Local-First Productivity
Carpe Diem is a privacy-focused, local-first planning application designed to eliminate bloat and keep you in the flow. By planning day-by-day and keeping a backlog at your fingertips, you maintain focus without the lag or distractions of online tools.
Technical Architecture & Core Pillars
Local-First Architecture
- Zero Latency & Offline Integrity: Built entirely offline-first using Flutter for desktop (Linux, macOS, Windows). Your planning data is stored locally for instant startup and total privacy.
- Native Performance: Compiles to high-efficiency native code across all three desktop operating systems, ensuring smooth animations and immediate task state updates.
Feature Engineering & Workflow
- Backlog & Planning Engine: Gather raw ideas in the backlog, and easily plan them for today, tomorrow, or up to 7 days ahead.
- Smart Overdue Mechanics: Uncompleted tasks automatically carry over to the next day with an overdue badge, keeping your agenda realistic.
- Real-time Board Views: Instantly toggle between a Kanban board (Todo, In Progress, Done) and a compact list view.
- Task Blockers & Bulk Tools: Add dependencies to prevent starting blocked tasks. Use bulk-edit actions to reschedule, categorize, or delete multiple tasks in one click.
Extensibility & Analytics
- Markdown Importer: Parse standard Markdown lists into structured tasks and projects automatically.
- Insights & Metrics: Track historical completed tasks and view graphical productivity statistics over custom time ranges.
Why Flutter?
I dislike resource-heavy background apps that eat up RAM all day (looking at you, Electron). A fully native toolkit like GTK was an option, but a daily planner needs to live on both desktop and mobile.
Flutter was the best fit: it delivers smooth cross-platform performance with a low footprint and near native performance, perfectly matching the project’s desktop and mobile targets. After all, I like the Flutter framework and think it is very promising!