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.

Design work is heaviest in the middle. What's left at the end is mostly mechanical, and doesn't need to keep taking up the room it did at the peak.

Depth rises the whole way instead. If both dimensions faded together at the end, "just started" and "nearly done" would look identical on screen. That's the reason for the difference, not decoration.

Size Depth
0 5 10

Moving it along

Ten nodes. Click one.

The bubble on the left 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

Every logging tool dies the same way: it looks good, and you stop using it after two weeks. The only variable that matters is how many seconds one entry costs, so that permanently-open input is the whole design.

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.
PlatformsmacOS 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.

Download for macOS Apple silicon · checking latest…

The first launch needs one extra step. The app is signed by its author rather than through Apple's paid program, so macOS will refuse it the first time. Open System Settings -> Privacy & Security, scroll down, and choose Open Anyway. Once is enough.

Apple silicon only for now. A Windows build exists but hasn't been tested enough to put here.