Due Board

Marks are lost to forgotten deadlines far more often than to hard questions. A list of homework does not help much, because a list does not know what day it is.

Due Board does. Every assignment sits on one continuous board under a heading that says how close it is — Overdue, Today, Tomorrow, This week, Later — and those headings are worked out fresh from the clock every single time you open the app. Nothing is filed into a bucket and left there. Open it tomorrow morning and everything has already moved along by itself.

Plenty of planners quietly drop a deadline once it has passed. Due Board keeps it pinned at the top, in red, counting the days, until you actually hand it in. It is uncomfortable to look at, and that is exactly the point — the work you have already missed is the work most worth seeing.

Colour on the board means one thing and nothing else. A four-pixel rail runs down the left of every row, and it tells you only how close the deadline is: red for overdue, orange for today, amber for tomorrow, blue for this week, grey for later. Subject tags stay small and outlined so they never compete for that meaning, and the one bright accent is kept back for the button you press and the on-time run you build. Deadlines carry a time as well as a date, because nine in the morning and midnight on the same day are not the same deadline and a planner that treats them alike is not telling you the truth.

Hand something in, tap the circle beside it, and the board records the moment. If it was late it says so. The week view shows the honest split between on time and late, a bar for each of the last seven days, and how many hand-ins you have got in on time in a row — a run that counts back over all your work rather than resetting itself every Sunday. Subjects each carry their own colour and show what they are currently holding, and a tap on any of them filters the board down to that class alone.

There are no notifications and nothing nags you. The board simply tells the truth whenever you look at it, which it can do because it works everything out afresh from the clock rather than from anything stored.

Everything lives in a database on the phone itself. There is no sign-up, no profile, no server and no connection of any kind. Nothing is collected, nothing is advertised to you, and nothing is for sale inside the app — there are no prices or payment fields anywhere in it. Settings can wipe the whole board whenever you like, and deleting the app takes the data with it.