Why Slate is like this

What was broken

Here is the joke at the centre of every task app: to remember the task, you have to remember the app. The list is behind an icon, a shortcut, a tab you closed on Tuesday. And the moment you most need it, mid-afternoon, four things half-done, is exactly the moment you are least likely to go looking for it.

So the apps get louder. Badges, notifications, a widget elbowing for a corner of the screen. That works for about a week, and then it becomes noise you have trained yourself to scroll past, because the interruption arrives when the software felt like it rather than when you were deciding what to do next.

Meanwhile there is a surface every Mac user looks at dozens of times a day, deliberately, at precisely the moment they are choosing what to do: the desktop behind the window they just closed. Prime attention, every single day. Almost every Mac spends it on a photograph of a mountain.

Who it’s for

• People who keep a real list and keep losing it, on a Mac they work on all day
• People already talking to Siri, who want that list somewhere they will actually see it
• People who care what their machine looks like and would rather a designed page than a stock photo of a fjord

Who it isn’t for

• Teams. No assignment, no comments, no shared lists. This is one person's list
• People whose every window is full-screen, because the core mechanic is invisible to them
• Anyone who needs their tasks in a browser, on Windows, or synced through a server we run

Rules we don’t break

Decided once, so they never have to be argued about again.

• The wallpaper is the product. Every feature gets judged on one question: does it improve the thing you see without opening anything? The app window exists to serve the wallpaper, never the other way round.
• Mouse-first, keyboard-optional. The shortcuts exist and they are in the menus. Nothing requires them. A list you can only drive from the keyboard excludes most of the people who need a list.
• Never approximate someone else's data. The Reminders mirror writes back exactly two properties: done, and due. EventKit cannot express subtasks or “every 2nd Tuesday”, so those are dropped rather than guessed at, and nothing mirrored is ever copied into Slate's own store where it could quietly drift.
• Quiet by default. One flat list. No section headers, no permanent toolbars, controls that appear on hover and leave again. The wallpaper is already the notification.
• Your data stays a file. No account, no cloud, no analytics. The store is a JSON file you can read in a text editor, back up, or delete.

What it actually does

• A real to-do app underneath. Lists, subtasks, repeats, notes, pinning, search, undo and redo, and dates typed the way you say them: pay rent friday 5pm #home becomes a task, a date and a list while you type it.
• The wallpaper renderer. Seven templates, Editorial to Ledger to Terminal to Receipt, across nine placements, 21 palettes, 14 typefaces and 12 patterns, showing due dates, overdue emphasis, subtask progress and list colours.
• The Apple Reminders mirror. Off by default. Turn it on and Siri capture from any device lands on your desktop, and ticking it off on the Mac clears it on the iPhone. This is the feature that makes the desktop a destination rather than a second list to maintain.
• Today's calendar, beside the list. So one glance answers both halves of the question: what is left, and when is the next thing.
• Two windows, two jobs. A deliberately tiny menu-bar popover for capture. A full window, with Today, Upcoming, All and Completed, for planning.
• A Pomodoro timer. 25 and 5, a long break every fourth, started from the menu bar. In the app because the list and the timer are the same job.

What it refuses to do

The most useful part of any note like this. Every line has a reason attached.

• Collaboration. Shared lists change the data model, the privacy story and the price all at once. Slate is single-user and stays that way.
• A sync service of our own. Apple Reminders already syncs to every device you own, and Apple is a better custodian of your tasks than a server we would have to run. So we mirror it instead of competing with it.
• Analytics. There is no telemetry. That costs us every scrap of product insight, and it is still the right trade for a file full of somebody's private life.
• Subscription-first. The one-time unlock is the headline. Everything the app does today is done by the version you buy once.

How we’ll know it worked

• Tasks get completed on days the app window is never opened. That is the only outcome that proves the wallpaper is doing the work rather than decorating.
• The Reminders mirror gets switched on by a real share of users, because that is the difference between a nice wallpaper and a system.
• Nobody has to be taught how to add a task. Natural-language entry lands on the first try, or the parser is wrong.
• With no analytics, we are reading this from campaign tags, ratings and email. A blurrier signal, accepted on purpose.

Where it could go wrong

• A wallpaper has an edge. Long lists overflow it. Pinning and per-template overflow rules are the answer, and layout overflow is asserted in the test suite rather than left to hope.
• Pretty palettes that hide overdue tasks. A colour scheme that makes an overdue item unreadable is a bug, not a matter of taste. Palette contrast is checked in the self-test.
• EventKit's ceiling. Anything Reminders cannot represent cannot come through. We drop instead of approximating, which is correct and still means somebody's complex repeat will not appear.
• The full-screen user. If you never see your desktop, the whole mechanic is invisible. The window and popover keep the app usable for you; you are not who it is for.

What’s next

• No dated roadmap. The shipped 1.1 is the whole product described here.
• The open questions we are listening for: whether overflow needs a smarter rule than pinning, and whether the calendar belongs in more than one template.