Dewen

Last devlog:
I decided to add multilingual support to make Dewen more accessible to people around the world. It supports languages like Spanish, French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more. Feel free to try it out if you’d like 🙂

This isn’t really a devlog, but I thought I might just post about it.

My app, after not having an identity for so long, finally has its own logo. I feel extremely glad about the logo being over and done with and the colors in the logo as well.

I want to give credit to @Jcleo2 for creating the geometry for the logo, which I then refined and added my own colors. So thank you @Jcleo2.

Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

Now that Stardance is happening for another month, I’m able to do more devlogs, so kudos to everyone for making it happen.

Another big milestone for Dewen: It officially has a desktop application now! Now you don’t have to use the website often and instead you can use the desktop application.

It uses Tauri to help with wrapping the app in a desktop layer to help make it a legitimate desktop app.

A quick heads up for macOS users: because this is an independent, open-source application bundle, macOS may display a warning stating the app is “damaged” on your first launch. You can learn how to do it correctly in the README on the GitHub repo page.

Dewen is currently available for macOS, but I hope to expand it to Windows and Linux as well. Thanks for reading, and I hope you have a great day!

I have added a second agent: the Researcher Agent!

To make it work, you need to have a Tavily API key and insert it into the settings. Then you can type what you want and it creates a quick note containing what it researched.

Alongside that, I also added agent selection where you can choose which agent you want to use. This prevents weird things from happening if you instruct the wrong agent.

I hope you have a great rest of your day! Try out the Researcher Agent now! (if you want to 😁)

I know I’m contradicting what I said before, that I was done with Stardance, but I thought this was something cool to talk about.

Well, I have agents in Dewen now! Integrating AI into Dewen has been one of my top goals since the start. Now it’s actually a reality, and I feel absolute pride in accomplishing this.

How it works is you toggle AI in the settings if you want it on or off, then it uses Bring Your Own Key (BYOK) meaning you can insert your API key into the app. Then there’s a button in the sidebar with shapes. Click on that, type in your prompt, and Dewen will do the rest.

This is powered by my Python backend, hosted on Render and UptimeRobot opens it every five minutes to prevent it from taking 50 seconds to load the AI. I hope you enjoy using AI in Dewen, and have a great rest of your day!

Well, this is probably going to be my last devlog for the Stardance Challenge, so let’s make it count.

First off, I finally managed to convert Dewen to IndexedDB, one of my long-term goals for the app. LocalStorage was starting to become limiting, and I wanted something more scalable while still keeping Dewen local-first. That’s why I went with IndexedDB. I set up DewenDB in storage.ts, added helper functions in main.ts to save tasks, notes, and activities, and made sure everything loads when the app starts.

Now, I want to take a moment to look at how far we’ve come.

Dewen started back in December 2025 as a simple to-do list. From there, it evolved into a productivity hub, then a productivity workspace, and now an actual application. The task list, focus timer, quick notes, calendar, activity panel, command bar, and everything else have come a long way from that original task list.

Building Dewen, and participating in the Stardance Challenge, has taught me much more than just how to code. It has taught me how to take an idea and turn it into a real application that people can actually use.

Now that the Stardance Challenge is wrapping up, I’m going to be shifting some of my time toward other projects while continuing to work on Dewen.

First, Dewen is my submission for the 2026 Congressional App Challenge, representing Pennsylvania’s 15th District, so that’s something I’m excited to focus on.

I also have several other projects I want to work on alongside Dewen: AuditionLM, an AI benchmark ranking and evaluation app; Local In A Box, or LIAB, a CLI tool for integrating and managing local-first architecture in applications; and Pocket Lab, a portable experimentation device for conducting experiments and exploring science.

Stardance may be coming to an end, but Dewen never will. Thank you for following along, supporting the project, and watching it grow.

To improve the customization of Dewen, I thought it would be nice to add theme presets to make choosing a theme faster and more approachable. Themes include default, ocean, forest, sunset, rose, midnight, terminal, and slate.

Another thing I added was localStoraging the focus timer state. For example, the focus timer reads 21:57, and you accidentally reload the site. It’ll still have 21:57 and continue going from there!

I hope these new features improve the user experience of Dewen, and I want to continue improving them and the core experience of the app. Thanks for reading, and have a great day!

This week I continued to update Dewen with more polish and power to make it easier for people to use my app. These updates focus on overall experience, faster workflows, and turning Dewen into a more complete workspace. Features include:

• better responsiveness: To make the experience better for mobile and tablet users, I decided to improve the responsiveness of the app to transition to different layouts easily.
• more commands: To help keyboard users control their workflow more efficiently, I added new commands like editing tasks and notes, controlling the timer, prioritizing tasks, and more. To learn more about them, type :h in the command bar.
• new mini analytics: I changed two of the empty cards to contain Upcoming Tasks that are getting close to their due date, and Stale Tasks that haven’t been touched in a while.
  I hope that these new changes improve the user experience for Dewen, as this is turning into much more than a simple task list. Thank you for reading, and have a great day!

I wanted to make it so that Dewen could be more discoverable rather than just requiring people to “click a direct link”, so I utilized the Netlify Sitemap plugin and Google Search Console to make that happen! This is a pretty cool milestone for Dewen, as it shows that it isn’t just another website project. Now I want to continue improving its SEO and discoverability so that eventaully, you can type in “dewen app” and it’ll show up. Thank you for reading!

Before this devlog, the search/command bar used to only do :a <task description>. To make it easier to use Dewen with the keyboard without navigating the app so much, I decided to add more commands to the command bar.
New commands include:

• :n <note content> | creates a note
• :c <task> | completes a task
• :d <task> | deletes a task
• :f <duration> <task> | starts a focus session (e.g. :f 25, take out the trash)

I hope these types of commands make it easier to use my app, especially for keyboard-native users. I’m also planning to implement more command bar commands as I continue improving the app. Thank you!

Added avatars and profile picture customization. Add your own image to serve as your avatar, look at presets for avatars based on hobbies and careers, and toggle if you want the accent on it on or off! 😁

Removed two mini analytics and added an animation for expanding and collapsing them

Added another customization option where you can customize the accent color 😁

(also updated mini analytics a little)

Added offline support to my website, so no matter where you are, you’re able to access my web app! 😁

Man, after using a single Vanilla JS file to develop Dewen, I realized I needed a better structure to help scale the project further. But I really underestimated how challenging it was going to be, especially since I don’t know React, meaning I have to learn it. So wish me luck, I guess.

I have officially converted from main.js to main.ts, meaning everything is in TypeScript. Now to make everything modular…🤞

Currently trying to convert from Vanilla JS to TypeScript and eventually a framework like React. Fingers crossed! 🤞

Part 1 of redesigning mini analytics: making a risk report featuring overdue tasks, tasks due today, and blocked tasks

New UI changes so far (removed topbar and updated sidebar a little)

This isn’t really a devlog, but rather a heads up about something: Hackatime and Stardance are saying that I’ve worked on this for a few hours. That’s incorrect. I’ve been working on this project since December and January. I’ve used AI to help me with some of the project, but this is in no way a “vibe coded” app. I’ve included a screenshot of my oldest Git commit history for the project to set the record straight. Thanks for the feedback, and I will continue working on improving this web app!

Have any feature ideas for Dewen? Would be happy to help develop them!

Currently working on leveling up the mini analytics (the cards you see under the “Good morning” message) to display useful information. Stay tuned!

Fixed a calendar and decrastinator bug

Energy Gauge