Soodo: A Task Manager Built Around Unstructured Capture

Soodo is an in-house product currently in active development by Crabclaw Tech Ltd. This case study documents work in progress rather than a delivered engagement.

The Thesis

Every to-do app assumes you arrive with a fully formed, well-typed task. Real tasks do not arrive that way. They arrive mid-conversation, mid-scroll, or while your hands are busy — as a fragment, a thing you saw on a screen, or a sentence you would rather say out loud than type.

The friction is not in managing tasks. It is in capturing them. An app that demands structure at the moment of capture loses the task entirely, because the cost of opening it and typing a well-formed entry is higher than the cost of hoping you remember. Soodo is built on the opposite premise: take the input in whatever shape it turns up, and sort out the structure later.

What I’m Building

• Multi-modal capture. Text, voice notes, and images are all first-class inputs. A recorded thought or a cropped screenshot is a task in its own right, not an attachment bolted onto one.
• Shorthand that gets out of the way. Due dates, priority, and tags are parsed inline from natural shorthand as you type, so a single line becomes a scheduled, prioritised, tagged task without touching a date picker.
• An inbox that expects mess. Anything captured without a home lands in an Inbox to be triaged later, alongside built-in Today, Week, and Starred views and user-defined lists.
• Capture where you already are. The browser extension means a task can be created without leaving the tab that prompted it.

The Browser Extension

The Chrome extension is the sharp end of the capture thesis. It does three things without pulling you out of context: quick text entry with inline shorthand, region capture that crops a selected part of the page straight into the Inbox as an image task, and voice notes recorded into the currently selected list.

It is deliberately narrow in what it asks for. Three permissions — session storage, active-tab access for screenshots, and scripting for the selection overlay — and nothing beyond what the capture flows genuinely require. Captures sync straight to the account rather than pooling in local state that can drift out of step with the web app.

Engineering Notes

The public marketing site is a statically built Astro front end, kept deliberately separate from the application itself so the shop window stays fast and cheap to serve while the app evolves behind its own deployment. The extension and the web app share one account and one sync path, which keeps the surface area small and means a capture behaves identically wherever it originates.

Known constraints at this stage are documented rather than hidden: captures require a live connection, voice recordings are size-capped on the free tier, and authentication is password-based while federated sign-in is still to come.

Status

Soodo is pre-launch and under active development, with the capture surfaces built out first on the principle that a task manager nobody reaches for is not worth the features stacked on top of it. Structure, scheduling, and collaboration follow capture — not the other way round.