Dev log
Medicine with an end date
Some medicine you take forever. Some you take for exactly twenty-one days, and then you stop. Until this week Ambervial only really understood the first kind.
“Twice a day for twenty-one days”
That sentence is now three taps. Add the medication, say how many times a day — once is morning, twice is morning and evening, three times adds lunch, four adds night — and say how long. Pick 21 days, or type any number. The times are ordinary dose times afterwards, so move them wherever they actually belong in your day.
From then on the app counts with you: Day 3 of 21, ends Oct 31, on your day view, in your cabinet, and on the medication's own page, next to how many of the scheduled doses you've recorded so far.
The reminders stop on their own
This is the part that actually matters. A reminder to take an antibiotic you finished three weeks ago isn't a small annoyance — it's noise, and noise teaches you to swipe reminders away without reading them. That habit is expensive later, when a reminder means something.
So when the course ends, Ambervial goes quiet about it. The record doesn't vanish: the course and every dose you recorded stay in your history and in the dose log you can hand a prescriber. It just stops talking, and the medication moves to a short “courses that aren't running” line at the bottom of your day. If the prescription gets extended or refilled, you say so — the app never quietly extends a course, and nothing it shows you is ever a reason to stop taking something. That conversation belongs with your prescriber.
An hour later, once
You asked for this one directly: the morning reminder goes off while your hands are full, and by the time they aren't, it's gone. Now, an hour after a dose time, if that dose still isn't recorded, one more reminder arrives. Recording the dose cancels it. One nudge, not nagging — and it never says you missed anything, because the app doesn't know that. It only knows what was recorded.
It's on by default for a timed course and off by default for medication you've been taking for years. Quietly doubling the notifications on someone's daily blood-pressure pill isn't a change to make on their behalf; there's a switch on every medication.
The boring part that took the longest
iPhones give an app 64 pending notifications. Not 64 a day — 64 in total, ever pending. Schedule a 65th and the one furthest in the future silently disappears. On top of that, a repeating daily reminder can't be cancelled for a single day, which quietly rules out the obvious way to build the hour-later follow-up: a repeating one would go off an hour after every future dose, including the ones you took on time.
So Ambervial now schedules two ways at once. Medication you take indefinitely keeps one repeating reminder per dose time — cheap, never expires, still works on a phone you don't open for a month. Course doses and every follow-up are individual dated notifications, planned about a week ahead inside a budget that accounts for the repeating ones, and topped up whenever you open the app. When the budget gets tight, dose reminders win and the furthest follow-ups are the first to go.
None of that is visible in the app, which is the point. It's also the kind of thing that's wrong until you check it on a real device, so we did: a 21-day course, twice a day, a reminder fired at its scheduled minute reading Day 1 of 21, and recording the dose cancelled the follow-up that was already sitting an hour out.
Where to get it
The web app has it now, at ambervial.com/app — no install, records stay in your browser. Version 1.3.0 for iPhone is in Apple's review queue, and TestFlight testers have the build already: testflight.apple.com/join/fqhCEfTr.
As always: Ambervial organizes your medication information. It isn't medical advice, and nothing it tells you is a reason to stop, skip, or change a medication on your own.