High Level Description

Daylish is a delightful day planner that helps you never be late again while effortlessly flowing through your day and getting things done. See all your calendar events, journeys, timers and alarms in a single unified timeline. Easily plan ahead with smart alarms and timers that assist you in getting ready well in advance of important events, taking into account travel and preparation time.

Quickly plan your whole day in just a few minutes, easily identifying where you need a little more buffer timer to avoid stressful situations, as well as finding gaps you can use for productivity, relaxation and fun!

Once you made your plan, just flow from one time block to another. Stay focused on what matters now, instead of worrying about what lies ahead. Daylish will keep you on track when the time comes and always lets you see at a glance what's happening right now and coming up next.

Alarms for Events

Calendar events have notifications and that's great, but sometimes you need that extra buzz to grab your attention and that's why Daylish allows you to create alarms that are linked to calendar events or any other timeline items.

Leave-On-Time

With Daylish's Leave-On-Time feature you can quickly block time for the journey as well as the time you need to get ready to leave the house. When your preparation time starts, you will get an alarm that you cannot miss. Once dismissed, it will automatically transform into a countdown timer, telling you how much time you have to get out of the house. Of course, this is visible as a Live Activity on your watch as well, so you can always do a quick time check while you're getting ready to head out.

The journey and preparation time blocks are linked to the calendar event. That means: if you move the calendar event in Daylish, everything else is automatically updated as well 💡🤯

Productivity Timers & Personal Routines

Use timers for focus work sessions or chores that fit neatly between your events or build your custom morning routine with multiple sequential timers. The possibilities are endless. (Regarding routines: I plan to soon add the ability to save routine presets that can easily be inserted, such as "morning routine" but for now they'd have to be created individually for each day by inserting the right timing blocks)

Design Considerations and UX

For the design of Daylish I deeply embraced liquid glass. The whole app is designed from the ground up for iOS 26 with many thoughtful touches that emerged over the course of many iterations, user studies and feedback. For example: when you add a new event there is a custom liquid glass "floating plus button" in the bottom right corner which beautifully morphs into a timeline block type picker (e.g. calendar event, timer or journey?). Once selected, the whole block flows into a title entry UI with metadata elements floating above. It all flows naturally which not only looks pretty but helps to naturally guide the user from step to step.

Another very unique design consideration, albeit not strictly related to Liquid Glass, is the use of an agenda style schedule view as a main timeline appearance versus a proportionally scaled "scheduling view" for editing timing and scheduling events. The vision of Daylish is that whenever you open the app, you should see what is currently your point of focus and what is coming up next at a glance at the very top of the timeline view. And you should be able to quickly scroll through your day and simply see each individual item without having to worry too much when exactly it is happening. It's just the order of events that matters. However, when it comes to actually picking a time for new events or rescheduling events, you want to see the events related to each other to easily visually identify time availability and possible overlaps. This is best done in a traditional timeline view where the events are scaled according to how long they are and positioned throughout the day. I've thought long about this and I've tried many iterations and ultimately ended up with item creation and editing flow that automatically smoothly transitions all the items from the agenda into the proportional timeline where you can see them flow into place spread out across the day. Whenever you edit an item's time or date, then as soon as you're done with the time edit, it'll flow back into the agenda view. The animations, again, not only look nice, but they serve a purpose of intuitively communicating the connection between the two views and making the semantics clear.

Widgets & Live Activities (including macOS and watchOS)

NOTE: Due to unexpected limitations in iOS 26 this currently does not yet work with AlarmKit apps but I have prototyped a featue where regular Live Activies are used as a fallback. But that workaround has a few other kinks, I still need to iron out so for the time being you will get the alarms and ringing timers on the watch but not countdown Live Activity on watchOS and macOS yet. I'm still planning to do this in the future though!

Since one of the goals of the app is always seeing at a glance what is happening throughout the day, of course I also adopted widgets and live activities, because those are the perfect tools for that purpose. The home screen widget and lock screen widget will simply always show either the current in progress timeline item, or if none is happening, the next upcoming one. I also want to add a configuration option to allow users to always show the next item instead. That will come later. The size and amount of different widget types is also limited in version 1, but this is certainly an area that I will be focusing on, and I want to offer a breadth of different options that ultimately fit everyone's home screens and workflows.

While the initial version of the app will only be available on iPhone at the start, I have designed the live activities in a way that they will automatically appear on Apple Watch as well as on Mac OS.

I definitely plan to bring the app to more Apple platforms soon, but in the meantime, this will allow using the most crucial aspect of the app on other Apple devices from the get-go. For example, you could schedule a deep work focus timer on your iPhone and see the time ticking down in your Mac menu bar, with the option to run it and see details and even interact with it. Or maybe you just started a timer that was scheduled for packing your things to leave on time for an upcoming appointment. The corresponding Live Activity also automatically shows up on you Watch's smart stack, so that you can always see at a glance how much time you have left until you have to be out the door.

Of course the app is also perfectly suited for standby, especially with the live activity taking up the whole screen and giving you a nice actionable progress bar that allows you to keep an eye on how much time you have left for the current task.

Release Plan

Daylish is approved on the app store and ready to launch alongside iOS 26 on September 15th.

Pricing for Daylish+

Many features are available for free, primarily those for using Daylish as a simple calendar app. If you want to use alarms, timers or smart routines or advanced filtering and customization settings though, you will require a subscription or one-time purchase of Daylish+

$2.99/month $19.99/year, $79.99/lifetime

Future Features

The current version has a limited feature set, which is simply due to the fact that I didn't know I would be working on this app idea (that I've had for a long time) until I saw the announcement of AlarmKit, which is what effectively enabled this idea to become reality. With just the time between WWDC and early fall and my iOS 26 work for Zenitizer I had to prioritize carefully to launch an MVP (well, actually I strived to create an "MLP" - "Minimal Lovable Product") that focusses on the essential "leave on time and manage your day" vision and executes the core functionality in a way that is delightful and intuitive.

But the whole app is designed in a way that allows for a myriad of different use cases and extension possibilities. Personally, I'm already using the simple timer functionality to set myself focus timers for DeepWork blocks. I have a couple of ideas to allow sourcing to-dos from Apple Reminders and possibly other sources and then allowing you to simply drag them into your daily timeline view to quickly block work items and start focus timers and mark them as done when they are done.

I also plan to add complete sleep cycle and wake up alarm functionality. The great thing about this app is that it is your unified timeline for anything timing related from dawn till dusk. And since the app knows when your first event is on the next day, it could suggest things like, hey, you might want to set your alarm a little earlier today to make it in time for that, because normally your morning routine takes this long and traffic will be bad in the morning or something like that. You can tell it what your sleep target is and maybe it can suggest a wind-down period for which it could show a notification or even an alarm if you want something that really nudges you to finally stop doing what you're doing and start winding down the day.

With the sleep functionality and the leave on time alarm sequences, we already have examples for what could be described as routines. Certain timing related blocks that are dependent on other timeline items and that are used on a more or less repeating basis for certain configurations. My vision for this app is that users can create their very own routines with different timing blocks that they can just insert with a single tap or attach to an existing item. Things like your morning routine where maybe you wake up and you journal for five minutes or do some stretching and then you have a coffee and read the newspaper and you know, things like that. And where you could easily transition from one stage to another and you have a live activity on your lock screen that guides you through these activities but also alerts you when you are taking longer than you planned for so you're never running late for the rest of the items in your day. The goal is to create a holistic time management and timer and alarm app for users of Apple devices.

Shortcuts support and App Intents in general is an area that I'm very excited about. And while I probably will not be able to add this in time for the version 1 release, it is a feature that I want to add sooner rather than later. And when I do it, I will probably go pretty in-depth to allow for all sorts of automation flows and use cases.

I have also experimented with Apple's foundation models and have a pretty good prototype for automatically suggesting emojis that can accompany timeline items. Many people like that in order to have a more intuitive visual grasp of the items in their day. So by automatically picking and suggesting emojis that go with the title of each item, it will make this more convenient for such users.

Like I said, I currently have a lot of ideas for the future and honestly at this point I think I want to get the app out there and start talking to people who would use it to understand which ideas I should focus on next.

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