Features
What the app does
Balane Plan 1.0 at full length. What is still missing is listed at the bottom, unvarnished.
Capture
From thought to finished task
Typing one line is enough. What you write into the inbox is read and broken into tasks — with kind of work, estimated duration, deadline and project. You confirm instead of filling in forms.
- Quick capture everywhere: shortcut, menu bar, search field. If search finds nothing, your input becomes a new task — a dead end wastes the typing that got you there.
- Menu bar panel on the Mac: type, interpret, enter. It never opens the main window.
- Photo: shoot a note, a whiteboard, a screenshot. The text is read out and treated like a typed note.
- Files by drag and drop into the capture field or onto any task.
- Duplicate detection: write about the same thing twice and the app asks whether the existing task should be carried forward. A wrong merge is more annoying than a duplicate.
- Subtasks with progress, comments, attachments, recurrence and reminders. The next occurrence is created when you tick the box, not by a nightly job — so two weeks of holiday do not produce eight copies.
Now
The one question
The home screen works out how much uninterrupted time is left before your next meeting, asks about your energy and puts four suggestions forward — each with its reason.
- The score counts: how much work finishing this unlocks transitively, how close the deadline is, how late the latest start would be, which promise the work belongs to, and how expensive switching out of the current project is for you personally.
- Energy (low, medium, high) is the only planning input the app cannot measure itself.
- One click starts the work and the clock.
Today
The planned day
Calendar view and list, switchable. The planner works with the real gaps in your calendar, minus buffers.
- Hard work into the long morning block, small stuff into the leftovers, one project at a stretch instead of five.
- Lunch stays lunch. Focus blocks between 25 and 120 minutes. At most seven context switches a day.
- Divisible tasks are split and the parts numbered. Indivisible ones never are.
- Whatever no longer fits is named. A plan that quietly drops half the backlog is worse than no plan.
- Working hours and weekly capacity (20/25/30/35/40 hrs) are settings.
Availability
"Away" and "on a train"
Two ways to tell the planner the truth about a day.
- Away: a stretch nothing is planned into. Doctor, holiday, moving house.
- Light work only: a stretch that takes only work which survives interruption — a train ride, a long call. Hard or delicate work never lands there.
- All day or with times, with a free label. For upcoming days too.
Focus
The measurement everything builds on
Start, pause, resume, done — every transition goes through the server, so the measurement survives app restarts and device changes.
- Pauses carry a reason: break, blocked internally, waiting on someone, meeting, interruption, task switch, end of day.
- The focus screen is deliberately bare: the measurement and three decisions.
- Adding time afterwards is designed in — without it the sample would be skewed.
- Waiting is not working. The two are kept apart.
- Learned per person and kind of work: correction factor per domain, productive hours, recovery times, switching cost between two projects.
Load
Push on or stop
Six measured quantities — active minutes, unbroken stretch, context switches, interruptions, meeting load, share of hard work — normalised against a normal day for you.
- Result: fresh, warm, strained or empty.
- Plus one sentence suggesting something to do, instead of just showing a colour.
Overviews
Five views, one body of work
Projects, board, timeline, overview and matrix — the same tasks, five questions.
- Board: blocked and waiting share a column, because the difference is the why, not the where.
- Timeline: two scales — a week and a half of work, or roughly a quarter.
- Overview: if a class of promise is more than 8% off target, the card says so.
- Matrix: urgency from real deadlines and remaining work — until you move a card and know better.
- An eight-week capacity forecast and a what-if simulation before every reschedule.
Knowledge
Not a second Notion
The things that have to sit next to the work, and nothing else.
- A wiki with version history.
- Decisions as their own object: with rationale, alternatives and status. A decision without a rationale is a sentence nobody can do anything with a year later.
- Processes: recurring procedures as a template that tasks are created from.
- Meeting notes on the meeting itself. Preparation and follow-up are scheduled like work — a weekly that really costs ninety minutes is not planned as sixty.
- Full-text search across everything in one field, fuzzy — so typos still find it.
Calendar
Every calendar that counts
Google, Outlook, Apple, team calendars: each hands out a private iCal address. That is what you paste in.
- Works today, with every provider, without anybody having to register an OAuth application first.
- The address is read on the server and never returned to the app.
- In 1.0 it is read-only.
Offline
The app survives a tunnel
With no network the screen still has something to show.
- Every server answer to a read request sits on disk, planner queries included.
- Every change that cannot go out queues up.
- Whatever deliberately does not work offline says so: creating a project, starting a work session, asking a model.
- A change the server rejects is discarded rather than retried forever.
What 1.0 deliberately cannot do yet
Because a feature list without gaps is not a feature list, it is an advert.
- Different working hours per weekday. There is exactly one start-end pair.
- Two-way calendar sync. Every calendar is read, none is written to.
- Inviting a team from inside the app. Multiple people per workspace are fully modelled — only the invitation path is missing from the interface.
- Multiple assignees per task and restricted visibility: done in the database and the data layer, without a control.
- AI workers that do work on their own: tables and billing are in place, execution is not switched on yet.
- Operating system notifications. Reminders appear as banners inside the app.
- A Linux build. iOS, Android, macOS, Windows and web are there.
Underneath
Flutter (Dart), Riverpod, go_router. Supabase with Postgres, 28 migrations, row-level security on everything, planner maths as database functions — the client mirrors them for offline use, the database is the truth. Server functions for calendar sync, note interpretation, purchase verification and billing. 61 automated tests, all green. Static analysis clean.