New project: Kanban md

Born from Atlassian's annoying behavior, it's a Kanban board desktop app based on local markdown files. The idea is to have a very simple, offline-only app that lets you open any markdown file as if they were a Trello board.

Minimal UI

The app is meant to be used daily and therefore puts the data up front. It is made of three parts.

The tab bar at the top lists your opened files. They are listed by title, to avoid having three "Readme.md" there. You can double click a tab to locate the file in the files browser.

The + button lets you add a file as a tab. You could also do ctrl+O. The opened files list is saved, and they are reopened when you reopen the app.

The search box filters the cards based on the presence of a keyword, and does not reset when going from one tab to the next

I try to support common keyboard shortcuts and Trello shortcuts.

• Drag and drop cards and lists to move them
• Click a card/list title to edit it
• Drag the background to scroll horizontally

Data format

Each board is one markdown file.

Anything before the first h1 is ignored, so markdown headers will be left untouched.

The first top-level title is the board name. If it is not found, the file name is used as the tab name.

Level two titles are column names.

Level three titles are card names.

Anything immediately following a title is considered its description.

Descriptions can be seen and edited in the card view.

Technologies

Currently the app is vanilla JS wrapped in Tauri. I might do a web version at some point, but local file editing is only supported in Chromium based browsers at the moment.

As most of my work, it's very lightweight. 30 Kb of js source code, but it becomes a 5 MB Tauri app once bundled. Still lighter than Electron.

Pricing

I think I'll make this app paid but DRM-free.

Something like 20€, money-back guarantee for 7 days.

I prefer to publish software as open source, like I did for Breakout 71 and many other projects, but responding to email, bug reports and inquiries takes a lot of time. Companies usually open source their complement, not their core business, and my core skill is making front ends that don't suck too much.

But at the same time, my plan is to make something very simple, with a limited feature set, that doesn't need a high price or subscription to justify its existence.