DeskTasks - The Task Widget That Stays Out of Your Way

A local-first desktop widget pinned behind every window - natural-language capture, recurring tasks, reminders, and time tracking, shipped for Windows and macOS with an offline-first companion PWA.

Role
Solo Builder · Product & Engineering
Timeline
2026 – present
Team
Solo
Outcome
540+Test Assertions
Stack
Electron · JavaScript · IndexedDB · Supabase · PWA

TL;DR

Todo apps compete for your attention; DeskTasks refuses it. The widget sits at the bottom of the window stack - visible exactly when you glance at your desktop, invisible while you work. Local-first and accountless with atomic JSON storage, a natural-language quick-add parser, honest calendar import/export, and an offline-first companion PWA. Shipped: 4 tagged releases, Windows + macOS builds, 540+ test assertions.

540+Test Assertions
4Tagged Releases
3Export Formats
2Platforms

Context & Problem

Every task manager makes the same bet: to be used, it must be seen, so it floats, badges, and notifies. The result is that checking your tasks becomes another context switch - and the app you bought to reduce friction adds some.

The insight behind DeskTasks is the opposite bet: the desktop wallpaper is the one surface you glance at dozens of times a day without meaning to. A widget pinned behind every window (HWND_BOTTOM on Windows) is invisible while you work and present the moment you look up. No window management, no dock icon to chase, no account to create.

Product Decisions

  • Local-first, accountless. Data lives in one portable JSON file with atomic writes (temp file → fsync → .bak → rename), 7 daily snapshots, and automatic corruption recovery with a visible banner. Sync via Supabase exists but is strictly opt-in convenience - the product is complete without a network.
  • Capture must be one line. The quick-add parser turns pay rent tomorrow 4pm !high #home every month into a titled, tagged, scheduled, prioritised, recurring task. It handles relative times, ranges, day words, and recurrence including last friday of month and every N days after done.
  • Never approximate. Calendar rules that can't round-trip honestly (a "2nd Tuesday" .ics rule the engine can't represent, or "after done" recurrence with no calendar equivalent) import as clearly-labelled single tasks or export with an explaining note - instead of silently drifting.
  • One timer, not many. Time tracking allows a single active timer, caps a forgotten one at 8 hours, and banks time when the task is ticked off. Completion is the clearest "I'm done" signal, so it's the one that commits the number.

Implementation

The Electron main process owns all state: every mutation goes through IPC to one store, and the renderer re-renders from a single broadcast - UI and disk can never disagree, which is what makes crash recovery boring. Reminders ride Windows toast notifications with repeat nudges, a morning summary, and an end-of-day recap. Notes allow only http/https/mailto links - file:, shell:, and javascript: are refused outright.

The companion PWA (Vite + IndexedDB + service worker) reuses the same shared modules - parser, recurrence, dates, CSV - so widget and phone can never disagree about what "biweekly" means. It reads and writes the exact same JSON format, works fully offline, and syncs through a single Supabase records table when the user opts in.

macOS got a deliberate compromise: Electron offers no window level below normal there, so DeskTasks floats like Stickies does, and focus detection leans on a best-effort, documented-as-fragile OS file. Shipping an honest 80% beat holding the release for a native rewrite.

Outcome & Metrics

  • 4 tagged releases (v1.1.0 → v1.2.2), packaged for Windows (installer + portable) and macOS (arm64 + x64)
  • 540+ test assertions - 409+ unit (parser, recurrence, platform, sync round-trips) plus 131 e2e assertions that restart the real app to prove persistence and crash recovery
  • 3 import/export formats - .ics with RRULE, CSV with BOM, Markdown - with UID-based dedupe on re-import
  • Offline-first companion PWA sharing the widget's exact data format and parsing rules
  • Zero telemetry, zero accounts - sync is opt-in; the data file is portable by hand

Learnings

What Worked

Making the main process the single writer bought disproportionate reliability: e2e tests assert on both renderer state and bytes on disk, and the two never diverge. The shared-modules decision (one parser, two surfaces) eliminated the entire class of "phone and desktop disagree" bugs before they existed.

What I'd Change

The z-order dance on Windows (a once-per-second check to survive Win+D) works but is a workaround; the wallpaper-layer reparenting mode is more robust and should become the default once its focus-loss trade-off has a cleaner answer. And unsigned builds are the real adoption tax - a code-signing certificate matters more to first-run experience than the next feature.

Related work