A calm, local-first task & time tracker for macOS.
The functionality of a serious time tracker, with a UI you actually want to open.
Daybird started as a replacement for Super Productivity — great engine, but the Material UI and the high-friction idle-time flow meant it stopped getting opened. Daybird keeps the honest time accounting and rebuilds the experience in the school of Things 3: airy, springy, quiet.
- Today view with priority tiers (Priority / main / Later today) — drag tasks between them, drag to reorder, right-click for everything else
- One-tap time tracking with a live time rail showing where your day actually went
- The "Welcome back" sheet — come back from being away and split the time honestly across tasks, breaks, or skip it entirely; carve it into as many segments as reality had, assigning each to existing or brand-new tasks
- A floating widget that appears when the app can't be seen — live timer as a pill that morphs into a card, or a gentle "Not tracking" nudge
- The Log — a day journal of what actually happened: timeline strips, finished/dropped tasks, and estimate-vs-actual honesty
- Discard ≠ delete — tasks can be dropped (kept in history, time preserved) instead of deleted; everything destructive has Undo
- Sound design that motivates — completions climb a soft marimba scale through your day; clearing your last task earns a tiny arpeggio; rest never sounds like failure
- Keyboard-first — ⌘N, ⌘1–4, Space/E/X, press ? inside the app for the full map
- Local-first — your data lives on your Mac, no accounts, works offline
Grab the .dmg from Releases (Apple Silicon). Builds from v0.1.1 onward are signed and notarized — they open like any Mac app.
Prereqs: Node 20+, Rust 1.88+ (rustup).
npm install
npm run tauri dev # development
npm test # unit tests (time math, allocation, store)
npm run tauri build # produces the .app and .dmgEarly and moving fast — v0.1 shipped from an empty folder in a single day of AI-assisted development, and it's already my daily driver. Coming up: SQLite persistence, real idle detection (currently the away-sheet is manual), Linear sync, Apple Calendar (past = actuals, future = plan), an Upcoming calendar view, per-task history from the event trail, and signed builds.
Design principle in one line: it should feel like stationery, not machinery.