There are certain personal projects that feel like cliches, due to the tendency for any and every developer to want to embark on them.
A To Do list manager is a classic case.
Nevertheless… I find myself here.
Motivation
I do have some professional motivation - it’s an excuse to catch up with some recent Swift/SwiftUI developments.
It’s the first project where I’ve used SwiftData, rather than Core Data, for example.
It’s also nice to have a fresh project where I can set the minimum platform high.
It’s maybe even an excuse to mess around with AI/vibe/whatever-we-call-them tools.
My main motivation though is just that I’ve never really found an app that works just right.
Just Right
As far as I know, my version of “just right” doesn’t correspond to a specific methodology. It might be similar to GTD or something like that, but I don’t think it’s exactly the same. Although, honestly, I haven’t done any research around this topic, I’m just following my gut.
At the moment, I’m calling my approach “The Stack”.
If I was high-falutin’ enough to claim a methodology, this would be it:
- capturing ideas fast when they occur is key
- there is only one list (“the stack”)
- it is ordered, but above the top few items, the order probably doesn’t matter much
- new stuff goes on the top
- you can pull an item to the top
- being able to categorise items can be helpful
- categorisation should be easy and unstructured (I use #hashtags)
- being able to focus on a hashtag is helpful
- items can be in more states than “to do” or “done”; “on hold”, or “rejected” for example1
That’s pretty much it.
If I had to put the approach into words more generally, I’d say that it’s all about staying focussed and removing choice.
Having more than one list would force me to choose where to put something.
Having the ability to drag items into any order or arrange them in a hierarchy would seduce me into tinkering with the order instead of tackling the items2.
It’s helpful to be able to work on items from one project at a time, and so I do allow you to focus the stack down to items with a given tag. That’s pretty much all the focus I feel the need for though.
Wanna Help?
If any of this sounds vaguely interesting, I’ve got both macOS and iOS TestFlight builds that I’m pushing to regularly.
They are early versions, and the UI/UX is basic. I’d love some help with that.
Editing item text is a bit clunky right now. I wish SwiftUI had more support for auto-completion in the text editor. I will eventually polish this to try to make it as easy as possible to tag things, and I might add support for styled text (probably via Markdown).
Items are persistent, even when deleted. They just stay in the database, with their status set to deleted (which is different from the completed status).
Syncing between devices is automatic, and iCloud based. No plans to change that right now, but in principle any sync mechanism would be ok.
The project is closed source, but it’s not rocket science and I may well open it up.
It shouldn’t be regarded as a safe place for the only copy of your items right now. I know that makes it hard to really use, and I’m keen to get it solid. I think it is pretty solid, but I don’t want to make promises I can’t keep. Don’t blame me if it eats your items…
If you’re at all interested in giving it a try via Testflight, or just giving me some feedback on the idea, give me a shout on my personal mastodon account.
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