WhichDrawer 1.2: Custom Fields, Offline Edits, and a Cabinet to Practice On

Your fields, not ours

WhichDrawer has always shipped a long list of item fields — SKU, brand, part number, purchase price, expiration date, and so on. That list was a guess about what you track, and it was wrong for almost everyone in some small way. The bead people wanted a finish. The electronics people wanted a voltage. My father would have wanted a column headed "came off the Rover."

So now you make your own. In Settings, define a field and pick its type: text, number, date, URL, a yes/no toggle, or a dropdown with options you write. Give it a description so future-you remembers what it was for, a placeholder, a default value that fills itself in on new items, and a required flag if you never want to leave it blank. Drag them into the order you think in. Then fill them in on any item, right alongside the built-in fields.

They work offline too, which brings us to the other half of this release.

Catalog with no signal at all

The places worth cataloging are the places your phone gives up: the basement, the back of the garage, a storage unit with one bar that lies about it. Until now WhichDrawer could show you your inventory down there, but not let you change it — which is a strange thing to tell someone standing in front of the drawer with the part in their hand.

In 1.2 you can add an item, edit one, or delete one in airplane mode. The change takes effect immediately, queues itself, and lands on the server the moment you have a connection again — custom field values included. Cold-launching the app while offline still shows you everything. And signing out clears the offline copy completely, which matters if you ever hand the phone to someone else.

Offline access is part of the Standard and Pro plans.

A cabinet that's already full

The hardest moment in any inventory app is the first one, when the app is empty and the job in front of you is to photograph two hundred drawers. Every new account now starts with Sample: Workshop Drawers — a nine-drawer cabinet with items already in it, across a few categories. Tap through it, search it, break it, move things around. It's there so the app can show you what it's for instead of explaining.

Two things about it worth knowing: it never counts against your organizer limit, so a free account still has its one real slot sitting there untouched. And there's a "Remove Sample" button for when you're done with it, which really removes it — it won't quietly come back.

AI photo search, on the free plan, with the number shown

Photo search is the thing people tell their friends about: hold up a mystery screw, take a picture, get a drawer. It's also the one feature that costs real money to run every time it's used, so it has always sat awkwardly between "try it" and "pay for it."

The answer in 1.2 is a straight allowance. Free accounts get 20 photo searches a month, resetting on the first of the month, with no time limit and no trial to expire. When you're down to your last five, the Items screen tells you how many are left before you spend one. When you're out, it says so plainly and tells you the actual limit, instead of opening the photo picker and failing at the end. Standard and Pro are unlimited, as before.

Sharing that behaves like sharing

When someone shared an organizer with you read-only, the app used to show you all the usual controls anyway — Add Item, quantity steppers, edit and delete — and then refuse when you touched them. That is the worst possible way to communicate a permission.

Now a read-only organizer looks read-only: no phantom buttons, no steppers, nothing that implies you can change someone else's things. If you've been invited as an editor, you get the layout editor and can rearrange the drawers (editing the items themselves is the next step on this road). And if you try to leave a household you're the only admin of, the app now explains that instead of handing you a generic error.

Adding an item, redesigned

The Add Item screen put the barcode scanner front and center and buried the option most people actually wanted, which was to just type the thing in. It's rebuilt: the camera scanner is still on top where it belongs, with a clear Enter Item Manually path directly underneath it, and you can now scan a barcode out of a photo in your library rather than holding the box up to the lens.

And the fixes

• The layout editor no longer silently reverts a merge if you reopen it within a few minutes of saving.
• Moving an item no longer leaves a blank sheet stuck on the screen.
• Two-factor sign-in goes straight to the code prompt, with no loops.
• Photos load faster and hold their place while you scroll.