Release Notes

2 May 2026

HelioPeak is no longer just an iPhone app. Version 2.0 is the biggest release since launch — bringing HelioPeak to iPad and Mac for the first time, adding full iPhone landscape support, and introducing a new way to capture context alongside your solar history.

New: HelioPeak on iPad

• A native iPad layout — this is the first version of HelioPeak built for the bigger screen. The main sections (Dashboard, Charts, Timeline, Systems, Settings) live in a left sidebar that's always visible in landscape and collapses to a button in portrait.
• Live Status hero panel on the Dashboard shows your current power, a circular gauge with the percentage of today's peak, the system name, today's running total, a sparkline of the last hour's production, and a weather chip with current temperature and conditions. The background gradient changes through the day — bright yellow at peak production, cooler tones in the evening, deep indigo at night.
• Highlights row below the daily stats with Best Day, Best Month, Peak Power, and Longest Streak.
• System Details gains a 12-month trend sparkline next to the lifetime numbers.
• Year heatmap on the Charts → Year view — an iPad-only visualisation showing every day of the year as a color-coded cell, switchable between Production, Consumption, and Self-Sufficiency modes. Tap any cell to see its value.
• Inspector panel — a right-side panel that opens via the info.circle button in the toolbar. As you tap chart points, the panel shows rich detail for the selection: exact value, year-over-year delta with the same period last year, and (for individual days) an hourly breakdown chart. The toggle is shared between Dashboard and Charts.
• Multi-system switcher strip — a horizontal row at the bottom of the Dashboard for one-tap switching between configured systems.
• Keyboard shortcuts — with a Magic Keyboard, ⌘+1 / ⌘+2 / ⌘+3 / ⌘+4 jump to Dashboard / Charts / Systems / Settings.

New: iPhone landscape support

• Rotate your iPhone for chart-priority mode — for the first time, HelioPeak supports landscape orientation on iPhone. Stat cards step aside so the chart fills the full screen, with the active period title sitting inline above it. Ideal for browsing your production curve in detail.
• Both Dashboard and Charts adapt to landscape, including the same crosshair hover interaction.

New: HelioPeak on Mac

• Now available on Apple Silicon Macs — HelioPeak runs natively on macOS as "Designed for iPad", bringing the full iPad layout to your Mac. Resize the window, use trackpad scrolling, hover the production curve to read exact values — everything works.
• One install across iPhone, iPad, and Mac with the same Apple ID. Notes you record on one device sync to all three within seconds via iCloud.

New: Notes and the Timeline

• Attach notes to specific days — a private journal that travels with your solar history. Useful for recording maintenance ("panels cleaned"), observations, issues, or milestones. Each note can have a category: Maintenance, Observation, Issue, or Milestone.
• Cross-device sync via iCloud — notes mirror automatically between iPhone, iPad, and Mac on the same Apple ID, with no setup required. Typical sync delay is 5–30 seconds. Storage is private to your Apple ID; the developer never sees your notes.
• Three ways to add a note — toolbar button on Charts, tap a chart pin on the Day view if a day already has notes, or from System Details on iPhone.
• Notes badge strip — on Week / Month / Year / Total charts, a strip above the chart shows badges for days or months that have notes. Tap to browse, paginated 10 at a time.
• Timeline view — on iPad, a dedicated sidebar entry shows every note for the active system, grouped by year, with search and category filters.
• Notes are included in CSV and JSON exports — the CSV export delivers a companion notes file (filename ending in _notes.csv) so each opens as its own clean Excel table; the JSON export adds a notes array at the root of the existing file. Both formats are sorted chronologically with date, text, optional category, and timestamps.

New: Annual Report PDF export

• Multi-page A4 report for any year that has data in your cache. Page 1 is a cover and executive summary (total kWh, daily average, best day, best month, CO₂ saved, estimated revenue, year-over-year delta). Page 2 has a 12-month bar chart and the Top 10 production days. Page 3 is a year-over-year detail table (included only when the previous year has 330+ days of data, so the deltas are meaningful).
• Consumption section automatically included on each page when your system tracks consumption with at least 95% coverage of the year.
• Available from System Details → share icon → Annual Report (PDF) → pick the year.

New: Year-over-year Comparison PDF

• Single-page snapshot of Today / This Month / Year-to-Date deltas, exportable from the Comparison sheet (trend icon in the Charts toolbar). Faster to generate and share than the full Annual Report — handy for archiving, mailing, or AirPrint.

New: Multi-system health indicators

• At-a-glance system health — if you have two or more systems, each row in the Systems tab and each chip in the system switcher shows a color-coded dot:
• 🟢 Green: produced within the last 24 hours
• 🟠 Orange: 2–3 days since last productive day — cloudy stretch or worth a check
• 🔴 Red: 4+ days without production — likely a real issue (inverter offline, monitoring disconnected)
• ⚪ Grey: status cannot be determined (no API key, no cached data yet)
• The check is purely local — no extra API calls.

Help & FAQ improvements

• Restructured — FAQ entries are now grouped by topic with scannable subheadings, so finding what you need takes fewer scrolls.
• New entries cover Notes, the Timeline, the Annual Report, the Inspector, multi-system health indicators, the iPad hero, iPhone landscape, and Mac.

Behind the scenes

• Year-over-year Comparison PDF now renders correctly in dark mode (previously some text could appear nearly invisible).
• Demo system Live status no longer shows stale evening data once the upstream feed plateaus.

April 2026

This version contains mainly minor bug fixes and performance improvements, including the following changes:

Improvements & polish

• Daily-only consumption support — systems that report daily totals but no live power readings now show a clear message on the Dashboard with guidance to use the Charts → Week / Month views (where consumption is correctly displayed).
• Localized percentages — comparison deltas and Self-Use values now follow each language's typographic convention (e.g. "85 %" with non-breaking space in French and German).
• Diagnostic email tool — a new "Send Diagnostic Info" option in Settings → Help & Support sends a pre-filled support email containing device info, system metadata, and recent PVOutput API responses — without your API key. Helpful when reporting unusual data behaviour.

New: Clearer "yesterday's data" indicator

• Orange date and ⓘ icon — when the Dashboard shows yesterday's data (early morning, before today's first sample), the date next to your system name turns orange and an ⓘ icon appears next to it for a quick in-app explanation. The orange returns to "Today" automatically once today's first sample arrives.

Improvements & polish

• Widget consumption display now shows small nighttime values in Wh instead of "0.00" — more useful for home-battery setups.
• Detailed data table column units (kWh) are now visible inline with each value.
• System Details: Recording Days subtitle previews when Best Year and Peak Year stats will unlock for new systems.
• System Details: Self-Use card now spans full width.
• General performance improvements.

New: Home Screen Widget

• Three sizes — Small, Medium, and Large, chosen when you add the widget to your home screen
• Live data — each size shows today's production in kWh, peak power, and a recent-update timestamp. Large also shows the current live reading and an intraday production chart across today's daylight window
• Consumption — when Show Consumption is enabled in Settings and your system tracks it, the widget overlays a consumption line on the chart and adds used kWh, self-use percentage, and net export or import
• Stale indicator — a subtle badge appears in the corner when the displayed data is more than one hour old
• Appearance — the widget matches your HelioPeak Appearance setting (System, Dark, or Light), independently from your phone's mode
• Multi-system — long-press any placed widget and tap Edit Widget to pick which of your configured systems the widget displays. You can place multiple widgets on your home screen, each bound to a different system. Available for both free (demo plus one own system) and paid (unlimited) tiers
• Refresh schedule — every 30 minutes during daylight hours (06:00–23:00 local time, roughly 34 refreshes per day). Overnight the widget keeps showing the last fetched values so you still see yesterday's totals when checking your phone in the morning. Overnight refreshes are deliberately off: iOS enforces a daily refresh budget per widget and PVOutput limits requests per hour — refreshing overnight would burn budget on data that does not change
• Automatic refresh — the widget updates within seconds when you add, remove, or change a system in the app, or when you toggle Show Consumption, Appearance, or Language

New: Vacation days now count correctly in Combined chart

• Days with zero consumption — vacation periods or systems briefly off no longer show "No Data Available" in the Combined view for week, month, or year
• Accurate averages — vacation days are included in monthly and yearly totals so your average daily consumption reflects reality

New: Better localization in your language

• Currency names — Euro, US Dollar, British Pound, Swiss Franc, and Australian Dollar now appear in your language
• Settings labels — appearance options (System, Dark, Light), chart period (Calendar, Rolling), and table style (Inline, Popup) are now translated

Improvements

• Faster app launch and chart rendering — date and time formatting reuses cached resources for snappier UI
• Smoother system switching — switching between systems while data is loading no longer mixes old and new data
• Clearer chart titles — "Production this month" and "Production this year" replace the previous ambiguous "Production"
• Improved keyboard handling when adding or editing systems
• More reliable error reporting helps diagnose issues quickly when they do occur

Also

• General performance improvements and smaller polish items

New: Comparison view

• New Comparison sheet in the Charts tab — tap the trend icon in the header to see year-over-year deltas
• Three periods: today vs the same day last year, this month vs the same range last year, and year-to-date
• Delta badges are colored by semantics — for production higher is better, for consumption lower is better
• Consumption section only appears when consumption tracking is enabled and has about a year of history

New: Specific Yield and Yearly Average

• On System Details: two new performance cards on their own row
• Specific Yield (kWh/kWp per year) is the solar industry's standard benchmark — Belgium typically 850-1000, Spain 1300-1600
• Yearly Average shows your lifetime production divided by the years recorded, in kWh or MWh
• Both cards require your system size to be set on PVOutput and at least 3 months of data

New: Consumption Peak Month and Peak Year

• The Consumption section on System Details now mirrors Production: Peak Day, Peak Month, and Peak Year
• Peak Year appears when you have at least two years of consumption data

New: Pull-to-refresh on Charts

• Swipe down on the Charts tab to refresh all data

New: History sync banner

• Banner on the Charts tab shows how many days of history are still syncing
• Mainly visible on non-donator accounts where PVOutput's hourly API limit (60 requests) means large systems need multiple refreshes to catch up — pull to refresh again later to continue filling gaps

Improved

• Chart legends now sit on the left so they no longer overlap the right-side watt labels on narrower screens
• Month labels on the Year view no longer overlap on narrower screens (Jan/Mar/May/Jul/Sep/Nov instead of all twelve)
• Tap-selection resets when switching chart periods, so no stale crosshair or tooltip from a previous period lingers
• Self-Use on Dashboard and Charts now shows an "estimated max" subtitle to reflect that the formula uses daily totals, not intraday timing
• Self-Use on System Details now correctly calculates over the overlap period (days where both production and consumption are recorded), instead of the full production lifetime

Fixed

• Keyboard Done button now appears and dismisses the numeric pad when editing the electricity price in Settings

Also

• Several performance improvements and smaller polish items throughout the app

New: Clear Cache

• Reset a system's local cache from System Details to reload all data freshly from PVOutput
• Per-system: only the selected system is affected, other systems keep their cache
• Useful after correcting historical data on PVOutput, or when moving from production-only to a combined production and consumption system

Improved: Combined Chart

• Consumption line now renders for the full 24 hours, also before sunrise and after sunset, not just during production hours
• Production and consumption charts in Combined mode share an identical X-axis, so time labels line up exactly across both curves
• Consumption line stays within the plot area and no longer draws over the watt labels on the right

Improved: Dashboard After Sunset

• Today's production value remains visible on the Dashboard after the sun goes down, instead of reverting to a placeholder
• Self-use percentage and Net Export/Import stay valid throughout the evening

Improved: Drill-Down Navigation

• Drilling down from Total to Year to Month to Day now keeps an accurate back-link at every level, returning you to the correct parent view

Improved: Electricity Price

• Setting the electricity price to zero is now respected everywhere in the app, so self-consumption trackers who don't care about cost see clean zero values instead of a fallback estimate

Also

• Electricity Price keyboard now dismisses correctly, and the field accepts up to 5 decimals for precise tariffs
• Several performance and bug fixes throughout the app

Consumption tracking, drill-down navigation, and detailed data tables — a major step forward in how you explore your solar data.

New: Consumption tracking

• New Production / Consumption / Combined picker on Dashboard and Charts
• Consumption stat cards on the Dashboard (self-use %, net export/import)
• Combined overlay chart: production and consumption on a single graph
• Works with PVOutput systems that report consumption data (smart meter, energy monitor, inverter with consumption clamp)

New: Chart drill-down

• Tap a year in Total view to jump to that year's Year view
• Tap a month in Year view to jump to Month view
• Tap a day in Week or Month to jump to the intraday Day chart
• Breadcrumb navigation to step back up

New: Detailed Data Table

• A table below every chart showing the underlying numbers
• Columns adapt to the selected mode (Production / Consumption / Combined)
• Delta % column on Total view (year-over-year comparison, green/red)
• Sortable headers
• Settings option: Inline (below the chart) or Popup (bottom sheet)

New: JSON export

• System Details → Export menu now offers CSV and JSON
• Useful for integration with scripts or external analysis tools

New: Automatic gap detection

• The app detects missing date ranges in your history and fills them in automatically on subsequent refreshes, without manual intervention

Improvements

• Clear banner with explanation when PVOutput's API rate limit is reached
• "Loading more history in the background" notice while gap-fill is in progress
• Adaptive x-axis stride (fewer labels on small screens)
• Improved gradients and peak markers on Day view
• Automatic year stride on Total view based on data range
• Numerous stability and performance improvements

Note for users upgrading from v1.1

If you used HelioPeak before v1.2 and your PVOutput system already tracks consumption, you may only see consumption data for the most recent days. This is because the local cache was built before the app knew about consumption. To load your full consumption history, go to Systems, remove the system, and add it again with the same API key. The app will rebuild its cache with complete history. Your data on PVOutput is never affected.

Performance, reliability, and international support — HelioPeak now speaks your language.

New: 6 Languages

• Full app translation: Dutch, French, German, Italian, and Spanish
• In-app language picker in Settings — override your device language per app
• All screens, charts, onboarding, settings, and FAQ translated

New: Smart Data Caching

• Completed days are cached locally after first load
• Reduces PVOutput API calls by up to 80%
• Offline support: view your full Week, Month, Year, and Total history without internet
• Today's data is always fetched fresh

New: System Info Card

• View your system's hardware details: panel count, inverter, orientation, tilt
• Collapsible card in System Details — data from PVOutput's system registry

New: Crash Reporting

• Automatic crash detection via Sentry (hosted in the EU)
• Only technical data — no personal data or solar production data
• Helps fix issues faster for all users

Improvements

• CSV export now uses comma-delimited format with UTF-8 BOM for universal Excel compatibility
• CO₂ Saved and Tree Equivalent now show "lifetime" and "per year" subtitles
• Estimated Revenue rounded to whole numbers
• Offline hint on Day tab explaining that intraday data is live-only
• Help & FAQ expanded to 20 sections including caching, crash reporting, and translations
• Privacy Policy updated with Sentry crash reporting section
• Cache automatically cleared when a system is deleted

12 April 2026

Initial release of HelioPeak — a modern solar production tracker for PVOutput.

Features

• Live dashboard with real-time production curve, peak power, and estimated revenue
• 5 chart periods: day, week, month, year, and all-time production
• Calendar and rolling chart modes
• Interactive charts with tap-to-inspect on all views
• Dashed average line on bar charts
• Multiple solar systems with drag-to-reorder
• System details with lifetime statistics
• CSV export of production history
• CO₂ savings tracking with tree equivalent
• Estimated revenue based on configurable electricity price
• Built-in demo mode — try the app without a PVOutput account
• Onboarding flow with PVOutput setup guide
• Dark and light mode support
• Currency selector (EUR, USD, GBP, CHF, AUD)
• Privacy-first analytics with opt-out toggle
• Help & FAQ with 17 sections
• Send feedback with device info

Requirements

• iOS 18.6 or later
• PVOutput.org account with a read-only API key