actually moving. It’s moving.
Pal is sitting in Apple’s queue
Build 68 is uploaded and processing at App Store Connect right now. That’s not the same as “live in TestFlight” yet — Apple still has to finish processing it before it’s actually available to test — but it’s the first real submission, and I’ll post here the moment it’s something you can actually install.
A bug I found getting there
While getting that build ready I hit a real one: the Ready Now list on the
home screen was quietly failing to load, and park hours weren’t showing
up either — no crash, just silently broken. Traced it to a date-formatting
trick used all over the app (a locale quirk that’s supposed to give you
2026-09-08 but was actually handing back 9/8/2026 on
this build) — one wrong character format, breaking things in twenty-three
different places across sixteen files, because the same trick had been
copy-pasted everywhere it was needed. Replaced all of it with one shared,
more reliable helper. Boring bug, satisfying fix — the kind where you go
looking for one broken screen and find the actual root cause was hiding
under the whole app the entire time.
Meanwhile, on the Planner
I’ve been heads-down on Pal long enough that a few real things shipped on the web planner without a post to go with them — catching up here:
- A Photo Gallery on Catalog. Every photo on your trip — from rides, outfits, dining, wherever it came from — now has one place to browse, filter by day or type, and decide whether it shows up on Publish. Standalone photos you’ve imported can now be linked to more than one item at once, which wasn’t possible before.
- The Story page at parqwish.com/story got a proper opening — where the name actually comes from, why the data model is built the way it is, and the honest version of learning to build this with Claude Code.
- A handful of smaller fixes: the Guide/Story/Blog pages got noticeably lighter and faster to load, and I fixed a couple of navigation dead-ends that only showed up once real people started clicking around.
What’s next
Waiting on Apple. Once Pal actually clears processing, that’s the post I’m looking forward to writing.