Matcha Planner

Matcha Planner is a task and calendar hybrid productivity progressive web app built using React.js. Sign into your Google account and you can edit your Google Calendar events and Google Task todos live in Matcha Planner.

Design Philosophy

The design and motivation of Matcha was initially founded upon my own frustrations using Google Calendar and task managing software – there lacks product that allows users to quickly log and track their tasks and calendar events together in a simple manner, along with the added benefit of keyboard shortcuts. Focusing on minimalism and ergonomics, I named the app Matcha, inspired by the matcha latte – a drink with a simple recipe but yields a powerful taste and effect on our energy.

The aim of Matcha Planner is to provide a sense of calm and efficiency to users and their productivity space, as many modern calendar and task apps are cluttered with chaos and excessive features. Matcha aims to be a simple yet feature-rich planner which users can find a pleasant and efficient productivity tool for their everyday lives.

Adding, deleting, rescheduling, labelling events and tasks are all done using the slash / command within each day

Features

  • Natural Language Processing – Dates and times can be added for events in between parenthesis (tmrw) (3pm) (9 at night) and Matcha will automatically assign the time and date of the event for you. It’s as simple as typing what you would say to a real life assistant.
  • Instantaneous Sync with Google Calendar and Tasks – Matcha loads and saves tasks and calendar events to your Google calendar and tasks. Once you log in with your google account, there is a live bidirectional sync between Matcha and your Google Suite Apps.
  • Shortcuts and Styling – Matcha’s simplicity lies in it’s command bar ‘\’ similar to Notions. You can style, change dates, add comments, and move tasks all with inline command actions. This makes your workflow simple, fast, and efficient – no more needless clicking.
  • Mobile PWA – A fully functional and tap gesture friendly mobile app which can be added to the home screen using the iOS Safari PWA wrapper.
    • Mobile PWA view of Matcha from an iPhone. All features on desktop are available on mobile

    Evolution

    I first began development of Matcha in tenth grade of high school, when I first began to explore progressive web apps. I first tinkered with Electron.JS, where I developed a prototype of Matcha as a minimalist todo list app with vanilla Javascript and jQuery.

    In high school, I was deeply obsessed with workflows and what made productivity apps effective. For me, I always hated the design of Google calendar (sorry, Google). To edit events, you would need to go through two different pages and more than four clicks to successfully save an entry. In addition, the idea of having two separate apps for task and event management baffled me – are they not both time and date-based representations of our daily actions and obligations?

    Thus, I decided to rebuild Matcha 2.0 with that consideration in mind. I created a planner-esque layout which housed both tasks and calendar events while organized by date and weeks. But something didn’t feel right. What about the detailed functionalities of events and tasks such as comments, reminders, notes, and styling? I also feared that if I do open up Matcha to other users over the internet, many would not feel persuaded to switch – since they are so used to using their pre-existing system for task management and event organization.

    Enter Matcha 3.0 built my first year of college (the current version you see): supporting live syncing with google calendar and google tasks via Google authentication, shortcuts, natural language processing, and more.

    Developing matcha has not just been a small side project for me, but it has now become a digital scrapbook of mine, embodying my development in interface and product design thinking, how it has changed throughout my high school and college career, and also showcases my growth in design and programming. Each phase in developing Matcha, from a tenth-grade scratchpad idea to now, a fully realized product, it’s surprising to see how much my philosophy and skills as a software engineer and designer has changed and grown.

    Matcha is still an ongoing project, so shoot me an email if you would like to gain access to try it out yourself :)