Mitra, a calendar of your own

There are good calendar apps, and there are calendars you can host yourself, and for a long time they were not the same ones.

The polished apps live on someone else’s servers and read everything you put in them. The ones you can run at home are mostly servers: they keep your calendars faithfully and leave you to look at them through whatever app you can find. Mitra started from wanting both at once: a calendar that is pleasant to spend the day in, running on a machine of your own and answering to no one else.

It does not ask you to move. Mitra is a layer over the calendars you already keep, not another place to keep them. Each source of your time is an integration that plugs in beside the others, a CalDAV server first and many more since, and they all meet on one timeline while each keeps its data where it lives. Your events and your tasks share that timeline too, so the work of fitting one into the other no longer happens in your head.

It is also a bet on the web as it is now, not as it was ten years ago. Mitra is written for current browsers and leans on what they can do natively: layouts that adapt to their own space, popovers anchored in place, transitions between views, a real model of dates and time zones. Carrying no compatibility layers and no heavy framework is what keeps it small and quick, lets it install as an app, and lets it feel at home on a phone as on a desktop. The price is that it asks for a recent browser, and it will keep asking.

Underneath is a simple belief: your time is the most personal record you keep. Where it lives, who can read it, and how calm it feels to look at should be yours to decide. Mitra is an attempt to make that easy.