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Memento Mori App Store Prep — Skia Calendar, Brand Coin Widgets, and the Homol Works Hub

· 2 min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Principal Consultant @ ThreeWill

After last week's widget readability pass, the focus shifted to submission readiness: a Skia life calendar, a consistent brand coin across widgets and loading states, deep-linked home widgets, and the marketing/privacy/support URLs App Store Connect expects.

What happened​

  • Rebuilt the life calendar on Skia — better scroll and zoom for a 4,680-week grid, with the tradeoff of a heavier Skia dependency and canvas-style rendering to maintain instead of a pure View-based layout
  • Enriched home-screen widgets (Dreams vs Time, Life Ring, Week Gauge) and replaced skull cutouts with a shared brand coin asset — extract script, CoinSpinner in-app, and widget snapshot wiring
  • Dropped the clipped goals widget; home widgets now deep-link into the right in-app tabs and use the coin as the weekly goal completion marker
  • Hardened Smart Record AI with clearer error messages, reflection editor improvements, and fallback merge tests
  • Locked the iOS build to iPhone-only and added an App Store screenshot / preview prep workflow
  • Finalized the App Store screenshot set on Homol Works and an App Preview video for Connect
  • Published a Memento Mori app hub on Homol Works with marketing copy and those same screenshots

Memento Mori Home Screen widgets with brand-coin goal markers

Polish Pass — Making Expo Home Screen Widgets Actually Readable

· One min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Principal Consultant @ ThreeWill

After the SDK 55 revival, the next problem was not “do widgets render?” — it was “can you read them at a glance?” Trimming the set and using a consistent brand mark beat shipping every layout variant.

What happened​

  • Wired shared skull PNGs through the widget snapshot builder for completed goals
  • Clarified week/dreams layouts and trimmed the overall widget set
  • Fixed TestFlight margin gates for fewer widgets
  • Confirmed on device / TestFlight (not simulator-only) — readable at a glance
  • App Store v1 docs will cover all layouts in the polished set (not deferring variants out of the write-up)

Memento Mori home-screen widgets — polished readable set

Reviving iOS Widgets on Expo SDK 55 (and Why They Went Black)

· One min read
Mike Homol
Mike Homol
Principal Consultant @ ThreeWill

Home-screen widgets for Memento Mori came back to life on Expo SDK 55 — but not before a stretch of black squares that looked like a React layout bug and were actually an extension packaging problem.

What happened​

  • Rebuilt widgets against Expo SDK 55 with expo-widgets patches and EAS multi-target signing
  • Black widgets traced to JS bundle copy into ExpoWidgetsTarget.appex, postinstall idempotency, and extension runtime symbols
  • Hardened TestFlight / IPA CI gates so widget regressions fail earlier
  • Current home-screen set is readable again — life % ring, weekly check-ins, and Dreams vs time — after the black-widget era
  • Smart Record is active again (not gated off for release): speak stream-of-consciousness reflections and get a bulleted summary; in final testing ahead of app go-live

Memento Mori home-screen widgets after the Expo SDK 55 fix

Smart Record — talk freely, get a bulleted reflection summary