Manifesto
We live in an age of infinite tools and finite attention. There's an app for notes, another for tasks, another for projects, another for journals, another for bookmarks, another for read-later, another for habits.
Each one demands context switches. Each one fragments your thinking. Each one owns a piece of your mind.
We think this is backwards.
daey is not a productivity app you open for a task and close. It's a companion — a place you live in. Your morning thoughts go here. Your meeting notes go here. Your grocery list, your life goals, your book highlights, your startup plan. All in one tree.
The best tools disappear. You don't think about your pen when you write. You don't think about the road when you drive. daey should feel the same way — so natural that you forget it's there, so reliable that you trust it with everything.
A companion app is always with you. It adapts to your life, not the other way around.
— Dieter Rams
Rams gave us ten principles for good design. We took them seriously. Not as decoration on a wall, but as engineering constraints.
A single tree that replaces five apps. Search nodes that render as timelines. Mirrors that let one thought live in many places.
Every feature must serve writing, structuring, or seeing. If it doesn't, it doesn't ship.
Dark, quiet, monochrome. Color appears only when it carries meaning — a hashtag, a deadline, a weight.
A bullet. Indent it. Collapse it. That's the entire mental model. Everything else builds on top.
No onboarding tours. No tip of the day. No empty states begging for attention. The app gets out of your way.
We don't pretend to be a database, a spreadsheet, or a second brain. We're an outliner. A very good one.
Plain text in a tree. No proprietary format. Export anytime. Your grandchildren could read your data.
Cursor position after backspace. Animation timing on expand. The exact moment a sync happens. Every detail is considered.
Local-first means fewer server round-trips. No analytics tracking your every move. Minimal footprint.
We remove features more often than we add them. The right amount of complexity is the minimum needed.
The Fibonacci sequence appears everywhere in nature — spirals of shells, branches of trees, petals of flowers. It describes how things grow: each step building on the two before it.
We use it for weight. When you mark something as important, you choose from 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 12. The gaps get larger as importance grows — because the difference between “important” and “critical” should feel dramatic, not incremental.
It's not arbitrary. It's how nature prioritizes. A wedding is not twice as significant as a dentist appointment — it's an order of magnitude more. Fibonacci captures that.
This is not a negotiable feature. It's a right.
Your data lives on your device first. It syncs to the cloud only when you choose, encrypted with AES-256 before it leaves your machine. We hold the ciphertext. You hold the key. We cannot read your thoughts, your plans, your journals — even if someone asked us to.
The app works offline. It works when the server is down. It works on a plane. Your companion doesn't abandon you when the Wi-Fi drops.
Export anytime. JSON, plain text, OPML. No lock-in. No hostage negotiation with your own data. If you leave, you take everything with you.
Nothing renders without content. No empty states. No placeholder text. No onboarding wizards. No tooltips following your cursor. No notification badges. No gamification.
Every pixel on screen must earn its place. If a UI element doesn't help you write, structure, or see — it has no business being there.
The writing experience is sacred. Nothing — not sync, not AI, not collaboration, not a server outage — may interrupt a keystroke. This is the one rule we will never break.
We're not building the next productivity app. We're building a companion for people who think in trees, write to understand, and refuse to scatter their mind across ten tabs.
If that sounds like you, we'd love for you to try it.