This year is was not only working on Fiery Feeds, but I also tried to bring my other two, somewhat neglected, apps back up to speed. You can see a complete list of all recent updates on the new changelogs page.

All in all, I shipped 7 feature updates, and 31 updates in total across all three apps.

Fiery Feeds

Fiery Feeds is still my primary focus, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. There’s also going to be an anniversary this year, Fiery Feeds 1.0 on the 10. Oct 2013, almost a decade ago. I would have never though I’d still be working on this app ten years later, but here we are. On to the next decade.

New Feed Management

Likely the biggest feature this year was the entirely re-written subscribe flow and Safari extension, and the all around much faster feed management.

Merged iCloud Accounts

Second biggest change, even if not all that exciting, is the updated iCloud sync for feed and read later accounts. Fiery Feeds dropped support for multiple accounts of the same type within the same iCloud account, and the update had to merge any existing accounts into the new container. This worked quite smoothly, and lays the groundwork for the next performance improvements for iCloud sync.

Shared Subscription

The paid-up-front Fiery Feeds for macOS app is more. I only sold it as a standalone app, because in the first 6 months of Catalyst the App, when it was released, the App Store did not support shared subscriptions between iOS and macOS apps. The switch to a shared subscription needed to be done at some point, and with this out of the way, I’ll be able to focus on feature again.

Lock Screen Widgets

Naturally Fiery Feeds supports the new lockscreen widgets in iOS 16 as well. You can show an article (latest or random, and it changes every couple of minutes), or the unread count of an account of your choice. Either in the slot above or below the time.

Upgraded Notifications

I also upgraded the article notifications. Better included actions, grouped by feed and a complete preview of the article when you view the details, powered by the native rendering engine. Some of the actions, like marking articles read or starred should even work when mirroring the notifications to your Apple watch (for those who keep asking me about an Apple Watch app).

Tidur Timers

The multi timer app Tidur Timers also switched to a shared subscription between the iOS and macOS version. I’ve re-written large parts of the iCloud syncing code, which should work now reliable between iOS, macOS and watchOS.

New Widgets

With the limited things allowed to do in homescreen widgets, it was quite a challenge, but I’ve added widget for the next active timers or specific timers, The same widgets are also available for the lockscreen on iOS 16.

Dozzzer

I’ve moved my oldest app, Dozzzer, also to a subscription model. After almost 3 years not working on it, I can finally say it’s in active development again and all known bugs are fixed. It’s maybe more nostalgia to keep Dozzzer alive, it was my first successful app, and my first app being featured by Apple, almost 12 years ago.

Dark Mode

Being an app for drifting of to sleep, it always had a pretty dark interface, but I’ve added another extra dark mode, when the system dark mode is enabled.

Soundscapes

Slight tweaks to all the existing soundscapes, plus the new soundscapes for brown noise, Mountain Creek, Rainy Undergrowth, Lush Forrest, Hawaian Waves and Stormy Cliffs. (I like fanciful names)

External App List

Since Dozzzer can fade out the system volume and stop third party apps, I’ve added handy shortcuts to some better known audio apps right from the external music screen.

Going Forward

Last year I tried – and failed – doing large, completely planned out feature updates. I’ve given up on that by the middle of the year and changed my approach. I’m no longer working at one update at a time (I spend a long time doing just bug fix updates, and putting off working on new features until all the bugs are fixed), instead I’m doing the old main/develop branches and will just release a feature update whenever there’s enough new stuff to make it worth an update. I think this will mean fast, and more, but smaller feature updates for all apps.