Year in Review
2023 was a very productive year for me. Major updates to Tidur Timers and Dozzzer, a bunch of features in Fiery Feeds and a completely new website.
Fiery Feeds
I’ve shipped 3 feature updates and 30 updates in total for Fiery Feeds in 2023. I still want to try to stop sneaking little features into the small updates, and ship a few more feature updates instead, but overall I’m quite pleased with the releases this year.
Feed and Folder Settings
You can set some options like notifications, number of articles to keep, layout details and more on a per feed or per folder basis.
Vertical Split View
There’s a new split view to show article list and article view at the same time, even on iPhones.
Interactive Widgets
You can mark articles read or starred, and even refresh and load new articles right from your homescreen.
App Intents
Once again full support for App Intents and Shortcuts.app. You can add saved pages or feeds, sync accounts, load articles from the local database, open specific feeds or folders, and more.
Advanced Saved Searches
The more advanced version of saved searches didn’t quite make it in 2024, because the new Widgets and App Intents got in the way – they just sounded more interesting to me, but I already started work on it before iOS 17. This will be in the first feature update in 2024.
Tidur Timers
Tidur received some updates to the widgets, and a complete redesign later in the year. It’s now has a good foundation to build new features on top.
Live Activities
Running timers are now displayed directly on the lock screen, like the native timer app does.
Interactive Widgets
Start, stop or pause timers right from your home screen and see the current timer state on a glance.
New Watch App
I’ve dropped the old WatchKit app, and replaced it with a new app, completely from scratch in SwiftUI, to make it a fully standalone app.
SwiftUI Redesign
Together with the Watch app, the iOS and macOS app also got a completely new interface, most of it written in SwiftUI. I brought the widget’s design to the main app and it’s now optimised for macOS and feels much more at home there.
Dozzzer
Dozzzer also received a major update to 5.0 and quite a few features for a simple sleep sounds app.
Widgets
I’ve added cover art for all soundscapes, and home screen widgets to quickly start your favourite soundscapes.
App Intents
You can start soundscapes and playback easily from Shortcuts or just ask Siri to start one.
New Soundscapes
Dozzzer got 26 new soundscapes in total this year, including sleeping dogs, sea gulls, a London street, a waterfall and more.
App Redesign
Brought back the old time dial, darker dark mode and all-around clean up of the design.
New Website
And finally I’ve retired the old cocoacake.net website, and moved everything to this new page, where you’re reading this article right now. New design, header images, easier to post and all around more modern.
Going Forward
As always, this is the rough plan for 2024, but things can always change during the year, depending on what I actually manage to get done, and what new features Apple releases at WWDC.
Fiery Feeds
This year feels like I’m finishing up the last few features before starting work on the next major update.
Advanced Saved Searches
As already mentioned in the section above, this is already a work in progress and will be the first feature update in 2024. Still a few things to do, but there’s good progress already.
General Improvements
There are several other projects I’ve been putting off for a while, like properly re-doing my text extraction setup, better favicon search, bringing the user guide up to date with images and other improvements along those lines. A Snow Leopard year in a way.
App Redesign
There are many spots where I want to move from custom UI to system elements that have become available in the past few years, and some – like the native three pane layout – already shipped this year.
My current thinking is to have one larger update, I can call 3.0, with all of the more obvious design changes, and continue with the smaller design updates in feature updates afterwards.
I’m going to start working on it this year, there’s very likely going to be multiple betas during the year, but I don’t think the 3.0 update is going to be released in ’24.
Tidur Timers
Widgets and Live Activity Updates
I’ve build the new widgets last year, and I’ve already had the redesign of the main app in mind, but the main app ended up looking a little different, so now I’ll update the widgets to match the app’s design.
Also the Live Activities still need the interactivity I’ve brought to the widgets already.
Single Timer View
The watch app already has a detail view showing a single timer. I’m going to bring this to the iOS and macOS app too. Should also be possible to open a timer in an always-on-top window.
Timer Groups
Group multiple timers and start all them with a single tap at the same time. I’m not sure I have a use case personally, but I’ve been asked about it multiple times, so there’s got to be something there.
Native Mac App
Except for a few parts, like the settings screen, the app uses SwiftUI, but this means it still needs to run as a Catalyst app on macOS. I’m going to replace those UIKit parts as well, and switch the app from Catalyst to native Mac SwiftUI.
Menubar Support
And, something that a timer app on Mac should probably support: A menubar entry. I’, thinking quickly starting timers, as well as showing the time for the next timer to finish.
Dozzzer
Dozzzer is now in a pretty good place, after the redesign and updates, it feels pretty feature complete now. I’m not planning any large feature updates for this year.
New Soundscapes
I’ll probably add a few new soundscapes, if I have any good ideas.
New App
Finally, I’ve started working on a new, small-ish app, which will hopefully see the light of day this year.