Albatross 🪶

Albatross is a little to-do list app I made for myself and Karina to distract myself from more important responsibilities. It's designed mainly for the two of us, so it prioritizes simplicity and fitting our specific needs and preferences. However, if you really must try it, you can go see a demo here.

Like many of my projects, Albatross is written in Oak and Torus. Search is handled with libsearch. Illustrations used in the empty states in the app were generated with DALL-E 2.

Feature set

• Tasks that support categories, due dates, and an extra detail/comment field
• Fast as-you-type search with libsearch
• Light and dark themes
• Speed 🏃‍♂️

I've also considered adding some ✨AI features✨ because doing that seems very hype these days, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Here are some ideas I've thought about, though:

• Natural language "quick create" for tasks, e.g. being able to type in Call Rob about improving deploy playbook @ next Tues and have it be parsed into the right shape
• Automatically "cleaning up" notes under a task, especially for tasks or notes that are sloppy records of conversations
• Custom encouragements whenever a task is completed, e.g. checking off "Get back to Theo via email" should elicit some encouragement message like "Great job sending that email!"
• A tool for breaking down larger tasks into smaller sub-tasks and making them more approachable

Development

Like many of my projects, Albatross is built and managed with Oak. There's a short Makefile that wraps common oak commands:

• make runs the Flask web server, and is equivalent to flask run
• make fmt or make f auto-formats any tracked changes in the repository
• make build or make b builds the client JavaScript bundle from src/app.js.oak
• make watch or make w watches for file changes and runs the make build on any change

Deployments

Albatross is a bit unique in that it's designed to be deployable as both a server-backed full-stack web app, persisting data on the backend; and a client-only static single-page app, persisting to browser localStorage. Both versions run very nearly the same code, except for the bits that concern syncing.

The static SPA is deployed via Vercel, with ./static/ as the "build output directory".

The full-stack app is defined by albatross.service and runs as a systemd service in a Linux box.