Why this exists
I could never see
what I was carrying.
Work, or things I wanted to do for myself. I wanted to see progress, but not as dates. And when something changed I wanted to write one line about it and get on with the day.
Babos is a work log built around those three things. There is no manual below. Scroll if you want to know how it reads, or skip to the download and find out by using it.
The whole thing in 77 seconds, no sound needed.
Babos, a work log for one person
One case,
one bubble.
Six things on your plate, six bubbles. How big it is and how dark it is tell you everything you need at a glance, so nothing on screen needs a label.
Reading a bubble
Two encodings, kept independent.
Size is how much of your head it's taking right now. Depth is how far it's gone. Because they move independently, four states stay distinguishable without a single number on screen.
step 5/10
size 160px
depth 0.59
The shape of the curve
Size peaks in the middle. Depth climbs straight through.
If both faded away at the end, "just started" and "nearly done" would look identical on screen. That is the reason the two are set against each other, and it is not decoration.
Size
Depth
Moving it along
Ten nodes. Click one.
The bubble changes as you click. There's no save, no dialog, and no percentage field to fill in. Click the node you're at and it's recorded.
Click the node you're already on to step back one.
The most important element
Writing one entry takes three actions.
Open, type, Enter. The input sits on the panel permanently, so nothing has to be opened before you can write and nothing has to be confirmed after.
Print test came back too dark
Adjusted CMYK, resent
Second round of marks sent
The only number that mattered was how many seconds one entry costs. That is why the input sits on the panel permanently, instead of behind a button.
Everything else
Kept in a drawer, not on the bubble.
Links, a note, tags, importance. All of it opens under the row when you want it and stays shut when you don't.
None of it reaches the bubble. No progress ring, no category colour, no percentage label. Size and depth carry all of it, and the circle stays a clean solid disc.
CaseCoffee roaster rebrand
ClientNordwest
Links
FigmaDrive
Tags
Branding
Weight
Note
Wants to keep the old cup icon somewhere.
Finishing
It swells once, then leaves.
Push a case to the tenth node and the bubble grows, drifts up, and lands as one lamp in the counter. Twenty lamps close a round, and the round can be written out as a report.
This is the only ceremony in the app. Everywhere else stays quiet on purpose. A tool that congratulates you constantly stops meaning anything.
Where it lives
Your data is one file on your machine.
StorageA single JSON file. No cloud, no account, no sign-in.
OfflineFonts ship inside the app, so it looks identical with no network.
PlatformsiPhone, macOS and Windows.
LanguagesEnglish, Japanese, Traditional Chinese.
The point of Babos isn't project management. It's leaving a trace of what you actually did.
Get it
Free, and yours.
The Windows build comes from an earlier cross-platform version of the same app, built on web technology, and it has not been tried on a real machine yet. Same app, same data, but you would be the first to run it.
Windows asks once too. The installer is unsigned, so SmartScreen steps in. Choose More info, then Run anyway.
Who made it
Built in conversation with Claude over four days.
The code is paired; the decisions are not.
Concept
Shih-Bo Chiu
The bubble encoding, the bell curve, and what stays off the bubble.
Direction
Shih-Bo Chiu
Visual language, every trade-off, and everything that got rejected.
Build
Paired with Claude
Swift and HTML implementation, written line by line in conversation.
Testing
Daily use
The bugs that mattered were found by using it, not by testing it.
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