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I don't have an iPhone to try this, but I've been a long time time user of Tasks.org on Android and particularly because it supports CalDAV and works so well offline.

However, while we are on the topic of planning apps, you should know the Todoist added the best use of AI I've ever seen. It's called Ramble mode and you can just talk and instantly it'll start showing a list of tasks that update as you go. It is extraordinary. I'm considering switching away from tasks.org for this one feature.

Here's a short video of it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DIczFm3Dy5I

You need paid (free trial is ok) and to enable experiments before you can access it.

Anyone know how they might have done this?

That’s cool! Slight fear of replicating the Dropbox comment here, but all you really need to do is run whisper (or some other speech2text), then once the user stops talking jam the transcript through a LLM to force it into JSON or some other sensible structure.

"once the user stops talking" is a key insight here for me. When using this I wasn't intentionally pausing to let it figure out an answer. It seemed to just pop up while I was talking. But upon experimenting some more it does seem to wait until here's a bit of a pause most of the time.

However it's still wild to me how fast and responsive it is. I can talk for 10 seconds and then in ~500ms I see the updates. Perhaps it doesn't even transcribe and rather feeds the audio to a multimodal llm along with whatever tasks it already knows about? Or maybe it's transcribing live as you talk and when you stop it sends it to the llm.

Anyone have a sense of what model they might be using?

I cannot remember off the top of my head the exact number and am clearly too lazy to google it but there is a specific length of time in which, if no new noises pass through, the human brain processes it as a pause/silence.

I want to say 300ms which would coincide with your 500ms example

This is definitely dependent on individuals. It’s a reason during some conversations people can never seem to get a word in edgewise, even if the person speaking may think they’re providing opportunities do so. A mismatch in “pause length” can make for frustrating communications.

I am also too lazy to google or AI it but it’s something I remember from when I taught ESL long ago.

That makes sense! To be honest I’m referring to my audio engineering degree and the pause was specific to noticing silence in audio so I’d 100% agree that in conversation it can vary between people as I know some many people who will not let you get a word in

https://boundaryml.com/

LLM to types and done

For Android and Windows users, you can try my todo app “Hamsterbase Tasks”.

It's open-source and supports self-hosted. Available on web, Mac, Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android.

Do you support calDAV? I looked briefly but didn't see it. A good calDAV client is something I'd pay for.

standard AI meeting room note takers have been able to extract todo items for a while now.

Is one well integrated with a project management tool and actually creates and updates the todos?

All of the ones I come across only extracted the points for action items. I didn’t notice any of them submitting to task managers.

You asked “how they are able to do this” and I said it has been a standard feature for a while now in meeting rooms. The additional features in todoist fills in the right data in the right columns, which is notable, but things like have been done with 30boxes where natural language is used to create events.

> Morocco runs on UTC+1 most of the year but switches to UTC during Ramadan to shorten the fasting day

Unrelated, but I love coming across religious "hacks" like these that communities have developed over the years.

A similar one is the fishing line that jews tied around New York to get around the rules of Sabbath https://www.npr.org/2019/05/13/721551785/a-fishing-line-enci....

I think you left this comment on the wrong article ;)

Haha yes, but it was unrelated either way

Indeed I did, thanks!

how many accounts do you have, my guy?

Only 2.

Irrelevant to this post, but Morocco switching to UTC does not change the number of hours fasted as that is based on sunset and sunrise so not really a religious "hack" but more similar to daylight saving (work hours remain same).

Moroccan here. We used to switch timezones 4 times a year, and I guarantee you it was exhausting!

I'm sorry, I like the look and the idea but... why is a subscription necessary for a local-first app?

I suspect the guy enjoys some food every now and then

I’m with the parent on this. I don’t mind subscriptions if a service is provided that justifies the recurring cost. If it’s a local offline app then I don’t see it justified. Price it accordingly or at least give an option for one-time.

But yes, sub vs non-sub model is a very divisive topic. Personally would never subscribe to something like a offline local todo list

One way of looking at is that subscription software helps align developer interests with dedicated users. It's easier to retain users than it is to get new users, so developers are incentivized to build features/make improvements for existing users to keep them as happy users. In a pay once upfront model developers are essentially only incentivized to build features that attract new users.

“Still not selling the imprint of my anus? Here’s another five bucks!”

i.e.

It’s sad I can’t use Google’s task manager (both because it sucks, and I can’t trust it),

but that’s life.

The issue I see is that for certain apps, such as one I am currently working on and hope to publish soon on iOS, is that they do require a lot of maintenance once published even if there were no server costs. Given the amount of work I already put in it and how much more will be necessary even just to keep the app correctly running in the future, I don't really see what other monetization approach would make sense for me. Actually, I would even argue that selling an app without a subscription might (sometimes) be setting wrong or blurry expectations: if a user accepts to pay today a single time, how long are they expecting updates for? Will it only be basic bug fixes or also major new features? With a subscription, I feel like at least if they are unhappy with my app, they won't really have lost anything and can just unsubscribe, since they had basically accepted, IMO, that the money they put in my app each period of time is only for the service and potential updates in that small period of time and not future changes.

This used to be handled by selling full-version upgrades and providing patches between versions for free.

A one time cost is fine if you don’t mind the app breaking next time Apple updates iOS. There is an ongoing cost to ensuring the app continues to work.

Why would it break next time Apple updates iOS? Will the developer not want new sales on that updated iOS ?

The maintenance effort required on iOS is substantial. About a quarter of your full-time year needs to be dedicated to it.

On desktop, you can just publish your software and slowly see it age as you work on your next big release. On iOS, it ages every year at brutal pace, and your new sales will plummet while you work on your next big release, meaning your revenue crashes much faster.

Even worse, the iOS App Store has no notion of paid upgrades, and publishing a new app is basically like starting from scratch as far as discoverability goes. So when you finally have your next big release ready, it's like launching a completely new company.

Apple really wants developers to make subscription apps that ship frequent iterative changes, and other business models just simply don't work well on their mobile platform (on Android it's even worse btw).

I have a fully offline app and I offer the users two options (in addition of using a "basic" version for free)

- monthly subscription

- or pay one time fee of ~ 6-month subscription and own it forever

To be honest, in this case the subscription is cheaper for the average user, because most cancel in under six months.

So it's ok to pay for machines but for the humans working on something then no?

I’m not paying for the human that made the app. I’m paying for the app, aka for an advertised thing with an advertised feature set for a specific price. If I deem the value I get for the price worth it, I will purchase the thing from you.

I will however not pay you monthly just because “the dev needs to eat too” if there is no service provided that justifies the monthly ongoing cost.

there are a lot of apps that do this though… eg. git tower. Sketch. Etc. Not saying that I like it or anything. Maybe its the combination of local first + an app that seems to be trivial (I am sure it was not but if you hear "daily planner" I think its reasonable to assume that its less complex than a git client and/or an app like Sketch).

I think someone that can afford to publish on the most expensive app publishing platform can afford food all the time. There are no poor iOS developers.

The developer fee is a business expense for anyone publishing software as an entity on the App Store. This is the same as any other expense someone might require for their profession, it doesn't have anything to do with their financial security.

The price isn't mentioned anywhere on the website and I don't have an iPhone, but I am curious, how much is it?

Everything will cost you, in Apple's ecosystem. This is just another line on the tab.

hmmm... a planner is one of the few things that i'd like to have access to regardless of what i'm using... One of the few things i don't mind and even slightly prefer to be online first for seemless sync (with the ability to edit and add to offline ofcourse)

Local-first should mean that you do have it regardless of what you're using. Point 2 in Ink&Switch's original essay is "Your data is not trapped on one device".

https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/

FWIW, the term "local-first" wasn't coined by Ink&Switch so different people have different understanding of the term.

But, Ink&Switch rule regardless, I love what they're doing and everyone would be better off doing "local-first" in the way they suggest, don't get me wrong.

Totally get that. I'm planning to support more platforms, and I'm glad to say that iCloud sync is already in the plans for future development.

Love the app, hate IAP / subs model

Yep, 25 euros a year for a goddamn app is ridiculous. It's the same price as a nice physical agenda, that needs all kinds of production and supply chain wizardry.

Mobile devs are out of their minds nowadays. No that it matters that much because those phone apps end up being largely pointless most of the time (hence the absurdity of the high price).

That's the only sustainable model these days, speaking as a mobile dev myself.

Sell me a major version every couple of years, would far prefer that. IAP and subs just feels scammy and lazy.

Sounds good, doesn't work. How would I sell a major version on a store like the Apple or Google app stores [0]? How will I fund my salary as well as my employees' salaries from only major versions, what if people buy now but not later on, do I lay them off? For what it's worth I do offer lifetime plans that are basically 2 to 3 years of the annual plan, as that's the expected lifetime value (LTV) of some of my apps.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45810856#45815972 (this comment gets it right on why you can't do this on said app stores)

What changed that made selling software (as opposed to renting) work before that prevents it from working now?

There used to be a lot less expectation of post-sale maintenance of consumer software in the era where sales rather than subscriptions were the norm. There was also tolerance for higher up-front prices, and for much of that period sales depended on marketing through and validation by a narrow set of relatively trusted discovery channels, which customer the perceived risk to buyers. Now everything is untrusted, no one wants to pay much upfront but everyone expects ongoing support over they've got the thing. I’m not saying subscription is the only thing that works, but it's pretty easy to see that the calculus facing the average vendor has shifted tremendously over time.

fwiw the expectation of post-sale maintenance would not be nearly as egregious if companies were not regularly pushing new updates that cause new issues

it is a problem of ones own making

Well, on mobile the underlying operating system is moving so fast that companies must continue to update their apps or else they stop working. It's the absolute inverse situation to the backwards compatibility story of Windows. That kind of backwards compatibility is a wet dream for every mobile developer.

I don't believe this is generally true. I have automatic updates for apps disabled on both my Android phones and iOS devices, and regularly use some apps that were installed years ago.

There are obviously going to be some exceptions for apps that rely on specific types of system services, of course.

You're not the average user if you have auto updates disabled. Notice you also said "some" apps, well, most do need to keep up with OS updates or fall behind.

I did not claim to be the average user. Most of my apps do not get updated unless they rely on APIs that force them to update. Furthermore, I have several android apps I published over 15 years ago that still function without updates on the newest version of Android.

What updates do you think need to be made to not “fall behind”? There aren’t many other than things like integration with Google Play services or App Store subscription billing.

It's a bunch of things. In the old days, if you bought software in a box for your OS (let's say DOS), you didn't expect it to need to be updated. It also continued to work just fine and maybe you didn't update your OS that frequently or had security issues to worry about. Nowadays, iOS gets updated every year and APIs get deprecated, and users update, so you have to maintain the app after initially shipping it.

A lot of people also expect the software to add features over time. In the old days, you'd ship a brand new major version and charge people for that and stop working on the old one. With the App Store, I suppose you could technically abandon the old version and sell a whole new version, but then all your old users will be annoyed if the app is removed from the store or no longer works when they update their OS. You could gate new features behind a paywall, and I know some apps do this, but then it adds to the complexity of the app as you have to worry about features that work for some users but not others.

I think people also expect software nowadays to be cheap or free, I think due to large corporations being able to fund free stuff (say gmail) by other means (say ads or tracking users). That means users would balk if you asked them to pay $50 for your little calendar app, so if you did ask for a one-time payment, it would be $5-$10, which is nowhere near enough to recoup whatever time you spent, unless you hit it big. Hitting it big nowadays with an app is difficult since there's so much competition in the App Stores and everyone has raced to the bottom to sell apps for pennies.

Actually people don't expect it to be updated in most cases. In fact, Apple is generally forcing their hands with constant nagging to update and the psychologically taxing red notification dot that people do not know how to get rid of.

Most people would be just fine buying a phone as it is and using it as is for the rest of it's useful life. But they can't, because Apple came with a clever marketing trick to make things easier for them: "free" updates for everyone. This way they get to keep working only on one OS version, deprecated stuff aggressively and largely no need to care about security patching stuff after a few years.

If you are in the "ecosystem" they will force you to upgrade your OSs to be in sync if you dare use one of their apps since they are tied to OS release (dumbest things ever, but of course it's on purpose).

Weird. Things3 seems to be doing great without it

The exceptions that prove the rule.

I hope you don't mind my $0.00 annual mobile spend as a result.

That's fine, people like you aren't my customer anyway and thus do not need to be listened to. Free users generally have value if they can convert to paid, because nothing is truly free in life.

If this were available on macOS as well, and did sync via iCloud I'd be all over it. It's a great model for a calendar/task manager but I really don't want to have to squint at my phone screen while using it.

If the developer checked the enable the Mac Catalyst destination in the Xcode project, you should be able to run it on your Mac.

Thanks. I'm happy to share that iCloud sync and MacOS app is something that already in the plan for future development. In the meantime, if you have an M-series Mac, you should be able to run the app directly on your Mac since I've enabled Mac Catalyst support.

Just a heads up from someone who's gone down iCloud sync path before. Make sure you're aware of the tradeoffs before relying on it for your app. It has a lot of downsides that aren't immediately obvious due to it relying on the user's iCloud storage quota. Many user's don't understand this and will leave 1 star reviews etc.

Thanks for the heads up. I’ll definitely keep that in mind. I’m curious though, what other downsides did you run into when using iCloud sync? Would love to learn from your experience.

In general it's a bit of a closed box, it's not that easy to work with and to me felt unreliable and difficult to debug. Running migrations can be easily forgotten and this needs to be done in the dashboard as far as I remember. There aren't official APIs to check certain things like if the user has quota, what to do when the quota is full, how to communicate that etc. I think you may be able to check if it's enabled though. Another one is its not cross platform in any meaningful way, I thought this would be fine initially but as the app I worked on developed it was clear a web or Android version would be nice to add without being tied to an Apple account. I ultimately removed it and wrote my own optional sync layer with my own auth and no one seemed to mind. This thread might be useful https://mastodon.social/@marcoarment/109540935902363728

Most of those things can probably be worked around and might not be applicable to your app but for me it went to the bucket of technologies not to touch again.

When I open this in the Mac app store, there is a download button, so I'm guessing it works on both iOS and macOS due to catalyst.

Look into NotePlan.co it syncs with iCloud and has native MacOS and iOS apps. I love it.

Good one, you should approach short-term stay property owners, they are looking to provide this for their guests!

Looks awesome! I will give it a try. Wondering what's ur monetization plan though.

I fail to see features that default iOS calendar app already has. The UI seems really simple and there is dozens of amazing calendar apps that have been on the market for 10+ years of features in this price range.

> I fail to see features that default iOS calendar app already has.

presumably local-first

How is iOS calendar not local-first

What does that mean?

Looks nice. I will give this a try today

Thanks. Would love to hear how it goes. Let me know if you have any feedbacks.

It looks well done. It is a shame that people posting reviews can be such dickheads. Out of the 4 public reviews, 3 are 1 star and only one of those is because of an actual issue. One is because the app isn’t right for them. The other because they wanted dark mode (really? You like the app enough to care that it doesn’t have dark mode but still gave it a 1 star?)

For 20 bucks a year without any sort of cloud servers to pay for, I'd expect dark mode at the very least. The app looks nice of course, but it's priced quite steeply.

If you charge a premium, customers will have high expectations.

It is not a binary system. If every time an app misses a feature you want you rate it a 1 star, it completely devalues the rating system.

I agree, but unfortunately ratings are rather useless until you've gathered at least a couple dozen of them.

Thanks so much for the kind words. Yeah, too bad people can be so quick to leave bad reviews for something like feature requests, especially since I've made it easy to reach out via email for feedback or requests. Really appreciate you pointing this out.

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