Lightpad: Calendar for the visual thinkers

Lightpad is a calendar that lets you use your excellent visual cortex for planning. Don't waste consciousness on stitching week rows in the table.

Fellow dreamers, I'm so glad to see you here. How do you feel today? Personally, I'm both excited and scared. But after all, I like to feel good. And I like it when people around me feel good. I think that's the value of a good product – it makes you feel good. Sparks joy 😌 Similar to many of you, I enjoy planning and thinking about the future. But I never wanted to place any of that into common calendars, with their dry tables, my fragile plans didn't want to get in there. So, I decided to make my own calendar, with both lively and calm colors and a natural flowing timeline. Lightpad shows time closer to what we think it is – a continuous dimension. And it's natural for your visual cortex, so it can process time distance on its own and your consciousness can focus on the planning. And, to me, it feels right. I think it can be a good fit for dreamers and visual thinkers. This project has been a long road, yet I’m excited for the journey ahead. Lightpad will continue to be enhanced and updated – so stay tuned! Google Calendar integration is expected to arrive in July (or perhaps much faster) and additional extensions are soon to come. Cheers! --- Prospects –––– I would like Lightpad to be much more than a calendar. I sure would like to have collaboration features, tasks, robust structuring features with tree editing. Some of those already have backend ready and just wait for the UI. More extension points are shown in the Roadmap section on the landing page. Some are yet to be announced. Feedback welcome (even the most brutal !) –––– If anything isn't working, or unclear, or you see a potential improvement – leave a comment, I'll be happy to help, or accept feedback. Remember – there's no such thing as a dumb question. If anything is unclear – it's my fault, and you will only help by asking. Promo –––– Use code PRODUCTHUNT to get a 29% discount on next 6 months of service on any of the plans on the main pricing page. Use word "secret" in your comment to get a special secret code for an even better deal. On Table calendars –––– Many of you may be accustomed to table-type calendars and I respect that. But think about what – the time is a continuous dimension, right? Therefore, it can be presented spatially. And your visual cortex is extremely good at processing spatial information. Table, instead, requires some processing by consciousness, to stitch week rows into a continuum, thus leaves fewer resources to process the tasks at hand. Don't get me wrong: tables are great, I love them. But table calendars, they optimize for space, instead of optimizing for brain resources. They were made for the physical constraints of the time. Those constraints no longer apply. With the layer of virtuality, we can make a quasi-infinite time representation. That's why I think spatial calendars are a much less wrong approach for our time. They use more of the brain and allowing consciousness to focus on the tasks at hand. --- Credits: Video: Polina Lyubko instagram.com/jorgdavis Video track: KaiKaiWave soundcloud.com/rudtjr7281 App SFX: Slava Redov soundcloud.com/slavaredov Poll –––– Some of my friends perceive time as a spiral where each turn corresponds to a year, so if you're like my friends – you're not alone. So how do you perceive time? See options below

@spacegangster I find I perceive time on a log-scale, where the distance between today and tomorrow is very short, but the distance between 3 days from now and 4 days from now is very long. That would be very intuitive for me visually.

@xarlyle0 hmm, that's definitely interesting 🧐 Do you think it will scale for larger timespans?

I organize my side project todos with lightpad. I did not miss a deadline again. The UI is intuitive and the time organization is unique. I highly recommend lightpad.

@orolle hi Oliver! Whoa, thanks a lot for the praise! Do you miss any features?

@spacegangster I think some team features would be nice. Some kind of tasks aggregation for tasks in the far future too.

@orolle got you! yeah, we want it too. How do you see tasks aggregation?

@spacegangster tough question. maybe count the tasks and group by tags or summarize by tasks by text (google text summarization) for maybe weeks or months. But I am not sure whats better. it though question.

@orolle good idea! Yeah, thats worth a research.

Very cool product. Suggestion: ability to add tag while typing tasks, using hashtag for example. And zoom in zoom out of flow. And keyboard shortcuts.

@trong_nguyen Hi Trong! Thanks! 🙏 Zoom and shortcuts are planned already, hash tag is a good suggestion, thank you for it!

@spacegangster I have another observation, that Lighpad looks great on Safari, but the text is squeezed on Chrome (like the "Now" text and the date overlap each other sometimes).

@trong_nguyen thanks! what resolution and OS?

@spacegangster Sorry, it is my bad. I was setting the font size to be large in Chrome. It looks normal when I set the font to be medium.

@trong_nguyen ah no worries! Ping if you'll find more stuff. Are you on Twitter? Also, just in case – there's a better promo code spelled "producthunt42"

Hey - this is cool! What's the difference between tags & supertags?

@joelrunyon hello there! Thanks for the praise 😌 Supertags are hierarchical (like folders on a laptop). You can try them in notes. For instance you can tag a note like "Project : PR : issue #3", "Ideas : tech". I'll try to highlight them in features this week! So how it feels to you? Ping if there's anything obscure!

@spacegangster two more questions 1) I haven't figured out to how to tag a todo event. Any tips? 2) Can I assign a time to an event so I can plan it out in my day?

@joelrunyon 1) you can create a tag in [manage tags], tune its color scheme. Then you can switch to it and create tasks inside of it. You can't change tags yet. My genuine mistake, I think I'll be able to address it this week, I need it myself. 2) Yes, on a laptop. For now you can create your day tasks, then switch scale (bottom right) to Hour mode and do [reschedule all]. It will feed you tasks one by one and you'll be able to give arrange them within hours of the day. You need minutes too right? I'm thinking about adding a time parser like in iOS reminders

@spacegangster ah - i'll poke around on tags a bit more. Would be great if you could make "hours" signify what day I'm on a bit more as it wasn't quite clear the first few times I clicked that.

@joelrunyon current selected day is always on top, in the status bar. I agree though, as it's a bit too high on the orbit. I'll take a think :) Thanks for all this feedback! Keep it coming!

This seems pretty nice and I will definitely use it, cause hell this is so better than usual calendars or notes app. I was going through the introduction and there were some tasks created for today and I can’t figure out how to remove them. Can you please provide me with some instructions?

@daria_peters Hi Daria, thanks for the praise! Sure. Open a day, and click "expand all" button. Then you'll see "archive" button on every task. A bit confusing, I get it. I'll update the tutorial later or will try to make the UI a bit simpler. Don't hesitate to ask me again, if this isn't enough. I'm ready yo provide a personal onboarding if needed. You can always reach me on Twitter / Facebook / Insta.

Just like a calendar, only cool and interesting!

@rowb thanks! Yeah, that's our original vision. We haven't done any research so far, but it seems to click with a lot of people!

@spacegangster OK cool, yeah I haven't been happy with normal calendars like Google and this looks like an interesting approach to making them more usable!

@rowb yeah! And we will polish that! There is better scaling coming as well!

Cool, idea. Never imagined calendar could be seen as a flow instead of tables. Good luck!

@deepu_mohan_puthrote thanks Deepu! We think it actually makes more sense in the digital age. And it's more scalable – one format that fits very different timespans.

Lightpad

Calendar for the visual thinkers

Calendar for the visual thinkers

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