v6 · The Ambitious Rewrite

Released Never released

Development Mid 2024 – Mid 2025 (nearly a full year of work)

Tech Stack Python, CustomTkinter, SQLite

Startup Time 17 seconds — too slow for the people I wanted to serve

The Story Behind This Version

I wanted it to look different. Not just another app with a standard OS frame. So I decided to build a custom title bar — my own window controls, my own styling, my own identity. It took over three weeks. I fought with window managers, with event handling, with every pixel that refused to align. I told myself: once this is perfect, everything else will fall into place.

And in many ways, it did. v6 was the most feature‑complete version I had ever built. A full timing system with drag‑and‑drop grids. A timeline view that showed how your day actually unfolded. Summaries that captured what you did, not just what you planned. Resizable windows — because users should shape their workspace. Goal tracking, note management, a polished settings panel, and the complete 8‑theme palette inherited from the STMC design lineage. It was everything I had imagined in my head, finally real.

But there was a cost. Every time I launched the app, I sat and watched a blank screen for 17 seconds. Seventeen. On my second‑hand laptop, that felt like an eternity. I optimized, I profiled, I ripped code apart, but the custom title bar had become a monster under the hood — and the startup time wouldn’t budge.

I had spent nearly a year on this version. Hundreds of hours, thousands of lines, 15 polished screens. And I knew I could never release it. Not because it didn’t work — it worked beautifully — but because the first experience every user would have was waiting. I thought about the people I was building for: tired students, overworked freelancers, anyone trying to squeeze focus out of a messy day. They didn’t need a 17‑second wait. They needed something that opened before they lost the will to work.

So I made the hardest decision of my journey. I archived v6. I walked away from a year of CustomTkinter mastery and started from absolute zero. I gave myself one month to learn PySide6 — a framework I had never touched — and rebuild the entire app for the world.

v6 was never released. But it was the version that taught me: your users deserve better, even when it breaks your heart.