if-remindererer

Summary

A small tab sits at the top edge of the screen, in one of three sizes. Hovering it for 120 milliseconds rolls a panel down, and the tab steps aside while it is open. Taskbar mode moves it into the taskbar instead, as a rounded pill in the empty run beside the clock, re-measured every 900 milliseconds so a second row, an Explorer restart or a taskbar on another display just moves it. The panel shows the list on its own, the list floating over the canvas, or the canvas with no list. The canvas takes the whole panel and the to-do list floats over it as a card in the top left, half the height by default, growing with the list and scrolling after that. Its add field is already focused: type, press Enter, the task drops into place. Tick the box and it glows green and collapses away, with Ctrl+Z to bring it back for the next 10 seconds. Star a task and it pins above the rest, in the order it was starred, with a warm glow.

Times are opt in. Switch them on and @@ drops a menu of days, today at the top, each row showing the date it lands on. Typing narrows the list, Enter takes the top row, and a time panel follows: the time read back large, with AM and PM to say which half of the day. The field takes 9, 930, 9:30, 9p and 1745 alike, so the minutes are never forced onto a grid. A digit straight after @@ skips the days entirely and assumes today. Nothing is guessed from the hour. The tab then pulses with a countdown, and shuffles once a task is due until the panel is opened.

On the right, an unbounded note canvas. Right drag to pan, which works on a trackpad, scroll to zoom, double click for a text box. Typing **, -- or 1. and a space starts a bulleted, hyphenated or numbered list. Enter carries the list on, Shift and Enter leaves it. Numbers are counted at render time rather than stored, so inserting or deleting an item renumbers the rest.

Text boxes carry bold, italic, underline, strikethrough, colour, highlight and size. Screenshots paste straight in. Rectangles, ellipses, lines and arrows draw on top, and an arrow dropped onto a text box stays attached to it. Canvases live in folders and save themselves 900 milliseconds after the last edit.

The panel rolls back up on the hotkey, on a click away, or on the pointer leaving it for 600 milliseconds, whichever of those is asked for. Leaving is measured by sampling where the pointer is rather than by waiting for an event that only arrives some of the time.

Nothing leaves the machine. No account, no sync, no network calls, no telemetry. One SQLite file under %LOCALAPPDATA% holds all of it.

Keys

Ctrl+Alt+R: Roll the panel down, or roll it back up
Ctrl+Shift+Alt+R: One line quick add, centred on screen. The panel never opens
Ctrl+Alt+V: Drop whatever is on the clipboard onto the current canvas

Build process

.NET 10 · WPF: Chosen over Electron for the cold start and over WinUI 3 for the borderless translucent window. Idle cost while hidden is nil: no timers, no rendering, the panel window is hidden rather than transparent. Published as one self-contained 60 MB executable so no runtime has to be present first.
Per arrangement placement: Panel position and size are stored against a SHA-256 of every monitor's EDID device id, resolution, DPI scale and virtual position. Undocking, changing resolution or closing the lid yields a different key, and the tab pulses amber until the panel is placed for that arrangement. Docking emits WM_DISPLAYCHANGE repeatedly for several seconds, so the watcher waits 1.8 seconds of quiet before moving anything.
Win32 interop: A real tool window at the screen edge receives the hover, rather than a WH_MOUSE_LL hook that would cost a callback on every pointer move and trip endpoint protection. RegisterHotKey for the three combinations, reporting refusals instead of failing quietly. SHQueryUserNotificationState keeps the panel hidden behind full screen apps. SM_REMOTESESSION drops the shadow and shortens animations over RDP. Geometry is applied in physical pixels throughout, because WPF's own units shift under mixed DPI.
Canvas engine: Written rather than borrowed. A scale and translate transform over a hosting canvas, so text stays vector sharp at any zoom. The dot grid is a single tiled DrawingBrush rather than thousands of drawn dots. Hit testing runs against the model in world coordinates, which gives thin lines a click tolerance. Rich text is a run based model serialised to JSON, converted to a FlowDocument only while a box is being edited. The list triggers rewrite that document from a queued dispatcher callback, because replacing it from inside a text change throws, and read it after the keystroke has landed rather than before, because reading it earlier sees the text one character behind.
Due times without guesswork: A due moment is kept three ways: the wall clock as typed, the id of the time zone it was typed in, and the instant those resolve to. The instant is derived rather than trusted, so a machine that changes zone re-anchors through the zone recorded at the time and the moment itself does not drift, only the local time it is shown at. The two awkward days a year are handled explicitly: a wall clock inside the spring forward gap never happens, so it walks forward in quarter hours until it does, and one inside the autumn overlap happens twice, so it resolves to the standard offset every run.
SQLite in WAL mode: Tasks, canvases, images, layouts and settings in one file. Every canvas save keeps the previous copy, capped at 50 revisions and restorable from Settings. Pan and zoom persist without generating revisions.
Failure cases, deliberately: A hotkey already claimed (says so, offers a rebind), a second copy launching (mutex, wakes the first), Explorer restarting (re-asserts topmost), the display arrangement changing mid-session (debounced, then repositioned), a full screen app in front (hover suppressed, hotkey still works), the clipboard refusing a read, and a stored document that no longer parses (discarded with a log line rather than a crash).
Inno Setup 6: Per user install with no administrator prompt, an optional Run key entry for start with Windows, and an uninstaller that leaves the data folder alone.

if​-remindererer

Summary

Keys

Build process

if-remindererer