Yasser Mansour

Work

LifeOS

A local-first desktop app for tasks, study, projects, money, people and notes. There is no account and no cloud: the database lives on your own computer.

Role
Design, backend, desktop wrapper, Android app
Platform
macOS and Windows, with an Android companion
Status
Beta · v0.1.0-beta.1
The LifeOS home screen: next tasks with projects and due dates, today’s events, and the sidebar of modules.
Home: what’s next and what’s on today. Demo data from the app’s own fixture command.

Overview

LifeOS brings together things that otherwise live across a dozen apps: tasks, a focus timer, projects, personal and business finance, people, notes, school, a journal, writing, a calendar and goals. You choose which areas you want during setup.

It ships as a normal desktop application for macOS and Windows. Each installation creates its own private database on first launch, and nothing is sent anywhere.

How it fits together

Three components, one source of truth
  1. backend/Django, Django REST Framework and SQLite. Owns all business logic and serves both the desktop UI and a REST API.
  2. desktop/A small Swift/AppKit wrapper. Starts the backend, waits for its health check, and shows it in a native window through WKWebView.
  3. android/Kotlin and Jetpack Compose with its own Room database. Works offline and syncs over the local network when it can reach the Mac.

Screens

The LifeOS finance screen: totals across personal and business accounts, this month’s income and expenses, and recent activity.
Finance, with personal and business accounts kept apart. Fictional figures.

Engineering notes

The same logic behind two doors

Desktop views call domain services directly; the REST API calls the same services through DRF viewsets. Finance math and the study timer exist once on the server, not once per client.

Models built for sync

Every domain model inherits one base model: a UUID primary key, timestamps, an incrementing version used to detect sync conflicts, and soft deletion so a phone that was offline can still learn that something was removed.

Backups before migrations

Backups can be created and restored from the settings screen, and restoring takes a safety backup of the current state first. An update that changes the database structure backs up automatically before it runs.

Honest about its limits

The beta builds aren’t code-signed yet, desktop installs don’t sync with each other, and there is no auto-update. The README says so plainly instead of hiding it.

Stack

Backend
Python, Django, Django REST Framework, SQLite, Waitress, WhiteNoise
Desktop
Swift, AppKit, WKWebView; Windows installer built in CI
Android
Kotlin, Jetpack Compose, Room