-
-
Main view & project picker
-
Board & inspector
-
Confetti!
Inspiration
For years, we’ve loved the straight-forward, Kanban-style way of working. It’s light, visual, and doesn’t get in the way, something you could replicate with a handful of Post-its on the wall (if only post-it notes had instantaneous, multi-device sync). But finding an app that captured that same ease? That was another story.
Needless to say, we’ve tried plenty of productivity apps. Some looked sleek but crumbled on the basics (like syncing your data, how is that still a problem?). Others felt clunky, heavy, and required a lot of setup and time-commitment upfront.
That’s not what we wanted. But we’ve got things to build. And we just wanted something to help us build, track, and collaborate, without becoming a job in itself.
We kept hoping we’d stumble across the right app. But eventually we realized, we got to build it ourselves.
What it does
It’s a live-synced collaborative kanban board with a personal Quick Capture scratchpad.
How we built it
We dove right into it. We wanted to figure out if we can get the basics to feel right first. Things like, navigation through the board with the keyboard, moving cards up and down and left and right with the keyboard, quickly creating a bunch of new cards etc. Once we had the basics right (and then fixed them again when macOS 15.5 came out, and then again for macOS 26…) we started using Polaris for all of our own projects and kept iterating and changing everything that didn’t feel right during use. Once we were pretty happy with that, we invited people to join our public TestFlight beta to get more feedback and hear from others what works and doesn’t work for them. We ended up with around 200 people in the TestFlight group and kept improving the app based on feedback.
Challenges we ran into
Malin and I appear to be obsessed with SwiftUI pain… This time we wanted to build a fully native (and native feeling) Kanban app with things like keyboard shortcuts for every action, quick keyboard navigation, global keyboard shortcuts to quickly capture new ideas. We almost abandoned the project multiple times as subsequent macOS updates completely broke our keyboard navigation schemes or things like text input.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Instant sync across devices, with full offline support is pretty neat but the biggest accomplishment is probably that the boards are completely usable just with keyboard navigation and keyboard shortcuts. Oh, and the SpriteKit confetti, of course!
What we learned
macOS apps take so much more time to build than iOS apps 😅 There are some many ways to accomplish the same action and all of them have to be there for the app to feel “right”. Even simple things like deleting a card. You need to support the “delete” key, context menu with delete action, and a delete action in the menu bar app menu.
What's next for Polaris To-Do
On the development side, the very next thing is the release of the iOS/iPadOS app. It’s mostly working (available in TestFlight) but needs a little bit of polish. After that we’ll tackle some features that didn’t quite make the initial submission cut such as image attachments, proper team invite flows, and smart duplicate card detection.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.