PopTask for Apple

heyy folks, i built PopTask for myself, honestly .. i kept losing thoughts to the same annoying ritual: have a quick idea, then fill out a little form for it .. title, tap the date, tap the time, tap the repeat, set the reminder .. by the time am done i've half-forgotten why i even opened it so i made the opposite, just to fix my own problem .. you type the mess the way you'd say it .. "mtng wth boss 2hr tmrw 3pm" or "gym mon wed fri 6am" .. and PopTask figures out the date, time, recurrence and reminder in about 3 seconds .. it'll even break a big task into steps and suggest follow-ups if you want the help .. no pickers, no forms then something i didn't really expect happened .. i put it out there, people started using it, and telling me it finally stuck where every other app hadn't .. that meant everything to me .. PopTask went from a little fix for myself to the thing i work on full-time now it started as a tiny mac menu bar app, one shortcut from anywhere (⌘⌃P) .. and this launch is the part am most excited about: it's now universal .. the same brain is on iphone + ipad too, with home and lock screen widgets, a live activity + dynamic island counting down your next task, control center, and hands-free siri so you can add a task even while driving .. everything syncs across your devices through your own icloud, near-instant, and one purchase covers all of them the parts am proud of: - it runs on-device where it can (apple intelligence on newer machines), so your tasks never touch my servers, and sync is end-to-end encrypted - it reads real, messy input .. typos, shorthand, "nxt thrs", multiple weekdays .. in 9 languages - it's genuinely fast .. the whole point is 3 seconds and back to what you were doing free up to 3 active tasks .. pro unlocks unlimited (less than a coffee $) this one's personal for me, so i'd genuinely love your brutal feedback, especially on the parsing .. throw your messiest input at it and tell me where it breaks .. am here all day replying to everything .. thank you for checking it out Show more

@mesut_tas you just described a bug i haven't hit yet but absolutely will :') respect right back, you clearly walked through the same fire .. good luck with yours 🙌🏽

@lilhadi dude - the app looks great, the site is beautiful, but... why, oh WHY... do you seemingly have NO product shots on the homepage?!? I totally get wanting to focus on the philosophy/ethos, here, but my good man - you built sexy tech, show it off, let folks know what they're getting into! :D Congrats on the launch!!

The Siri-while-driving path is the one I'd stress-test hardest. Typed "gym mon wed fri 6am" is messy but the characters are at least what I meant; dictation stacks a transcription layer under the parse, so "meeting with boss two hours tomorrow at three" can go wrong twice before you ever see the preview, and driving is exactly when you can't glance down to catch a wrong 3pm/3am. Do you read the interpreted task back by voice on that path, or is the preview still visual-only? I build in a category where the user's hands and attention are both gone in the moment, and "confirm without looking" turned out to be a genuinely different problem than "confirm fast."

@lilhadi nice launch haider! how does the icloud sync latency compare to standard cloud databases when pushing tasks from iphone to mac instantly?

@mohsinproduct honest answer: plain CloudKit for a private db isn't realtime the way firebase/supabase are .. no live socket, and apple throttles background sync to minutes .. so i built a custom fast-path on top that 🙌🏽

@lilhadi The "by the time I'm done I've half-forgotten why I opened it" line hit home — capture friction is the silent killer of every task app, and most makers optimize everything except that first 3 seconds. Curious about one design decision: you parse messy shorthand in 9 languages, on-device. Was multilingual parsing part of the plan from day one, or did users pull you there? Asking because handling "nxt thrs" is one thing, but date shorthand conventions differ wildly across languages.

heyy @mesut_tas my honest answer on languages: not day one, it started english-first and grew .. partly ambition, partly users typing in their own language and expecting it to just work and you nailed the hard part 🙌🏽 "nxt thrs" is easy, it's the date conventions that are the minefield .. same input, different dates by locale .. the real work wasn't the UI, it was teaching it to read intent per language without guessing wrong

@lilhadi users typing in their own language and expecting it to just work" lol yes.. that's the most honest roadmap generator there is and the minefield goes deeper than date formats btw. i ship in 6 languages and the nastiest bugs weren't even parsing, they were scheduling assumptions. "every monday" is trivial until monday is a public holiday in the users country and the thing fires anyway. or "next week" crossing a holiday cluster that means totally different things in turkey vs germany. ended up baking holiday awareness into recurrence itself.. thought it was a nice to have, turned out its the thing users mention most respect for doing all this on-device, that constraint makes multilingual twice as hard. good luck with the rest of the launch man, youre clearly here for the right reasons

@grey_seymour ha :') you're 💯 right .. i got so deep in the "why" i forgot to show the "what" product shots are going up!! thanks for the nicest kick in the pants i've had all launch 🙌🏽

the on-device angle is what caught my attention reading through this thread, running decent NLU across 6+ languages locally is a real engineering constraint, not just a privacy checkbox. curious how big the parsing model ends up being and whether older iphones (like an SE or an iphone 12) handle it fine, or if you had to trim capability for lower-end hardware. also "holiday-aware recurrence" is a genuinely clever detail most to-do apps never bother with

@galdayan on an SE or iphone 12 there's no apple intelligence anyway, so the everyday cases run through a lightweight deterministic layer that's basically instant with near-zero footprint .. handles them fine 🙌🏽

@narek_keshishyan you actually found the exact gap .. today the preview is visual, so the one moment it matters most is the one it doesn't fully cover siri reads back a confirmation, but not granular enough to reliably catch a 3pm/3am flip .. which is exactly the failure that actually hurts and you're dead right that "confirm without looking" is a genuinely different problem than "confirm fast" .. i optimized hard for fast and quietly assumed eyes were available, reading the resolved time back by voice on that path is going straight on the list 💯 genuinely useful, thank you 🙏🏽

How well does the natural language parsing handle recurring tasks with exceptions, like "gym mon wed fri 6am except holidays" or tasks that need to skip specific dates?

@hiranurmet28559 the base recurrence is solid .. but exceptions like "except holidays" or skipping specific dates? not yet .. funnily enough @mesut raised the exact holiday-aware idea earlier in this thread, so it's firmly on the list now 💯

The gap between a to-do list and actually blocking time for the thing is where most of my week leaks out. When PopTask schedules a task and I blow past the block, does it reshuffle everything after it or wait for me to re-triage? That overrun problem is usually where these apps break for me.

@chielephant it waits for you, it doesn't reshuffle .. blow past a block and the task just goes overdue .. you re-triage by snoozing in plain language ("push to friday 3") i deliberately kept it capture + reminders, not an auto-scheduler .. auto-cascading a whole day is a different, riskier problem (one miss and it reshuffles everything)

Thanks for this, Haider, and for being so open about the tradeoffs in the comments. Keeping PopTask as capture plus reminders instead of a full auto-rescheduling engine seems like the right call, since one wrong auto-cascade could quietly rearrange an entire day for someone. A concrete case where this would help: someone juggling recurring errands and appointments who currently dumps half of them into Apple Notes with a mental note to sort later, then forgets they exist until the day of. Typing something like dentist next thurs 2pm and having it land as an actual scheduled reminder removes the one step where those thoughts usually die. You mentioned building a custom fast-path on top of CloudKit for near-instant sync. What happens if a task gets created through Siri in the car and edited on the Mac menu bar within that same sync window? Does the fast-path just resolve it as last write wins, or is there something smarter going on there? Congrats on taking PopTask universal, going from a personal fix to a full-time project in a few months is a big jump.

@mbakgun appreciate you actually digging into the tradeoffs 🙌🏽 honest answer on the sync window: it's last-write-wins, with CloudKit reconciling underneath i didn't build CRDT-style merging for a solo task app, it's almost always one person on two devices, so a real simultaneous conflict is rare, and last-write plus CloudKit as the backstop has held up i'd rather not add that complexity chasing an edge case until it actually bites someone 👀

@lilhadi Glad it's useful. One more from the same scar since it's going on the list: the read-back earns its keep on relative times, not just am/pm. "Remind me tomorrow" or "next Friday" is where a driver can't verify anything — echoing "tomorrow at 3" back confirms nothing, since the bug is whether the parser resolved "tomorrow" to the date you meant across a midnight or a timezone. Speak the resolved absolute instead ("Thursday the 12th, 3pm") and the user catches a wrong resolution without looking. That's the only read-back that actually closes the eyes-free gap.