Today's update is the biggest navigation and tracking overhaul ReelRifter has shipped since launch. The short version: every feature is now one click (or one keystroke) away, the calendar finally looks back instead of only forward, and you can mark anything watched on any date.
Here's the long version.
1. A real sidebar — and a Cmd+K palette
ReelRifter has crossed 33 documented features. The old top-bar dropdowns weren't keeping up. Two changes fix the "I know there's a feature for X but I can't find it" problem:
- A collapsible left sidebar with every feature grouped into five sections: Discover, AI, Plan, Social, Account. Pin it open, pin it collapsed, or leave it collapsed and let it expand temporarily when your mouse is over it.
- A command palette. Press ⌘K (or Ctrl+K) anywhere to open a centered overlay. Type to filter every feature — "binge", "extension", "sports" — and hit Enter to jump. Empty state shows everything grouped by category so you can browse, not just search.
Both pull from the same feature registry, so what's findable in one is findable in the other.
The topbar is now lighter too — just the logo, a wider search bar, notifications, and your avatar. Search results in that bar now find shows, movies, people, and features in the same dropdown. Type a director's name and click straight through to their page; type "calendar" and jump to the Release Calendar.
2. The calendar goes backward
The dashboard Calendar tab used to only show the next 90 days, and only the next upcoming episode per show. That meant navigating to last month was always empty, and a show whose season had ended dropped off the calendar entirely until next season was announced.
Now:
- The window covers 12 months back through 90 days forward.
- For each show on your watchlist, we pull the relevant season's full episode list from TMDB and surface every episode whose air date falls in the visible month.
- Finished and on-hold shows are included, not just actively-watching ones. The thing you finished last month still appears.
Performance held up: the computed event list is cached per user with a 15-minute revalidate, and the page streams via Suspense so you see the calendar shell before the data lands.
3. Mark watched on any date
Every "Mark watched" button on every show page is now a split button:
- Quick-click the label = mark now (one click, no extra friction)
- Click the caret = popover with Now / Aired date / Custom date
"Aired date" uses TMDB's air_date for that episode. "Custom date" gives you a date input. The whole-season "All" button gets the same treatment, plus one extra option: Each episode's air date, which marks each episode on the day it aired — perfect for binge-watching an old show and having your streak / calendar history reflect the actual schedule.
The same picker now lives on the +Ep button on every Watching TV card on your watchlist. The first time you open it on a given show we lazily fetch that season from TMDB so the aired-date option works for any episode, not just the live edge of a currently-airing show.
While we were in there: episode ratings used a 5-star scale, but show-level ratings were 10-star. We unified everything on 10-star. Existing 5-star data was doubled in the migration so "max" still means "max."
4. Browser extension v0.2.0
Substantial upgrade:
- Desktop notifications when something is added to your watchlist (toggle in extension options).
- Faster detection — about 10–15 seconds from press-play to watchlist update, down from ~40.
- Auto-rewatch tracking — scrobble a movie you've already finished and it logs a Rewatch row automatically.
- Runtime-based disambiguation — for titles like "Pollyanna" (a 1960 movie AND a 2003 TV series on TMDB), we hint movie vs TV based on the playing video's duration so TMDB picks the right one.
- Rewritten Disney+ and Prime Video extractors using document.title + aria-labels, since both services moved their players off the old class names.
The extension is now at reelrifter.com/extension, with a full new docs entry at /docs/browser-extension.
5. Watchlist controls
Two new ways to narrow your list:
- All / TV / Movies segmented toggle next to the search box. Composes with the existing status chips, so "Watching · Movies" or "Owned · TV" both work.
- Release Date sort — orders by TMDB release / first-air date, newest first. Joins Recent, A–Z, Rating, Finish Soon, and Most Behind.
6. Quality-of-life
A handful of things that aren't user-facing features per se but feel better:
- Auto-finish on caught up — finishing the last aired episode of a show's current season automatically flips the watchlist status to FINISHED, dropping it out of Continue Watching. When the next season is announced, season-countdown alerts will surface it again.
- Auto-rewatch — server-side: marking or scrobbling a title that's already FINISHED creates a Rewatch row without any UI step.
- Discord community — we moved from GitHub Discussions to a Discord server. Link's in the footer (icon + text).
- Watch Party signup nudge — guests who join a watch party via a code now see a small dismissable banner after the group resolves on a title, inviting them to save the pick to their own watchlist. Signed-in users never see it.
What's next
A few things on the near-term list:
- Episode tracking on Disney+ and Prime Video for the browser extension. We can read title and runtime now; getting per-episode season/episode info requires reading the streaming manifest rather than the DOM, which is a bigger change.
- Mobile drawer for the sidebar — currently the sidebar is desktop-only and mobile uses the bottom tab bar. A slide-out drawer is the natural next step for the long tail of features on mobile.
- First-run onboarding — the four-card "import your watchlist, install the extension, try AI Picks, join community lists" flow for new sign-ups.
If you've used ReelRifter in the last few weeks and noticed things felt scattered, this update is the answer. Tell us what still feels harder than it should.