Margin

Demo

See it move.

A short tour: capture in plain words, the day timeline, and freeing up time.

Features

From a sentence to a schedule.

• One keystroke, your own words

  Option+Space summons a floating capture bar. Type a sentence in English or Arabic, press Return, and it lands as an Apple Reminder or a Calendar event, however you phrase the time.

• A day at the edge of your screen

  A slim timeline docks to the edge of the display, with a live now line, a working-hours band, and blocks colored by list. Drag its edge to the width you like; it remembers. The shape of your day, always one glance away.

• Two-way Apple sync

  Built on EventKit. Items become real Apple Reminders and Calendar events, and edits made in Apple's apps flow back into Margin.

• An assistant that knows its place

  Optional help from Apple Intelligence on your Mac, or your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini key. It fills in only the date and time, and never rewrites your words.

• Find a free slot by asking

  Ask for an open block and Margin shows the options on your day, including around a colleague whose shared calendar you follow.

• Reschedule by hand

  Drag a block along the timeline with a precision magnifier. When a meeting wraps early, finish it and the freed time reopens on your day.

• Send items anywhere

  Type an at sign in the capture bar to send an item to any of your lists, pulled straight from your real Apple accounts.

• No account

  Nothing to sign up for and nothing to sign into. Your data lives in your own Apple Reminders and Calendar, on your Mac.

Screenshots

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Version history

• 2.3.129 September 2026

  Colleagues' meetings, clearly: where someone's meetings overlap, each gets its own color on their stripe, canceled meetings stay visible, faded, and never count as busy, and hovering shows every meeting at that time. A better way to pick a time: Edit and Time open a big picker where you can type “fri 3pm”, tap Today or Tomorrow, choose a day on a large month, then an hour and a quarter. Now, on the edge: in Equal hours, a small sparkle on Margin's edge marks the current minute, and nothing crosses the hour any more. Fixed: the Edit and Search windows always open above the Dock.

• 2.3.028 September 2026

  Margin is now on iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch, as its own app on the App Store: plan in plain words wherever you are. Timers follow you: start a focus timer on the Mac and it runs on your iPhone, Lock Screen and Watch, where you can pause it or add five minutes, privately through your own iCloud. Command-click several tasks and drag them together, to another hour, another day, No date, or Delete with Undo. Ticked tasks keep their place, and past hours stay easy to read. Working hours get a daylight tint, and each hour shows how many of its tasks are done. Fixed: the day could go blank after a drag, the “…” menu would not close again, and Margin did not always open at login.

• 2.2.023 September 2026

  The day to scale, and a Focus screen that does more. Equal hours is the new default view: every hour is the same size and says what is in it, with how many tasks and events, a red tint when something urgent is inside, meetings drawn as lines at their exact times and a dot for each task. With AI on, a busy hour gets a one-line summary; click any hour to open it. Expanding and Folded are still there in Settings > Timeline, and empty hours are no longer folded by default. Focus lets you switch between timers, pause and resume, see when the run will be done, keep a note of where you left off and see how long you have focused today, and it warns you when a meeting starts before the run ends. Click an empty session to pick a task for it, or drag one in. The calendar has a Today button. Fixed: the capture bar could lose the keyboard and look frozen; a running timer kept the Mac busy; the current hour could be hidden under the timer when the timeline opened; an opened hour could land below the screen; the Day tab needed several clicks; and button hints covered the Day and Focus tabs.

• 2.1.122 September 2026

  A fix for the What's new page in 2.1. Its Skip button had been pushed off the bottom of the window by the notes above it, and with no close button and nothing bound to Escape the mailing-list form was the only thing left on the page — which made handing over an email address look compulsory. It never was. The page now has a close button, Escape shuts it, and the card and the Skip button sit in a fixed block at the bottom that no future release can push away.

• 2.1.022 September 2026

  The whole day on one screen, and a month at the top of it. A stretch of the day with nothing in it now folds into a single line that says how long it is; click it, or hold a task over it while dragging, and those hours open back up — a clear day that used to take fifteen hundred points of scrolling now takes two hundred. The header no longer writes the date twice: the top line tells you where the day stands — what is next, what is still open, what is done — each in turn, once, and then it rests, with the day and its date on the line beneath. The calendar can be pinned from its own popover to the top of the timeline, at the timeline's width, with the day scrolling underneath, and while a timer is running it shrinks to a single week so the run keeps its room. The Inbox shows how long each capture has been waiting, and the tray in the header carries a count so you know there is something in there. A due notification can be acted on where it appears: Complete or Later, and clicking it opens the timeline on that task. Right-click any row for Edit, Complete and Delete; in the Inbox the choices are days rather than quarter hours; and a pulled timer can be stopped from its own rail. Search is driven from the keyboard and puts live work before finished, exact names before passing mentions, and what is coming before what is gone. Margin reads your typing more carefully too: a typo in a day word is corrected and named, “sat with grandma all afternoon” is no longer an appointment on Saturday, and “all morning”, “every august” and “meeting tomorrow 1415” are understood. About Margin opens Margin's own About, and Command-comma opens Settings from anywhere. Fixed: the show or hide shortcut could not bring the timeline back and the menu said it was showing when it was not; Pure Black drew black controls on black on a light-mode Mac; a task filed into a hidden list vanished without a word; deleting or moving a task in the second after adding it said it could not be found; an all-day event given a time stayed all-day and moved its date underneath; a task dropped on a pomodoro session that had already finished was sent into the past; data Margin could not read was written over instead of kept; the capture bar could throw away a half-typed sentence; and Settings jumped back to the middle of the screen every time it opened.

• 2.0.020 September 2026

  A new timeline, timers that hold your tasks, and nothing you capture is lost. The day is drawn as cards under every hour, midnight to midnight, with the now line threaded through it, your working hours washed in daylight and the free hours plain to see. Pick a task up and it follows your hand in fifteen minute steps; hold the Control key while you drag and a magnifier opens over the drop point with five minute steps and a tick at each one. Pull the thread down for a countdown, or hold Command while you pull for a pomodoro, then drop a task into a session, or into several, and drag it back out whenever you change your mind. Focus gives the run a ring of its own with the task in the middle and Done, five more minutes, or Stop underneath, and the sessions already spent read thin and quiet while the one running now is thick and lit. A reminder captured without a day is no longer invisible: it waits in the new Inbox until you give it a time. Search finds any reminder or event by name and jumps to the day it sits on. Settings can warn you 5, 10, 15 or 30 minutes before a meeting, the date picker is a proper month with days you can aim at, and other people's calendars draw as edge stripes in their own colour. Fixed: a capture bar that could be left on screen unable to be typed into or dismissed, the dock quietly using a fifth of a core while idle, a task dropped into one pomodoro session emptying the others, and header buttons that needed a second click.

• 1.7.014 September 2026

  Type a whole list in one go, and a pure black screen for the evening. Press Option+Space, type "/list" and a space, and Margin asks four short things: what the list is called, the day, the time, then the items separated by commas. The day and the time are read the way Margin reads everything else, so "tomorrow", "Friday", "26 Oct" and "half past four" all work, and Return on its own means today, or no time at all. On your timeline the list is one row under its own name with an arrow: open it and every item is there with its own checkbox, and ticking the heading finishes the lot. Each item is saved as an ordinary reminder at that time, so all of it still reaches your iPhone, and a list of five things tells you once, in the list's name, instead of five times at the same second. There is also a pure black theme now, in Settings under Display, for OLED screens: the same gold and lavender on a properly unlit black, and it stays dark whatever macOS is set to.

• 1.6.011 September 2026

  Teach Margin your language, and the edge of the screen stops opening by accident. Settings → Language holds a tile for every word Margin understands — the days, the months, the small words that tell it what a number means — and you can attach your own to any of them: "mañana" for tomorrow, "demain" for the next day, "eod" for the end of the day. Margin then reads your words everywhere you type. The timeline now waits before it opens: rest at the edge for a moment and it comes out, brush past on your way somewhere else and nothing happens, and the wait is yours to set, down to none. Or keep a short tab instead of the full edge, sitting at the middle of the screen and growing only as far as a running timer needs. Hovering a timer strip says what it is — the name, the time left, which pomodoro session you are in — without opening anything, and right-clicking any reminder or event inside the next eight hours turns it into a countdown. The timeline opens with weight and closes quickly, and its contents arrive in order rather than all at once.

• 1.5.110 September 2026

  24 hour times no longer need a colon. "Tomorrow at 1300", "call the clinic by 1730", "standup 0900" and "review 0900 to 1030" all land properly, where a four digit time used to be skipped and the task became an all day item. A number stays a number where it should: "pay 1500 riyals", "read 2000 words" and "renew the licence in 2026" are left alone, in English and in Arabic. A bare time with nothing around it, like 1730 on its own, is read as a time only when you have set the 24 hour clock.

• 1.5.08 September 2026

  Pull a thread, with four sessions on the end of it. Drag the glyph at the left of the capture bar and a line follows the pointer, sagging under its own length, with the time written beside it: let go, type the task, press Return. Hold Command and the thread measures pomodoro sessions instead, changing colour and knotting at each one, up to four, clicking under your finger and ticking so you can count them without looking. Name it, and Margin walks the sessions and the breaks for you; the lengths are yours to set. Five colours run through all of it, one for each session and one for every break, on the thread, on the strip at the collapsed timeline's edge, and on every full-screen alert. A meeting now takes the screen when it starts too, in its own calendar's colour, with Join on the button when the event carries a video link. Command-click picks several tasks to complete or delete together, and a running timer draws on the timeline as the bar it is rather than an ordinary row. Plus polish across the day: the end of the night is reachable, the timeline opens already on the current time, and the pull is steady from the first frame.

• 1.4.06 September 2026

  Pull a timer, and a screen worth waking up to. Drag the glyph at the left of the capture bar and a length grows under the pointer: a minute, twenty-five, an hour, up to eight. Let go, type the task, press Return. It is an ordinary reminder in your default list at that time, and while it runs it keeps a coloured strip on the collapsed timeline's edge that drains as the moment approaches. Up to four at once, each in its own colour, and when one lands the others grow to share the space. When a timer lands, Margin takes the screen: the task's name, how late it is, the list it lives in, and three ways out. Done ticks it off in Reminders, Snooze 5, 15 or 60 minutes moves the task and restarts its strip, or keep the task and just drop the timer, with every button's key written on it. The full-screen alert itself has been redesigned, for countdowns as well as timers, and the capture bar's glyph now breathes softly so you can tell it does something, with a hint the moment you rest the pointer on it. Fixed: the About pane was cut off with no way to scroll, and on an empty day the "Nothing scheduled" note sat on top of the hour labels.

• 1.3.013 August 2026

  Countdowns, a real editor, and a day that is easier to read. Type "/countdown send the email in 20 minutes" and Margin keeps a timer that lives only here, never in Reminders or Calendar: it draws on the timeline as a bar filling toward its moment, and when it lands you get a full-screen alert with Dismiss and snooze. Double-clicking a task now opens a proper editor beside the timeline instead of a field squeezed into the row, so you can change the words, the time, how long a meeting runs, and which list it belongs to, in a field that grows as you type. The arrow keys walk the day: with a task command showing, Up and Down move between tasks and the one you are aiming at blinks on the timeline. "/edit" can now move a task to another list. The faintest text in the app, used for hour labels, times and list names, was too pale to read comfortably and is now well clear of the accessibility minimum in both themes, and the now line no longer fades away in light mode. Fixed: finishing a task could leave it open in Reminders so a notification still arrived, quitting just after ticking one could lose it, giving a task a time no longer drags it to today, and a countdown that came due while another alert was showing could disappear without ever alerting.

• 1.2.24 August 2026

  Hovering a task no longer pushes the rest of your day around. The full text now opens in a small card beside the timeline instead of the row growing in place, so the task underneath stays where it is and stays readable. The card also shows which list a task belongs to, which used to be visible only while a row was expanded. It is quicker too: the card appears in about a tenth of a second, and once one is open, moving to another task swaps it instantly with no wait. Also fixed: hovering a short meeting could make its title spill outside the block. In the direct edition, Margin now runs free for 7 days with every feature included, no key and no account, and the days remaining appear in the menu-bar menu and in About.

• 1.2.122 July 2026

  A new look and a timeline that reads the way a day actually works. Night Studio is the new default theme, a calm celestial navy matching Margin's new icon, with the original warm look preserved as Classic. Meetings now draw as a soft band across the time they really take, and the tasks inside them sit at their own moment instead of being stacked in a list, so a 12:30 task inside a lunch hour appears at 12:30 and carries the same actions, editing and dragging as any other row. Right-click any task to push it fifteen minutes, an hour, to this evening or to tomorrow morning, overdue ones included. Birthdays work: write "Mom's birthday every August 3", pick a calendar, and Margin saves a real all-day repeating event. The command list now shows which everyday word matched, Esc clears a free-time search, and the now line sits exactly on the minute after drifting up to eighteen minutes late as a task approached.

• 1.1.018 July 2026

  The timeline is now yours to size: drag its inner edge to any width, feel it snap gently at the two designed widths, double-click the edge to reset, and Margin remembers your choice. As you type a task, the timeline now ghost-highlights the exact slot where it will land, and once you press Return the new task blinks twice in place as confirmation, for edits and reschedules too. Tasks containing a web link show a link pill that opens your browser. Phrases like "in 1 hour 12 minutes" now parse. Plus a wide round of fixes: all-day tasks protected from slow iCloud refreshes, hover-expansion in the All-day tray, text aligned to its completion circle, DST-safe working hours, a colleague's all-day out-of-office painting their busy stripe, and a caption tooltip for every header icon.

• 1.0.012 July 2026

  First public release. One keystroke (Option+Space) turns plain language, in English or Arabic, into an Apple Reminder or Calendar event, however you phrase the time. An optional assistant, Apple Intelligence on your Mac or your own OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini key, fills in only the date and time and never rewrites your words. A slim day timeline docks to the edge of the screen with a live now line and a working-hours band; ask it to find a free slot, drag to reschedule with a magnifier, finish a meeting early to reclaim the time, plan around a colleague's shared calendar, and send items to any list by typing an at sign. Two-way EventKit sync, no account. Available on the Mac App Store and as a direct purchase with built-in automatic updates.

Common questions

• How does Margin turn a sentence into a reminder?

  Press Option+Space anywhere, type something like "lunch tomorrow 12 to 1", and Margin reads the time out of your own words and creates an Apple Reminder or Calendar event. You never fill in a date field.

• Does Margin work in Arabic?

  Yes. You can type your sentence in English or Arabic and Margin understands the time either way.

• Do I need to pay for an AI subscription?

  No. The assistant is optional, and when you use it Margin can run on Apple Intelligence on your own Mac, or on your own OpenAI, Anthropic or Gemini key. It only fills in the date and time, and never rewrites your words.

• Does Margin sync with Apple Reminders and Calendar?

  Yes, two ways, through Apple's own EventKit. Anything Margin creates appears in Reminders or Calendar, and changes you make there appear in Margin. There is no account and no server of ours in between.

• Is there a free trial?

  Yes. The direct version runs free for 7 days with no account and no card. Margin is also on the Mac App Store.

• Is Margin on iPhone and iPad?

  Yes. Margin: Plan in Plain Words is its own app on the App Store for iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch. It saves to the same Apple Reminders and Calendar, and a focus timer started on the Mac follows you to the iPhone, Lock Screen and Watch through your own iCloud. View it on the App Store.

Related apps

From the same studio

• Soluna Calendar

  Shows the date itself, Gregorian and Hijri together, with prayer times in the same menu bar.

• Jot

  For the thoughts that are not appointments yet, captured with the same Option+Space reflex.

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