The desktop and tablet display of BoatPlay — a fixed, no-scroll layout at the wheel with ten pages, mission modes and an alarm banner nothing can cover. Runs from the boat computer, works with the network off.
Instruments, Chart, Energy, Cameras, Weather, Audio, Switching, Internet, Browser and Settings.
The Helm is a fixed, no-scroll layout with a top bar — connection badge, the mission-mode row and the display-mode button — a tab bar with glove-sized targets, and one page at a time. Routing is hash-based, so the whole helm works from the boat computer over the boat LAN and from the offline cache with no server rules at all.
Three display modes, chosen manually with one tap on the top bar or from settings: day is light and high-contrast for sunlight, dusk is the dark neutral default, and night is red-shifted on near-black to preserve night vision. Switching repaints every surface at once.
Touch targets are a minimum of 64 CSS pixels — at least 12 mm on the densest helm tablet we expect — so the helm works with wet hands and gloves. Every text-and-background pair in every palette is contrast-checked against WCAG targets by the test suite, so a palette edit that drops legibility fails the build rather than reaching a boat.
Alarms show as one banner across the top of every page, and nothing can paint over it — not a tab, not a toast, not the stern camera. Colour carries severity; the words are a three-word headline and one detail line. Acknowledge from the banner, review the history in settings later.
After the first visit the Helm loads and navigates from a cache-first service worker with no network at all. Live values are kept on disk on every update, so a reboot with the network down shows the last-known numbers — dimmed and dated once they are older than ten seconds, never blank and never faked — with the badge reading OFFLINE — last-known data. When connectivity returns the stream reconnects on its own and the badge goes back to LIVE; no reload needed.
Chart tiles you have viewed while online keep rendering offline. The cold-start budget is enforced by the build: the entry is under 250 KB raw, so the helm boots in about a second even on a slow boat LAN, and the heavy chart code loads only when you first open the chart.
A full simulated day with a magenta DEMO banner on every page, so you can learn the helm at the kitchen table. Demo data never touches the persisted last-known values and never talks to a real server. The live demo below is that mode, running the real helm software.
A simulated day on the water, running the real helm software. The ring on the chart is the furthest point you could still turn back from with a reserve in hand — it moves with the wind, the tide and the speed you pick.
BoatPlay™ Helm · simulated data Open full screen →
Registration gets you a licensed copy for your boat computer or a tablet at the wheel, your boat’s credentials, and first word when the phone apps reach the stores. No cost, no obligation.