A New Home Page, and One List of Categories

The last two weeks were mostly about the web planner: a new look for the Home page, a better Prepare page, one list of categories shared with the mobile app, and a handful of fixes for things that were quietly misbehaving. Here’s the rundown.

A new Home page

The Home page used to lean on photos of real park landmarks. Those are gone, replaced by original illustrations in a 1950s limited-animation style — think the old space-age educational shorts. Each of the five phases gets its own little scene: someone writing a wish list for Plan, a wall map with a route drawing itself for Preview, a suitcase being packed for Prepare, a stroll with a camera for Play, and a retro computer full of photos for Publish. They play a short animation when the page loads and again when you hover, and sit still if your device is set to reduce motion. The banner is now a generic skyline — rocket, palm trees, a slowly turning Ferris wheel — with a new tagline, “Your Theme Park and Resort Companion.” Your trip countdown (“12 days to go”, “Day 2 of 4”) moved up next to the trip name, so it’s visible on every page.

The scenes are drawn as editable vector art, so expect them to keep getting refined.

Prepare works like Plan now

On a wide screen, Prepare now has the same two-column layout as Plan: what you’re packing for this trip on the left, and everything in your packing catalog on the right, each with a thumbnail and a one-click “+ Pack”. Ensembles can be added in one go from the same panel. Each category in the sidebar also lists its sub-categories — Day Wear, Shoes, Toiletries — so you can narrow both columns to just what you’re looking for.

The Catalog page picked up a List view alongside the existing gallery, with the same sub-category filters. And on Preview, the Available Items sidebar now gives Dining, Shows, Shopping, Equipment, and Sundries their own sections instead of lumping several of them under “Wishes”. Packed items also stay in that list now; they used to disappear the moment you ticked them off, which made it impossible to schedule “apply sunscreen” for 1 PM once it was in the bag.

One list of categories, and Accessories gets its own

It turned out the web planner and ParQwish Pal had been keeping separate lists of sub-categories that barely overlapped — the planner had “Clothing & Accessories”, the app had “Apparel”, and so on. An item synced from one to the other kept its name, which the other app didn’t recognise. On the app’s Shop screen, that meant some items just didn’t show up when the list was grouped by category.

Both apps now share one list. Shopping has Accessories as its own category, separate from Clothing and from Ears & Headwear, plus a new Souvenirs category. Old names were renamed automatically — Apparel became Clothing, Dapper Day became Themed, Custom became Other. Anything that was filed under “Clothing & Accessories” moved to Clothing, so if you had bags or jewelry in there, you’ll want to move them to Accessories. The FAQ has the details.

Fixes

• Sync between devices. The sync indicator could show green on a device that wasn’t actually signed in to your account, so two devices that both looked connected never saw each other’s changes. It now only shows “Sync” when you’re signed in with Apple, and says “Sign in” otherwise. Trips created before you signed in now reach your account once you do.
• “Loading trip…” forever. On a fresh browser, trip pages could sit on a loading spinner indefinitely. Fixed, and the planner now picks your trip for you — the one in progress, else the next one coming up — instead of waiting for you to choose one.
• Duplicate restaurants after importing. Importing a file from the app could add a restaurant that was already on your trip a second time, under Prepare › Dining. That’s fixed, and a one-time cleanup removes the leftover copies.
• The iPhone home screen icon. Adding the planner to an iPhone home screen used a screenshot of the page instead of the app icon. It uses the proper icon now. If you added it before today, delete the shortcut and add it again to pick up the new one.

What’s next

ParQwish Pal 1.0 is with Apple for review. The shared categories are already in the TestFlight build, and they’ll reach the App Store as a 1.0.1 update along with one more change: the ability to change an outfit’s, gear item’s, or sundry’s category right in the app, which for now you can only do from the web planner.