Every update to Divebase, in order. The thinking, the screenshots, and the why behind each one.
Most of your dives are made possible by dive professionals. A dive center picks you up, a boat takes you to the site, a captain drives it. Divebase already kept track of the buddies you were in the water with, and now you can note down also who made the dive possible, with three new fields on the dive: Operator, Boat and Captain. The dive roster is now complete.
Divebase now has native apps for iPhone and Android, and both are available in private beta. A small group of divers has been testing the iPhone app and the Android app since the first alpha versions. Today I'm opening the beta to more testers, and you can ask for an invite.
The apps connect to your dive computer over Bluetooth, download your dives, work offline, and sync your logbook with the web app.
Not everyone on a dive is a buddy. On a course there's an instructor and a few students. On a guided dive there's a guide and the rest of the group. Until now, the People tab listed everybody the same way, so you knew who was in the water with you but not what they were doing there.
From today you can give a buddy a role on a dive: Instructor, Assistant, Guide or Student.
When imperial and Canadian units arrived last month, one measurement stayed behind: cylinder size. You could read your depths in feet, your pressures in psi and your ballast in pounds, but the moment you opened the gases panel your AL80 was still described as 11.1 L · 3000 psi. That's technically correct, but if you've called that tank an 80 since your open water course it tells you nothing.
From today, Divebase reads and writes cylinder sizes in cubic feet. It's the fifth unit you can choose, and with it every measurement in the app can be read the way you learned it.
Not every change deserves a post of its own. Most of what I write here is about one feature at a time, because most features need the room. But between the big ones, a steady trickle of smaller improvements lands too: a control that got easier to use, a field that turned up in the API, a count that appeared where there wasn't one. They rarely get a mention, and some of them are the kind of thing you'd want to know about.
So this is a different kind of post: a round-up. One short section per change, in rough order of how much I think you'll care.
Dive numbers go wrong in small, boring ways. You delete a duplicate from the middle of a trip and every dive after it is off by one. You import a week from a computer whose counter restarted, or the same trip twice from two sources. You log a day by hand and guess the numbers. None of it is dramatic, and all of it leaves a logbook you can no longer trust to count.
From today Divebase fixes it in one pass. Select the dives, press Renumber, and the selection is rewritten in logbook order: the numbers, the repetitive series, the surface intervals, or any combination of the three you ask for.
Divebase has spoken metric since the very first day, and for a lot of you that has been the one thing standing between a trial and a logbook. I dive in Europe, I learned in metres and bar, and every screen I built assumed you did too. Meanwhile the messages kept arriving, from the US, from Canada, from the UK, many asking the same obvious question: can I see my depths in feet?
From today, yes. Divebase now reads and writes feet, Fahrenheit, psi, and pounds, and you choose each one on its own.
This is the update I've been slowest to ship, and not because converting a number is hard. It took this long because a careless unit preference is exactly the kind of feature that corrupts a logbook. I wanted the foundations under it before a single foot reached a screen.
How much lead you carried is only half the story. When dive conditions arrived, every dive gained a place to record the weight, but the number on its own never says whether it was any good: nine kilos is right for one diver in a 7 mm suit and far too much for the same diver in a shorty with a steel tank. What you want back on the next dive is the verdict, not the figure.
So now you can record the verdict too. Beside the weight on the dive form sits a Buoyancy rating, five steps centred on neutral:
Shearwater Cloud was never the logbook most technical divers chose. It's the fastest way to get a dive off your wrist, and one day you notice it's holding every dive you've ever done. You buy a Perdix, a Teric, or a Peregrine, you pair it with the app because it's right there and takes ten seconds, and you tell yourself you'll file the dives properly later. Years on, the app that was only meant to replace a cable is the only complete record of your diving.
That makes Shearwater Cloud the most common starting point I see for divers coming to Divebase, and a great migration path: it's not a partial log or a subset you exported once, it's genuinely all of it. Today Divebase reads that database, whole.
Convenience is why your dives ended up there, so the long-term answer has to be just as convenient. The Divebase mobile app is being built to be the thing you reach for on the boat: download the dive straight off your computer, no cable, no desktop, no export, into a logbook that gives you the interactive chart, your gas, your gear, your sites, and your trips on the other side. Until that lands, this importer is the bridge.
Subsurface is the dive log every other dive log is measured against. It was started by Linus Torvalds in 2011, has been led by Dirk Hohndel and a community of divers ever since, and it's free, open source, and runs on Linux, macOS, Windows, Android, and iOS. Through libdivecomputer it downloads from more dive computers than any commercial product bothers to support, including plenty the manufacturer stopped caring about years ago. If you've ever wanted your dives off your computer and into a file you own, chances are you passed through Subsurface to get there.
Subsurface also settled, early on, something I care about a lot: your logbook is a plain file on your own disk, in a documented format, readable without an account and without permission from anyone.
That file made this the hardest importer I've written, and the most interesting. Subsurface isn't a simpler tool I could pour into Divebase and tidy up afterwards; in several places it records more per dive than anything else Divebase reads: trips, free-text tags, weights as a list of named pieces, per-cylinder gas with the exact second the diver switched onto it, per-sample tank pressure, the recording computer's serial, firmware, and decompression algorithm, and every warning and bookmark the computer raised. I set the same bar as for MacDive: everything the format holds, in the right fields, with nothing dropped on the way. Today the Subsurface import is here, and it takes the whole divelog.
