Fresh Brews: ProjectCafe, XSaver, and MultiInstance Join the Menu
Three apps went up on the menu since the last round-up: a planner that recalculates every date when one item moves, a screen saver that turns an idle display into a control room, and a way to run two copies of the same app at once.
Three apps went up on the menu since the last round-up, and two of them look like nothing else on the shelf.
ProjectCafe: dates that keep themselves right
ProjectCafe landed on the Latte shelf, and it's built around one idea: order. Each item has a length, the people doing it, and the tasks that have to finish first. Move one and everything waiting on it moves too, straight away, at any size of board. Nothing gets recalculated by hand.
Durations are counted in working time. Five days across a weekend finishes on the following Friday, holidays come out, and a half-day Friday counts as half a day. The items where a lost day costs a day off the finish date get marked, and so do the ones with room to spare.
You edit by dragging. Move a bar, pull its edge to lengthen it, drag from one bar to another to declare a dependency, drag through the middle to record progress. Undo takes any of it back. Put people on the work and the app flags the days somebody is booked past what they can do. Ask it to level the load and it pushes work later until the week is workable, then puts it back if you change your mind.
Money sits next to the work, with hours rolled up against each person's rate. Save a baseline and you can read whether you're ahead or behind, over or under, and where the thing is going to land. Problems live on the chart rather than in a separate document: notes, checklists, files, issues and risks attach to the item they belong to, and risks carry a likelihood and an impact so the report sorts the worst ones first.
Seven views read the same data. A work breakdown with bars, a card board, a network of what leads to what, a mind map, a month calendar, a roadmap, and a set of reports. Change a date in one and the others already agree. It opens and saves the planner files your last collaborator sent, plus spreadsheets, outlines and calendar files, without shifting anything on the way through. Wide schedules print across real pages with the item names repeated on each sheet. The interface speaks English, Vietnamese and German, with figures written the way each reader expects them.
There's no Open and no Save, and the work sits in a file you can back up like any other. If you already run your board offline, this is the same instinct with a calendar attached: how to run a personal Kanban board, completely offline.
XSaver: an idle screen with a job
XSaver went up on the Affogato shelf. Walk away from the machine and every screen you have turns into a wall of instruments: a rotating globe, a radar sweep, a scrolling list of what the computer is doing, a world map with arcs flying between cities. It draws over an app running full screen, which is where most of them give up.
Five scenes to pick from. A seventeen-panel control room, a wall of falling digits with words hidden in it, a console typing out a break-in line by line, the attack-arc map, or a lock solving itself one character at a time. Leave shuffle on and it swaps scenes a couple of minutes in.
Half the readout is real: what is running, processor load, memory, disk space, network traffic, temperatures. One switch replaces each number with something invented and just as convincing, which matters if the screen faces a room. The machine name and user name get blurred to something like op***@gi*** before they ever reach the display.
Seven colours, from Phosphor Green through to Synthwave, and each panel takes its tint from the one you choose. XSaver sets itself as your screen saver and hands the old one straight back when you change your mind. While a film, a presentation or a call is running, it waits rather than painting over it. A shortcut you pick, or the menu bar icon, brings it up instantly when somebody appears behind you. There's a Windows build too.
MultiInstance: two logins, side by side
MultiInstance is the smallest of the three and the one I've used most. It runs a second, third or fourth copy of an app you already have installed, each copy with its own sign-in, history and preferences, all open at once. Pick the app from a list, name the copy, launch.
Each copy keeps its data in a folder of its own, so a work profile and a personal one never touch. Instances with separate data stay signed in between launches. Turn any of them into a shortcut and it lives on its own. A Running badge marks the copies that are open right now. It's on the Espresso shelf, macOS only for now.
Two accounts in one app, a separate copy per client, a clean second profile for testing. It launches software you already own, and each copy keeps its own logins to itself.
Everything on one tab
The menu is at 126 apps across eight categories, all included in one membership. Solo Cup runs $9.99 a month, or $4.99 a month if you pay for the year up front. Every file stays a file, openable by whatever you choose next, which is the part of local-first that matters most.
Start a 7-day free trial and try any of them. No credit card required, cancel whenever.