A downloadable app

Buy Now$5.00 USD or more

Let's face the truth - you carry your Playdate everywhere, so why not use it as a productivity tool?

Features

  • ToDos - note things to do in your inbox or move them to separate lists. Lists and entries can be edited or removed at any time.
  • Calendar - check the date and add events on the full-screen month view.
  • Voice Memo - record max 2-minute long voice memos and label them with a title.
  • World Clock - check the time in 140+ cities around the world.
  • Contacts - save contact data on a rotary business card holder.


Controls

Each feature follows slightly different controls, but they are intuitive and, by default, visible on the screen as hints.

  • Press A to select or confirm.
  • Hold A for secondary options like edit or remove.
  • Press B to go back or cancel.
  • Use a d-pad to highlight items.
  • Crank for scroll or seek.

Oh, and if you prefer a clutter-free screen, hide the control hints from the settings.

Ideas and feedback

Submit ideas and feedback as comments on itch.io or email them to me using hello[at]kamil.id

Changelog

See what's new in the changelog entry.

Updated 26 days ago
StatusReleased
CategoryTool
Rating
Rated 4.8 out of 5 stars
(6 total ratings)
AuthorHydra Softworks
Made withPlaydate, Aseprite
Tagscalendar, contacts, notes, Playdate, todos, world-clock
Average sessionA few minutes
LanguagesEnglish

Purchase

Buy Now$5.00 USD or more

In order to download this app you must purchase it at or above the minimum price of $5 USD. You will get access to the following files:

PocketPlanner-4.1.pdx.zip 1 MB
PocketPlanner-3.4.pdx.zip 446 kB
PocketPlanner-2.4.pdx.zip 398 kB
Pocket Planner-1.4.pdx.zip 375 kB

Development log

Comments

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Everything looks polished here, but is it possible to have items pop up on the sleep screen like a recent To-Do prompt or showing what date it is?

(+1)

Hey, thank you for your comment. Playdate SDK doesn’t offer such options. When the app is off-screen (or even if the menu button is pressed), it is put to sleep (for energy efficiency).

(+1)

Love it! There’s something so appealing about software and apps that feel like they were made for like, the Nintendo DS in terms of charm and feel.

Are there any plans on making it so birthdays added to contacts show up in the calendar?

(+1)

Thank you for a nice comment. Maybe not DS, but 3DS is one of the consoles I play the most.

Birthdays in calendar sounds like a good idea but it will be also hard to implement. It needs a change in how dates are entered (potentially some date picker component). But I’ll add it to the ideas list.

(+2)

Love the planner. Really enjoying it  reminds me of having a pocket organiser when I was younger  

Couple of suggestions. 

1. A confirmation on the delete action in contacts  

2. A line break function so I can format addresses nicely in contacts or a dedicated address field  

3. Date of birth in contacts

4. Just a notes section in general 

Hey, Thanks for suggestions. I’ll check what I can do.

    1. sounds like a low-hanging fruit (I didn’t add it previously because I thought that that option was hidden and it’s hard to trigger it by incident).
    1. Is problematic because the Playdate keyboard doesn’t support that option. I didn’t find any solution to make it user-friendly.
    1. I can add that field.
    1. Theoretically, the address field is for notes right now. If I find a way to solve 2. I may add an additional field.

Thank you for your quick response. 

I was a bit trigger happy (maybe crank happy) and hit delete by accident, was shooting as I sent ages formatting my first contact! 🤣

maybe for the future but if you could link a date of birth entry to the calendar that would be amazing!

For the notes section I meant more like the list section. So you could either select new note or new list. 

Really enjoying adding entries to it as it is though! Been using it for shopping lists. 

Hey there, I don't really know much about computer stuff. Is there any chance you could do a walk through of how to edit the data via data disk? Cause manually inputting everything on Playdate takes me quite a while.

(+1)

Hey! Thank you for the idea. I’ve noted it, but I’m not sure I’ll make that. To provide a reason - editing data files should only be done by power users. If you forget about a closing quotation mark or add an unnecessary comma, it will result in broken JSON. I’m scared that if I encourage people to do that, I’ll have to deal with additional sets of errors, and I won’t be able to debug them because they will be related to corrupted data. But still, I’ll think about it. Maybe I should add a warning/disclaimer and recommend a tool that will make sure that the created JSON is correct. Thanks for the message!

Loving the app.

Just a question about editing the data inside the app in data mode:

Is the "id" integral to the operation of the app? I'd like to add some lists and to-dos, and the easiest way to do that is to copy an existing list. Can the ids just be random/duplicates, or are they generated in some way?

(1 edit)

Hey, yes, Id is essential. It is used to compare elements of the list (events, todos, etc.). The only requirements for them are to be strings and to be unique (within a file). The format doesn’t matter. You can safely use https://www.uuidgenerator.net/ to generate IDs and put them for elements. I’m often just typing random characters by hand.

(+1)

is it possible to change to a Sunday-Saturday calendar display?

(+2)

There is no such option right now, but I’ll look at this topic. I can’t promise anything, though. Playdate SDK doesn’t have anything date related, so I implemented everything from scratch, and right now, I’m not sure how easy it will be to modify it. :)

(+1)

ya did it! Thank you!!!!!

(+1)

Hi! I noticed a few things that should be simple to add and would be nice.

1. List names get cut off if they are too long, and the only way to view the full name is to go into the renaming menu.

2. It would be very nice to be able to use the crank to scroll through lists instead of just the D-pad.

3. It would be nice to either rename or delete the Inbox list.

4. It seems like the sound for checking and unchecking a ToDo item should be swapped.

The app is very nice and I like it a lot! These would just be some nice quality of life changes, but by no means do you have to add them. Thank you for making this!

(1 edit) (+1)

Hey, Thank you for your feedback. I’ll look at them, but right now, I have a quick tip for 3. As you probably noticed, this app is strongly opinionated, and that’s why based on GTD (and Things app) inbox list is called Inbox, so I’m not planning to add an option to change that in UI. But you can easily do that in data mode. Connect your playdate in data mode, head to data/com.hydrasoftworks.pocketplanner directory, and open todos/data.json in a code editor like VS Code or Notepad++. You will find the line "name":"Inbox",. You can change Inbox to something different there.

Thanks! I hadn't heard of GTD, and looking into it is swaying me towards leaving the Inbox as is and trying it out haha

In that case, I’m strongly recommending https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1633.Getting_Things_Done for you. :) Speaking about productivity, this may be the most important book that I read (and I like productivity books). It’s not mindblowing, but I’ve been using GTD with https://culturedcode.com/things/ for many years, all thanks to reading David Allen’s book 15 years ago.

wish i could use this on some other kind of device

 

Hello, I am considering this app as it reminds me of my old Psion, but is there any method to populate the contacts and calendar other the from the device itself? Like editing a csv or something. Thx

Hey, all app data are kept as JSON files. You can edit it easily with a text editor like VS Code or Notepad++. You just need to connect Playdate in data mode. The format of data is not documented, but when you add one item to the app, then it will have an example to follow. For example. Events look like this

{
	"createdAt":734261931,
	"date": {
		"day":8,
		"month":4,
		"year":2023
	},
	"id":"AQSJMJPJENPW",
	"repeat":1,
	"title":"Pocket Planner v3"
}

(with a note that “repeat” is not used/implemented).

Thx for clarification! Bummer there is no repeat, I wanted the calendar primary for storing Birthdays

(+1)

This was an early purchase for my Playdate and I still love the idea and execution of it. 

This may be an unrealistic idea, but what if there was either a kanban-style view of to-dos or a separate tab entirely dedicated to it? It seems like it could be intuitive to shuffle cards between columns, and the aspect ratio would complement that sort of thing. 

I think any kind of feature that leans into the idea of the Playdate's potential as a stationary, always-on desktop display will only add to the practicality of this app. 

Looking forward to any future development!

Hey, Thank you for that idea — I noted it down. It’s something that I would like to use, so I like it so much. Right now, I’m working on a contacts list, and when this is ready, I’ll start thinking about kanban.

(+1)

Hello! I’m curious about the ongoing development of Pocket Planner. What are you planning? Thanks!

Hey! One of my ideas was a timezones browser/info, but when I saw a database I had to parse to have that, I decided this was above my skills. Do you have any idea what I can add to the Pocket Planner?

Actually, it was the time zone feature that I was looking forward to.

Also, a contacts option where you load vCards into a folder from your computer could be cool. Maybe a way to share contacts with a QR code?

Thanks, I attempted timezones but failed. I already forgot about a contact list idea! I should go back to it.

Hey, whenever I open the planner it defaults to 2052 rather than 2022. Idk what's causing this. I'm currently using the simulator as I'm in group 5 for playdate preorders but my PC had the correct date.

Hey, First of all, thank you for buying Pocket Planner! I don’t have access to the computer this week to debug it, but can you check one more thing for me? Is the recording date correct when you record and save a voice memo (I’m not sure it works on Playdate Simulator, but it should)? If not, I’d say there is something wrong with communication between PlaydateOS and your system. On the calendar, I do some calculations with dates, so there is space for error, but on memos, there is just a date taken from OS.

The voice memo dates it as 17/09/2052 so it must be an issue between the simulator and the system

Hey, I LOVE this app. However, would it be possible to add checklist functionality to the calendar? Also, the ability to copy and paste tasks would be extremely useful. 

I found a bug with the to-do list, when I try to delete a list it always deletes the last one in the list (of lists).

Hello, thank you so much for reporting. 🤦‍♂️ that I missed this. Version 2.2 (released right now) should have this fixed.

Thanks!

Found a bug with the calendar. If you repeatedly press a direction to move your cursor instead of press and hold to go fast there is a very common bug where even when you stop touching the dpad it still scrolls in whatever direction it was being pressed in both up and down and as far as i know its just the calendar that has this issue

Thank you for reporting. I’m able to replicate this. I’ll take a look and try to fix it.

I did some digging and noticed that sometimes I don’t get the corresponding button up and down events when buttons are mashed very quickly. I added some code that should fix those situations in 2.2 (released now). Once again, thank you for reporting.

Thanks for the quick fix I tried my best to break it again and no issues. Great work

Hello hello! Loving the app so far, however, it seems I am getting like crashes upon inputting certain expressions (ex. No Work, because I have a free day at work) on events on the calendar.

Is there somewhere where I could submit these crash reports in case you wanna look at it? It's no big issue for me, but, just in case.

Thank you!

Hey, please send them to kamil.powalowski [at] gmail.com But also, please check if you have OS updated to 1.12.2. I get some crash reports that only happened on 1.12.1 due to an already fixed bug on the OS level.

Really been appreciating this. <3

Love this! If it synced with Notion it would be a game-changer.

(+1)

in the save file i see there is a spot for repeating events will we eventually be able to repeat events? 

Good question :) I don’t want to add that because it requires more business logic. Monthly and yearly recurring is easy, but weekly has to be calculated in advance and stored somewhere. I have this parameter, so if I decide to add that, I will not have to migrate data, but I’m waiting for the users’ input. If there are enough people that will think it’s useful, then I’ll add it.

I'd really like to see yearly. I was going to put in birthday's and anniversaries, those types of things. I wouldn't mind monthly or weekly as well. But yearly would be very nice.

I just purchased this and it is great! Awesome job!

(Also, it would be neat if there was a notepad :) )

(1 edit)

I would hate to create more work for you but i feel like this should increase each second you record to tell you how long it is.

(1 edit)

You are right. Thanks for reporting. I’ll prepare an update this week.

Updated :) Thank you for the suggestion.

thank you so much

(1 edit) (+1)

an idea that would be helpful would be to have the ability to move things up and down  in the todo list by holding right on the d-pad while cranking the crank

(+1)

I love it. I thought about todos moving up and down but didn’t know how to make that the other way than by using a context menu (hold A) which may be painful on a long list. I’ll check if your idea is possible.

i’m excited to hear about your results.

eventually will you be able to mass add events by editing the save file?

Yes, it shouldn’t be a problem if you can convert them to the correct format.

sick it shouldn’t be too hard to replicate the format <3

(1 edit)

Not sure if this is a planned feature, but it would be really cool if this included a phone/address book section for those of us without cellphones ;) xD

(+2)

Hi, I’m also not sure about this :) But you are not the only one who mentioned the contacts list. Somebody on Twitter proposes a Rolodex style for contact management https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolodex

The closest plan is:

  • test the app on an actual device when my Playdate comes (shipped in April but still on its way to Poland)
  • release the app after the PlaydateSDK update (I’m waiting for a fix in the audio recording).

Then I want to add events to the calendar (right now, the calendar is read-only). I don’t know what will be next, but voices like yours matter, and I’ll consider them.

(+1)

Oooooo the Rolodex proposition is a wonderful idea. It would translate sooooo to the crank, especially with a little flip-flip-flip sound effect as you scroll through.

I'm sure there are others like me. I haven't had a cell phone for two years, so something like this could have a huge potential to fill the void of an address book while still staying somewhat techy XD

Very excited to start using this! Is there any word for when it'll be downloadable? I didn't realize I wouldn't be able to download the work-in-progress when pre-ordering haha. I don't mind not having access until it's finished, just curious if there's a timeframe :)

(+1)

Hey, I’m waiting to get my Playdate (I have the order PD22XX, so it should be shipped next week) to test Voice Memos, which I cannot try on the simulator. Also, since I tested Pocket Planner only on the simulator, it may require some UX tweaks when tested on the actual device. But it shouldn’t take long. Probably a week or two when I get a console.

Sounds good! I look forward to it :)