For the last few months MagicBase has been my own daily tool for tracking tricks, moves, and sets, quietly evolving in the background. Today it’s stable enough that I’m comfortable calling it what it is: a Beta. Not a finished product, but no longer a rough sketch either.
Here’s what changed to get here.
Tag your own way — categories, types, emoji, all of it
The repertoire system got a real rebuild. Every trick and move now sits under a Category — Cards, Coins, Props, or App, plus you can add your own with a custom emoji if none of those fit.
Underneath that, Types are fully yours to define: create them, combine them, give them their own emoji, rename or delete them later. A trick can be „Impromptu“ and „Mentalism“ at once, no more picking one drawer. And Moves get the exact same system, so a sleight’s technique (Palm, Force, Flourish…) lives right alongside the trick-level effect tags, structured the same way throughout the app.
Small thing, but it’s the piece that made the whole database finally feel like my system instead of a fixed form I was filling in.
Payments moved to Polar
The subscription and billing backend has fully moved off Stripe and onto Polar. For anyone with an active plan, nothing changes about what you get — this is purely a backend swap, done because it’s a better long-term fit for an indie app like this one.
A more solid foundation under the hood
This one’s invisible unless something goes wrong, which is exactly the point. Your tricks, moves, sets, and notes each now live as their own record instead of one giant shared save file. Saving a single trick now only touches that trick, not your entire collection — which matters a lot as libraries grow, and matters even more if you use MagicBase across more than one device.
Rusty Mode
Tricks and moves you haven’t touched in a while now surface on their own, instead of quietly aging out of memory. If something’s gone rusty, MagicBase tells you before a gig does.
Smarter Excel import
Bringing an existing spreadsheet into MagicBase understands the new category/type structure now — including telling trick-level effect types apart from move-level technique tags, so an import doesn’t dump everything into one bucket.
Also in this round
- Set builder, search your repertoire and drop tricks straight into a show while you’re building it, instead of adding everything after the fact
- Quick-edit, change a trick or move’s type right from the table view, no need to open the full editor for a small fix
- Categories that fill up can be merged into another one instead of getting stuck
Why Beta, not v1.0
Everything above has been running on my own account and a handful of testers‘ setups. Before I call this a finished v1.0, I want it to sit in more hands, on more devices, for a few more weeks — the honest way to earn that label rather than just declare it.
If you’re using MagicBase and something feels off, breaks, or is just plain confusing, that feedback is exactly what this phase is for. Find me here or drop it directly in the app.
Thanks for building this with me.
