Changelog

Not every dive is the same kind of dive. Today I want to highlight a quieter feature of the Divebase logbook: the ability to record how you dived, not just where and how deep.

We call it the dive mode, and right now it understands five:

• Open circuit: regular scuba. You breathe from the tank and your exhaust bubbles up into the water. The familiar default most of us started with.
• Closed circuit: a closed-circuit rebreather (CCR). It recycles your breath, scrubbing out the CO₂ and topping up the oxygen, so almost nothing leaves the loop.
• Semi-closed circuit: a semi-closed rebreather (SCR). The middle ground, recycling part of the gas and venting the rest.
• Gauge / bottom timer: the computer steps back and acts purely as a depth gauge and timer, tracking no gas at all. A staple of technical diving.
• Freedive / Apnea: breath-hold diving. No tank, no gas, just one breath and the blue.

Every diver loves their gear. It's a love-hate relationship: the further you get in your diving, the more equipment you end up buying. Believe me, there's no finish line to this race.

After a few years you own dozens, sometimes hundreds, of pieces: suits, regulators, gloves, BCDs, tanks, and on it goes. A lot of it needs upkeep, and, just like your certifications, it pays to know when each piece is due for a service.

As a diver, one question follows me everywhere. What's your current certification? And, more often than not: what's the certification number? You've felt it too. You reach a dive center, or you finally step aboard the liveaboard, you can't wait to get in the water, and first there's the paperwork. And you need that number.

I've tried everything. A photo of the card on my phone, a line in my notes... but every time I ended up back where most of my diving already lives: my dive log software. MacDive let me keep every certification in one place, and I loved it for that.

So when I started Divebase, certifications were the very first thing I built. Before dive sites, before dives, before anything else. Here's how they come together today.

Every dive happens somewhere. In the last update you probably didn't miss that little box with a map, pointing at where the great Henry Desprez was sunk. That is what we call a dive site, and this time it gets the spotlight.

Dive sites are first-class citizens in the Divebase dive log. Here's a first look at how you collect them, describe them, and find them on a map.

Dives are the heart of any logbook. They're not only the information you'll come back to most, they're also the hardest to organize. A single dive carries an overwhelming amount of detail: the time, the dive site, the depth, the temperature... you name it.

We spent a good number of hours iterating on a design that strikes a reasonable balance between readability, density, and completeness. What you see today is just the tip of the iceberg, with plenty more still to come. Here's a quick preview of where things stand.

Every diver remembers their first descent: that moment you stop floating around on the surface and actually go somewhere. Divebase is at exactly that point. We've left the boat, the water's clear, and there's a whole lot to explore below. 🤿

This is the very first entry in what we hope becomes a long logbook of updates. Here's a work-in-progress peek at where things stand today. The app is still finding its sea legs, but the data you see below is no mockup: it's my own logbook, gathered over 17 years of diving.