Smart TDL

A calm day planner for iPhone and Mac that decides what matters next, without showing you a single priority flag.

What it does

Smart TDL is a minimal, TeuxDeux-style list of days: Today first, then the next six. There are no projects, tags or priority pickers. Instead, a ranking engine scores the open tasks in the background and quietly floats the most important one to the top.

• Fast capture. Type call Sam friday and the task lands on Friday with the date words removed. Also understands tomorrow, next tue and in 3 days, plus recurrence like every weekday or every monday.
• Invisible ranking. A local heuristic works offline with no setup. Paste your own Anthropic API key and Claude Haiku 4.5 ranks instead, optionally guided by a one-line "what are you working on?" note.
• Never reorders under your hand. New scores are buffered and applied only at a "safe moment", when no row is being touched, hovered or edited.
• Honest confidence. When the AI's top two scores are within 0.06 of each other, the UI stops presenting a single #1 and gives the top tasks equal weight.
• Rolls forward. Unfinished tasks move to today, and one shortcut pushes everything left today to tomorrow.
• Mac week board. A column per day (3, 5 or 7 days) with a "gravity" type ramp, so rank shows up as size and weight. Undated Later / Misc / Reminders lanes sit to the right, and tasks drag between days and lanes.
• Keyboard first on Mac. Cmd+N new task, Cmd+K quick capture, Cmd+J focus mode (one task, full screen), Cmd+Shift+T push to tomorrow, Cmd+Z undo, plus a menu bar capture item.
• iPhone. Swipe to complete, pin or delete, a long-press menu to move a task, and a success haptic when you check one off.

How it works

• TaskStore (@Observable, main actor) is the single source of truth. It persists to JSON in Application Support, and the decoder tolerates older files that lack newer fields.
• Ranker protocol. HeuristicRanker (keyword and due-date scoring) and HaikuRanker (raw Messages API over URLSession, since there is no Swift SDK) can be swapped freely. The API key lives in the Keychain, behind a UserDefaults flag so launch never triggers a Keychain prompt.
• Context connectors. A ContextAggregator combines the user's note with one-line fragments from pluggable connectors before each rank. TimeContextProvider turns today's remaining calendar events (EventKit) into "about N free hours left", using merged, window-clamped interval math. A Gmail connector is stubbed behind an InboxReading protocol.
• Sync, built ahead of activation. TodoItem maps to and from a CKRecord as pure, offline-testable functions. SyncCoordinator wraps CKSyncEngine with last-writer-wins on modifiedAt. AI scores are deliberately left out of sync, because each device computes its own. Remote changes are buffered behind the same safe-moment gate as local re-ranks, and local saves are diffed so only changed IDs go upstream.
• Capture inbox. A Share Extension appends text to an App Group queue (CaptureInbox), and the app drains it into Today whenever it becomes active, so the app remains the only writer of tasks.json.
• One calm daily nudge. DailyRitual schedules a single repeating notification under a stable identifier, so rescheduling replaces it instead of stacking. The copy leads with the day's top task and never shows a bare count.
• Tests. 67 XCTest cases cover ordering, recurrence math, legacy decoding, the safe-moment commit, CKRecord round-trips, LWW merges, sync echo suppression, free-time math, notification scheduling, connector prose and the capture queue.

Tech stack

Swift 5, SwiftUI (one multiplatform target, iOS 17+ and macOS 14+), Observation, CloudKit (CKSyncEngine), EventKit, UserNotifications, Keychain Services, XCTest. No third-party dependencies. Display type is Playfair Display (SIL OFL).

Running locally

Requires Xcode 16 or newer.

open SmartTDL.xcodeproj

Pick My Mac or an iPhone simulator and press Cmd+R. From the command line:

# Mac app
xcodebuild -scheme SmartTDL -destination 'platform=macOS' build

# iPhone simulator
xcodebuild -scheme SmartTDL -destination 'generic/platform=iOS Simulator' build

# Unit tests
xcodebuild test -scheme SmartTDL -destination 'platform=macOS'

To use AI ranking, open Settings (Cmd+, on Mac) and paste an Anthropic API key. Without one, the app uses the local heuristic.

Status / roadmap

The core app works locally on iPhone and Mac. The following are implemented and unit-tested but not yet switched on, because each needs Apple Developer signing or an OAuth client:

• iCloud sync between Mac and iPhone (SyncCoordinator.swift, setup steps in docs/sync-plan.md)
• An in-app opt-in for the calendar free-time signal
• The daily notification
• The Share Extension target (ShareExtension/README.md)
• A live Gmail connector

The product thinking lives in docs/PRD.md, with platform companions for Mac, iPhone, Android and a landing page.