It’s a new year, and it’s time for another of my annual roadmap posts. Last year was really productive – I’ve released two new apps and a grand total of 87 updates across all my apps.

This time I’ve got two more apps to write about, so I’m going to structure it by app this time, with bullet points for what I would like to achieve this year. (As always this is a rough plan, and might change at any time, but writing these posts helps me planning out my year).

Fiery Feeds is still my most important app, but with my new to-do app Focused I now have a second app I use daily myself. The focus this year will be mostly on Fiery Feeds and Focused, but I also have a couple ideas for some new smaller utilities – which are so much more fun to build since SwiftUI became usable.

Fiery Feeds

I’ve managed to do most of my planned features last year, even if the user guide needs to be updated even more this year.

With advanced saved searches finally shipped, I think Fiery Feeds is now complete, at least in headline features. This year is going to be mostly about improvements to existing features, and moving the entire app from ObjC/UIKit/Catalyst to Swift/SwiftUI.

Advanced Saved Searches

2024 finally added at least an initial version of the long planned support for smart searches. It’s still not as advanced as I’d like it to be though.

• Extending them with and/or operators, exact text search (right now it uses the SQLite Fast Text Search extension, which discards some information like casing and accents).
• I’m going to allow one search per account to automatically mark articles read – to filter out specific keywords you don’t want to see.

Article Caching

I’ve rewritten the caching logic for article and preview images, extracted text, favicons and all the extra bits of data in Swift. I’ve learned a lot since writing the previous cache almost ten years ago, so the new logic is way faster, while doing more work (like running the text extraction to find preview images while scrolling in the article list – which was unthinkable with the previous implementation).

Text Extraction

There’s a completely new, local text extraction logic with a custom parser in Swift, based on the fantastic FiveFilters extraction rules.

I’ve introduced it early last year as the default option, with the previous server based extraction as fallback. Together with the cache rewrite, I’ve been able to entire replace the old extractions.

There’s still a few things to do though.

• I’m working on a small Mac App to help create those rules in a visual way
• I want to introduce an option to pre-load the website in a web view – to allow extraction of javascript based sites.
• Updating the rules should be possible without app updates, and ideally you should be able to add your own rules right in the app. (With any luck I’ll be able to integrate the rule-creating-app right in Fiery Feeds, but this might be more a next year thing).

App Redesign

After working on new apps completely in Swift and SwiftUI, I decided that a full on redesign in UIKit is not the way to go anymore.

Instead I’m going to move the entire app to Swift/SwiftUI, which is not something I’ll be able to finish within a single year. But once this is finished, I’ll be able to drop Catalyst and make it a fully native Mac app too.

• For this year the focus will be to migrate the settings views and all the little and larger auxiliary screens to SwiftUI (I’ve counted, there’s almost a hundred different screens in the app, excluding the feed and article views themselves).

Feed Search

One new feature, I’d like to add, especially to help new users get started is a way to search for new feeds to add (or even have some sort of starter packs) right inside the app.

• An updated Add Feed view, with the option to search new feeds.
• See suggested feeds or starter packs of feeds to quickly subscribe to.

Focused

This app started as a small calendar for planning out my tasks (with a daily limit, so I don’t overbook myself) and then just escalated, until it fully replaced Things for me.

I still consider it somewhat of “early access” software – it works well, but there are definitely missing key features. I think I might have a pretty damn good todo app by the end of the year though.

The best feature are still the daily limits – now called goals – you can set for each individual area, project and tag. The app can (re-)schedule your tasks for your, while taking priority, and daily goals into account.

Areas, Projects, Tags

It started with just being able to assign colors to tasks. Now you can have ongoing areas which contain both tasks and projects, projects which contain tasks (and can be finished and archived soon), and tags you can use to filter your lists.

• Notes and tags for areas
• Notes, tags and completions/archiving of projects
• Custom task groups within lists
• Custom ordering of tasks in lists

Task Search

Late in the year, but you can now search for tasks, and filter individual lists. Kind of boring, but needs to be there.

Interface Improvements

I’m still more focused on getting the must have features done, so the interface is not particularly polished yet. That’s for next year when the app actual does everything I need it to, but there are a couple of annoyances that I want to improve this year already.

• Multi selection and editing multiple tasks at the same time
• Inline editing for simpler changes
• Keyboard navigation and shortcuts

Watch App

I do use my watch a lot, so I’d like the have my tasks there too. This is probably not going to be a full featured version of the app, but it should at least show today’s tasks and have the ability to add new tasks.

• See today’s tasks right on your wrist.
• Add new tasks to the Inbox (and possibly other lists)

Timed Alerts

Setup alerts to get notified about tasks at specific times. I don’t think this feature needs to be particularly complex.

• Get notified about tasks at specific times.

Location Support

Set specific notifications for tasks or tags, to make tasks appear in the “Today” view only when you’re at those locations.

• Get notified about tasks at specific locations.
• Optionally get notified about tasks when entering the specified location.

Tidur Timers

Last year brought updated widgets, a fully native SwiftUI powered Mac app (including support for a menubar item), a new fullscreen view for individual timers, and I’ve moved everything to SwiftData for much more reliable iCloud sync.

All in all, I’m pretty happy with where Tidur Timers is, so I don’t expect too many changes here.

Timer Groups

Grouping multiple timers together and the ability to start all timers in a group with a single tap. This was on my todo list last year already, but I didn’t get to it. Still planned for this year.

Maintenance

Tidur Timers is already fully based on SwiftUI, but there are a few things I need to do to keep it up to date, there are mostly internal changes that should not be noticeable for users.

• Upgrade to Swift 6 and the new Observation framework
• Better handling of live activities (including server based pushes)

RC Dash

The second new app I’ve released last year. It’s a little dashboard to keep track of my sales in RevenueCat.

There are two features I’m missing in the app, but this app is mostly for me alone, and at the very bottom of my priorities. I’m not sure I’ll a lot of time to work on it.

Notifications

There’s a server-to-server callback in RevenueCat, and I only need to forward it to get notifications.

Charts

I’m still using the website if I want to view any graphs or charts. Would be nice to have this in my app as well, but this seems like it might be a lot of work.

Dozzzer

My sleep sounds app Dozzzer is still mostly UIKit based, but I don’t think bringing it to the Mac makes too much sense, so it’s fine to keep it that way.

I don’t think there’s much to be changed, other than maybe a few more soundscapes and some minor UI changes.

• Adding Progress Slider when playing music items (or audiobooks), so you can skip ahead if you need to.