What's New in HorseBook: The Summer Catch-Up (1.1.6 through 1.1.11)

By Brian Bickell, who builds HorseBook from a ranch in Oklahoma — usually from whatever the folks using it tell me is missing.

The last one of these roundups covered 1.1.5. Since then we've shipped six updates in about six weeks, and I've been writing about the big pieces as they landed instead of pausing to do the tour. So this is the tour — everything that's gone out since mid-July, with links to the deeper writeups where they exist.

The headline: the Breeder plan and the full stallion book

The biggest change of the stretch got its own post, so I'll keep this short: HorseBook now has a Breeder plan, and as of 1.1.11 it carries the full stallion book — mare bookings, collections and shipments, freezing logs, mare compatibility notes, fee schedules with payment links and shareable invoices, a season summary, and 1,000 AI scans a month. If you stand a stallion, the Breeder post is the one to read, and the stallion book records guide walks the day-to-day of it.

Mare-side breeding records — cycles, covers, pregnancy checks, foaling, progeny — stay on every plan, same as always.

Deeper mare and foaling records

1.1.6 quietly added a lot of depth on the mare side. Foaling records now hold the details that matter in the first hours — whether she needed assistance, first stand, first nurse, placenta passed, plasma given, IgG and SAA results, and the foal's markings. Heat-cycle records picked up ultrasound and palpation exam details and a drug administration log, so what the vet found and what the vet gave both live on the cycle they belong to.

I wrote up how the whole season fits together in tracking a mare's breeding season.

One-tap Done

Reminders can now be marked done right from the list — on the phone, on the web, and straight from the morning digest email. No opening the record, no hunting for the button. Farrier came, you tap Done, the record writes itself and the schedule rolls forward. It's a small thing that removes a step from something you do every day, which is my favorite kind of change.

The morning digest is a real push now

The digest — the once-a-day note about what's due — can now arrive as an actual push notification on your iPhone, not just an email. Same rule as always: one notification a day, and nothing at all on the days there's nothing to do. You can pick phone, email, or both in settings.

If you signed in with Apple's Hide My Email

Apple's private relay addresses sometimes quietly stop forwarding mail, which means reminders stop reaching people who never know it. The app now asks relay users for a regular contact email — with a confirmation note so you know it works. If you signed up with Hide My Email and haven't added one, it's in Settings, and it's the difference between the digest landing or not.

Expired and expiring, at a glance

Medical records, documents, and genetic tests now wear status badges — a Coggins that's lapsed or a health certificate about to says so right in the list, before you open anything. Less doing date math in your head at the trailer.

The everyday stuff

A lot of the stretch went into fixes and speed — the kind of work that doesn't demo well but is most of what using an app actually feels like:

The app opens noticeably faster from a cold start.
Foaling windows now calculate the same everywhere, anchored on the earliest cover — and they're always shown as a date range, never a single made-up due date, because no foal reads a calendar.
Fixed a booking-save bug that could overwrite a mare owner's name with a linked contact's name.
Locations can be renamed, and deleting one asks first.
Restoring a subscription after a lapse is more reliable — including the case where you subscribed before you'd signed in.
Measurements entered as zero (a foal weight, a semen volume) actually save instead of being silently dropped.
Report PDF export shows its progress instead of appearing frozen while it builds.
Voice memos stop recording properly if you leave the screen partway through.
Google and Apple sign-in interruptions recover cleanly instead of dead-ending.
AI scan usage counts are accurate now — a couple of race conditions were miscounting in-flight scans.
The AI scan consent screen has a "Not now" option.
Signup can no longer get stuck behind a verification check that failed to load — it retries gracefully.

And two that just landed

Fresh on the web dashboard this week: a gestation history card on every mare with a completed foaling — the earliest, average, and latest she's actually carried, one row per foaling, so foal watch can run on her record instead of the textbook's — and contracts on bookings, so the signed breeding contract lives right on the booking it covers. Both arrive on the iPhone app in the next updates.

Thanks, as always

Nearly everything above started as a message from somebody using the app — the one-tap Done, the foaling detail fields, the whole stallion book. I read all of it, and a surprising amount of it ships. If something's missing for how you keep your horses, tell me.

You can download HorseBook on the App Store or sign up for the web app. The 14-day free trial covers everything, no card required.