Effery vs Underway

Some things aren't meant to last. A grocery list. A Wi-Fi password. A recipe you'll try once. A thought that only matters today. Effery is a note-taking app where every note has a countdown. Set a timer — one hour, three days, a month — and when it's up, the note disappears. No clutter. No archive guilt. Just the notes that still matter. DESIGNED TO VANISH Every note gets a time-to-live. Pick from 1 hour to 1 month. When the timer runs out, a 24-hour grace period kicks in. After that — gone. BEAUTIFUL BY DEFAULT Notes appear as book spines with hand-crafted patterns. 24 colors across 8 families. 12 base patterns. 6 hidden patterns to discover through gestures, timing, and exploration. 18 PATTERNS. 6 ARE HIDDEN. Shake your phone. Open the app at dinner time. Use a specific color. Place your phone face-down. Each secret pattern unlocks through a different interaction — no instructions, just play. 14 THEMES From warm Sepia and Paper to AMOLED black and Nord blue. A Japan theme inspired by traditional off-white. Find the one that feels like yours. PRIVATE & ENCRYPTED AES-256 encryption. Face ID or password lock. No accounts. No servers collecting your data. Your notes exist on your device and your iCloud — nowhere else. iCLOUD SYNC Seamless sync across your Apple devices. Encrypted end-to-end. Your notes follow you. SMART NOTIFICATIONS Get reminded before a note expires. Alerts from 1 to 24 hours ahead so nothing important vanishes before you're ready. 5 LANGUAGES English, Italian, German, Spanish, French. ORIGIN I wanted to bake pangoccioli — Italian chocolate chip buns — for someone I love. I needed somewhere to save the recipe. Just for that night. I built this app for that one recipe. Then I kept building. Completely free. No ads. No in-app purchases. No tracking. Just a small app made with care.

Open Underway and you land on today. Type one plain line and it becomes a dated entry. Scroll back a month and it is all still there, ticked off, on the day you did it. The days behind you sit just above, the days ahead just below, and you scroll straight through them, back through last year or forward into next. If you have ever dated a page in a paper notebook and written one line per thing, this is that, typed. Write "lunch with Sam friday 2pm #work" and Underway pulls out the date, the time and the tag on its own. Type ! or !! to mark a line important. No forms, no fields, no five taps to write down one thing. A line can be a trip, a day off, a bill, an appointment, a birthday, or where someone else in the family is that afternoon. A calendar wants a start time and an end time. A to do list wants a checkbox. A lot of life is neither, and all of it can go in here and still be findable months later. Finished tasks do not vanish. They stay on the day you did them, quietly greyed, so scrolling back through last month shows you what you actually got done. Your plan for the year and your record of it are the same thing. There is nothing to set up. No projects, no lists to build first. You open it and start typing. WHAT IS IN IT • Dates and days of the week are tinted, so a glance tells you where you are. • A switch to hide finished lines, if you would rather see only what is left. • Overdue in one move. A banner counts what slipped and offers to bring it all to today, or clear it. • Tags and priorities you type, not pick from a menu. # for a tag, ! for important. • Search across everything, still fast at tens of thousands of entries, and a calendar view to jump to any date. • Vault, for anything that has no date yet, with an optional nudge to look through it. • Repeats. Daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, ending on a date or after a count. Change one, or change this one and every one after it. • Optional reminders on anything with a time, and birthdays brought in from Contacts once so they come back every year. • Widgets on your Home Screen and Lock Screen. Tap one to land on the task. • Apple Watch. Today, overdue and the week ahead on your wrist. Tick things off, or dictate a new line and it arrives on your phone. • A look back, if you want one. How often you finish on time, what you added and completed, and how long your streak is. • Themes, palettes and paper textures. • Backups you keep. Take out a full copy, or a lightweight one you can read in any text editor, and import it back whenever you like. NO ACCOUNT, NO SERVER No sign in. No ads. No trackers. Your tasks are not sent to us, and there is nowhere for us to send them. Everything lives on your iPhone, your watch talks straight to your phone, and you can take a copy out whenever you want. Free, with nothing to buy inside. Available in English, Spanish, French, German, Japanese, and Simplified Chinese.