March 1, 2026Reminders
Board reminders
You can now schedule multiple reminders per board to get a notification when it's time to check in. You can select days of the week and the time, as well as add a custom message that will show up in the notification.
Review reminder
You can also set a global reminder, not attached to any specific board, to review your day and check in on boards you might have forgotten.
Customization
In Settings, there is a new "Notifications" section where you can set a custom sound for notifications from Ripples to make them audibly distinct.
When a notification arrives and you're not ready to take action right away, long-press it and tap "Snooze" to get reminded again in a few minutes. The snooze interval can also be configured in the new settings section.
February 11, 2026Internal Overhaul
Ripples went through a major internal refresh in order to prepare it for a new cycle of updates with new features and performance improvements.
Background
I have a lot of ideas and plans for the app, but now that it's almost 2 years old, a few questionable design and architecture decisions made at the very beginning have started to significantly slow down the rate at which I can build new features.
The main hurdle turned out to be my custom data layer, which at the time I thought was a good idea. I learned a lot building it, and overall I think it was a net positive, but over time I started to spend more and more time supporting and expanding my custom database adapters, migration engine, and all the other pieces that go into a proper data layer in an app. That was time I could have spent improving the app by adding meaningful features.
At the same time, SwiftData was released and matured over a couple of years, and it started to look a lot like what I needed.
What I did exactly
Every part of the app was adjusted to work with models coming from SwiftData (my custom data layer was using simple structs everywhere). I left only the bare minimum from my custom database adapters in order to read boards from the old database and put them into the new store. So when a person updates to the new version and opens the app, the migration will happen.
Annoying side effect
Unfortunately, one thing I couldn't avoid was migrating existing Home Screen widgets and custom shortcuts that previously used the old data store to the new one. You'll need to delete the old widgets and re-add them, and do the same with shortcuts. Sorry about this. I tried my best to make it work, but there was no other way.
