.Ember

Pieces of your day, in one app

.Ember pulls journaling, todos, calendar, timer, news, and stats into a single minimal Mac app — one keyboard shortcut to find anything (Cmd+K), one sidebar to navigate, one set of design decisions instead of five. The pieces are wired together: a calendar block knows what todo it scheduled, a journal entry knows what you got done that day, the stats dashboard pulls from all of it without you setting anything up.

Local-first — your data is always yours

Everything you write lives as plain Markdown in a folder you choose. Open the same vault in Obsidian, VS Code, Finder — anything that reads files. .Ember runs no server. Optional iCloud sync goes through Apple’s CloudKit private DB, so your data stays in your own iCloud account.

If you also use Obsidian, the optional Obsidian Sync feature mirrors between .Ember’s vault and your Obsidian vault on a schedule you set. The two vaults must live in separate folders, with the sync engine moving Markdown between them.

ADHD-friendly — with as little friction as possible

Friction at the moment of starting is what kills a daily-use app. .Ember puts a Focus Daily Entry mode at the top of the day: open the app and you land in a full-screen Journal + Todo wizard, so the first thing you do is write and plan, not pick which view to be in. Todos can be bucketed into blocks (Routine, Work, Personal — your own) and run straight into the timer. The system distinguishes between auto-renewed habits and todos you typed in today, so a quiet morning never inflates the “I did nothing” feeling.

Bring your own AI key, when you want it

AI is off by default and gated by a single master toggle. Turn it on and paste a key (Anthropic, Google, or OpenAI) and three features light up: Auto-arrange Inbox suggests block + time slot for each todo using your last 14 days of calendar history; Daily Brief curates 5–7 RSS articles based on what you’ve been saving to your journal; the command palette gains “Auto-arrange today” and “Refresh Daily Brief” entries. The key is encrypted into the macOS Keychain — never in localStorage, never on a .Ember server.

Coming to the Mac App Store

.Ember is in private beta as of May 2026. The Mac App Store release is “Coming Soon” — once Apple’s review clears, the download button at the top of this page lights up. The source repository is private during the beta and opens alongside the App Store launch.