ashkan117
Background
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on developing a personal planner over the last two years called Alpen. Yes I know another todo app. I’ve used a lot of apps to try and manage planning out my days but I’ve never been able to consistently/productively do so. Alpen was initially motivated by my personal problems but it was also a platform to learn more about Elixir and it’s ecosystem after beginning to use it for work.
In my opinion other apps file short because they are just a big list of things todos. Alpen’s philosophy is that until it actually enters your calendar that todo is in purgatory.
The name originally comes from the A.L.P.E.N method, ultimately it expanded into a few more techniques like time blocking and the Eisenhower Matrix. If you haven’t heard of these no worries. Alpen aims to instill these “best” practices into the app so that planning has more of a flow.
Why Alpen?
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Planning as we all know is hard. Alpen provides a more opinionated way to plan your day. It takes a little getting used to but after the learning curve, you have a framework and more certainty in the system.
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Life is chaotic. Alpen tries to make it easy to jot things down quickly and provides mechanisms so that it’s simple to give more of an intention to when you do things rather than creating things and forgetting
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Giving back. Alpen will ultimately be a subscription model, however I aim to make it an affordable option and I’m hoping by leveraging Elixir and the ecosystem it allows a solo dev to keep cost low so that more people benefit. Furthermore, I’m only able to even create this project due to all the amazing work others have done so I would love to use those earnings in the future to pay something back to the ecosystem
Technology
Speaking of technology these are just a few of the libraries that help Alpen run.
- Elixir/Phoenix/Liveview (Core)
- Ash
- Oban
- Corex
Roadmap
Alpen is ambitious by nature. It really wants to help create a framework without being an all in one tool. It’s a personal project management! This means that it should be able to co-exist with tools like Linear/Jira. A manager creates your tickets in those tools, Alpen takes those tickets and makes them yours. You break them into pieces so that things are manageable.
Alpen is not a note taking app. It has places where you can write notes but it ultimately aims to work in tandem with more complete note taking apps like Obsidian.
So although Alpen has been my system for the last two years there’s much more I want to do. That’s why I need more people to give it a try offer any feedback they’d like.
Who it’s for
This is primarily at a state for Knowledge Workers, people who work with a laptop for their work day. A mobile app will be added down the line but the focus for the time being is focusing on the core interactions and creating a strong foundation that people find invaluable to help plan their day.
I’m not trying to sell you that Alpen will solve all your problems. Planning is hard and will always be hard. I’m hoping Alpen gives you a little more control throughout your day as well as provide you more tools so that your planning abilities are elevated. It unfortunately is not a silver bullet and it will always feel like we can use a couple more hours at the end of each day.
Please give it a go, there is an existing article that try and highlight some more of the concepts Alpen builds on. I’ll definitely be adding more but I’d love to hear what people think and really build a tool that makes an impact!
Where Next?
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hyperoceanic
Hi - sounds promising! Sadly though, your blog post is illegible pale grey on a white background. Selecting text is pale grey on light blue - equally illegible. The blog index page shows pale grey on black, which is more legible.
ashkan117
Hello! Really appreciate you taking the time to take a look and to point out the context issues. This should be fixed now!
This was due to some dark mode styling that wasn’t functioning as expected. I’ll try and pay closer attention to the dark mode style, I personally use light mode in my browser so it does go unnoticed at times. Regardless, hopefully the styling looks better on your end.
hyperoceanic
Many thanks Ashkan, reading now.
ashkan117
Feel free to let me know what you think or if you have any suggestions!
ashkan117
I’m trying to spend more time on documenting the existing features. For the last year I’ve been using the iOS shortcut pretty heavily since I always want to be able to make a note of things on the go and I just got around to documenting how to use it Add Todos from Your Phone with the iOS Shortcut · Alpen Planner.
On a technical note, since this project uses Alpen I had to improve the way were using using AshJSON so that we can simplify how to authorize requests on your behalf through your API token as well as in the api flow of things to automatically add the todo to the Unplanned track but not when adding things through the UI.
My goal for the next few blogs are how to Categorize Unplanned todos and then more details on Why and How to leverage the Eisenhower Matrix through the app.
netoum
Congrats on your project and I am happy to see Corex used in projects.
If you encounter any issues, drop me message, I am more than happy to help out
ashkan117
Hey everyone, just wanted to post an update, there have been many along the way but I wanted to mainly give an update on the calendar within Alpen.
New Modern Design
We recently updated the calendar to a new theme that looks more modern while also improving the compatibility with light and dark mode.
Before
After
See more events at a glance (/calendars)
We also introduced a new specific route for your calendar. This should help you see your standard day view but more importantly here the new week and month view. I’ll be having a few trips this month and a nagging pain has been remembering which dates I have these events. This helps be able to more quickly move around the calendar year to remember events coming up but also to create them quickly.
Give it a try
As always feedback is much appreciated. It’s an ambitious project that aims to help people become a better planner through its concepts like domain, projects, events vs time blocks etc. I’d love to see what people think or where the friction is in even attempting to use something like this
derek-zhou
Can I self host it? I have signed in and tried a few things, however, any more engagement would require me to enter personal data, which I am reluctant to expose. It is billed as a personal project management, so data sovereign is something a potential user would need to consider.
ashkan117
There are no plans on self hosting at the moment as I do plan to try and monetize the project. With that being said as someone who does self host a few applications I would like to make it so that people are not worried about how the data is managed. End to end encryption is definitely on the roadmap though.
I’ll try and take a look at how some other applications handle the data sovereignty aspect and see what I could implement
derek-zhou
I am not worried about you abusing my data to violate my privacy. It is not economical for you to do that (you are not Google). However, I am worried that if I built a life on your platform, then you will pivot, sell the business, or just quit in the future and leave me high and dry. Even if you had data export, I would not have the mean to restore the functionalities.