The Foundation of Lista’s Design

2026-10-06T00:00:00+00:00

Lista is built to stay simple as it grows. Its design rests on a small set of building blocks that combine with each other: a minimal structure, a few item properties, and the filters that bring the two together.

Two axes

Picture Lista's design as two axes.

The vertical axis is structure: where your items live. The horizontal axis is filters: how you look at them. Every view of your items is where the two meet — a place in your structure, seen through a particular filter.

Today in the Work space, including all of its lists.

Neither axis depends on the other. Filters are there wherever you are, and your structure is navigable with or without them. Together they give you many ways to look at the same items, and you never have to define any of those views.

Structure

Lists hold items, and sections break a list into parts.

When lists start to belong to different parts of your life, spaces separate them. Put your work lists in one space and your personal lists in another, and each becomes its own context, so one never adds noise to the other.

That structure is yours, and none of it exists until you add it. Lista adapts to how much you need, from a single list with a few items to several lists across separate contexts.

Two places are always there: the Inbox, for items without a home yet, and Overview, which covers everything. In the sidebar, they sit above your spaces and lists.

A few properties

Items carry a deliberately small set of properties. Each one covers a common need in its simplest form, and each is visible right in the list as you go through your items.

A star. A single star, rather than a scale of priorities. It flags whatever you want to keep in sight, independently of any date: what matters most, or anything else. What it means is up to you.

A date. Scheduling an item means it shows up when it becomes relevant, with an optional reminder and an optional repeat.

Assignment. In a shared list, an item can be assigned to someone. Each person knows what they are expected to handle, and items assigned to someone else step out of your way. If another person is taking care of something today, it does not appear in your Today or count toward your badge. Unassigned items stay visible to everyone, since anyone might pick them up, and items assigned to you behave like any other item of yours.

Filters

Lista's filters give you different views of your items by combining structure and properties:

All Items
Starred
Today
Scheduled
Assigned to Me
Assigned
Completed

There is nothing to define. Every filter is built in, and every filter applies at every level of the structure: the Inbox, Overview, any space, any list.

That is where the two axes pay off. Today in Overview is everything scheduled up to today, across all of Lista. Today in your work space is the same question asked of work alone, with nothing personal in sight. This is what makes spaces more than folders: inside one, every filter focuses on that context alone.

Lists narrow it further. Starred in a single list is what is flagged in just that list. Completed in a list is where you go to find something you already finished there. At the other end, All Items in Overview is simply everything you have, wherever it lives. Any combination just works.

Filters also follow the same principle as structure: they appear when they mean something. The two assignment filters are only available when the scope you are in contains a shared list. If you never share a list, you never see them, not even in Overview.

Moving between them

Once you have selected a place in the sidebar, you can switch filters as often as you like, and the selection stays where it is.

Moving to another place starts fresh: the Inbox, a space, or a list always opens on All Items. A new place is usually a new context, and you are rarely asking it the same question you asked the last one. Overview is the exception. It opens on Today by default, and you can choose a different default filter in Settings.

Without noticing

Taken together, this is a fairly powerful filtering system. Any filter at any scope, across items you organize however you want. But it does not feel like one, because there are no rules to write and no views to save. You pick a place, you pick a way of looking at it, and Lista shows you exactly that.

Structure tells Lista where things are. Properties tell it what they are. Filters bring the two together, at any level, with nothing to set up.

Lista is on the App Store for iPhone, iPad, and Mac.

Why Lista

2026-09-07T00:00:00+00:00

In 2010 my wife and I wanted a simple app to share lists — groceries, what to pack for the weekend, the everyday things we kept track of together. Apps that could do it existed, but none of them were as simple and as clean as we wanted. In one form or another, I have been working on it ever since.

Twenty years of to-do list apps

The oldest to-do app I can remember using is Kinkless GTD, an add-on for OmniOutliner Pro from around 2006, which eventually became OmniFocus. Later I was an early adopter of Things, drawn to its simplicity and its craft.

None of them supported collaboration.

Listary, 2010–2015

So in 2010 I co-created Listary. It was a very simple list app — items you could check off, and nothing else. No due dates, no priorities, no metadata of any kind. What it added was collaboration: you could keep a list to yourself, or share it with someone and work on it together.

Sync and collaboration were the hard part. There was no CloudKit in 2010 — it would not arrive until 2014 — so the first version worked through Simplenote, and the second through Dropbox's Datastore API. In 2015 Dropbox retired it, and that was the end of Listary.

Todoist, 2012–2022

In 2012 a friend, Gonçalo, CTO of Todoist, asked whether I would join as their first iOS developer. I said yes, and stayed for a decade, growing into Head of Apple Platforms. Ana, who co-created Listary with me, joined too, and is Head of Design.

Ten years inside a to-do app used by many millions of people teaches you things that are hard to learn from the outside. Mostly it taught me what power costs: which capabilities earn their complexity and which do not. Filtering, in particular, became something I could no longer work without.

In 2022, after ten years, I left to take a break.

The gap

I wanted my hands back on code and I wanted to learn SwiftUI, so I started a playground project. Unsurprisingly, a to-do list app.

At the same time, I kept noticing that nothing on the market was quite right for me — including my two favorite apps.

Todoist has kept moving toward teams, and complexity comes with that. It still works great for personal use, but I was no longer using a to-do app as part of a team, and I was carrying complexity I no longer had a use for.

I still admire Things, and its simplicity and craft remain a reference. But it does not offer collaboration, and it does not have the kind of filtering I had come to depend on.

So I took that playground project and turned it into my own answer to all of this.

Lista

The brief in my head was roughly: the simplicity of Things, the power of Todoist, the privacy of Reminders.

Spaces group related lists, and lists break into sections — enough structure for a whole system, and none of it there until you add it. Filters like Starred, Today, or Scheduled apply across everything, inside a space, or within a single list, with nothing to set up first. Any list can be shared — through Messages, Mail, or a link — and everyone on it works together in real time. There is no account: Lista syncs through your own iCloud, which is what makes sharing that simple, and what keeps your data yours, invisible to us.

Lista is for people who want to stay simple without sacrificing power, collaborate in real time with small groups, keep their data private, and find that craft in an app that feels familiar on every Apple platform.

I started it at the end of 2022 and released it on the App Store in March 2026. It is the app I wanted and could not find, and I use it every day.

Lista will keep evolving. What will not change is what it is built on: staying simple as it grows.