Knoden

Even a Family Needs Real Separation

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:45:00 -0400

PIM’s multi-user support isn’t a login screen bolted on top — it’s real separation, enforced at the database and vector-store level, for a household or small team sharing one PIM Server.

Bringing What You Already Have Into PIM

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:40:00 -0400

Contacts and Calendar can now read your existing vCard/Thunderbird address book and .ics calendar files, the same way Mail already reads a local mbox — so switching to PIM doesn’t mean starting from zero.

Trying to Find Out If Anyone's Using PIM

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:40:00 -0400

We wanted a simple answer to a simple question — is anyone actually downloading and running PIM? — and found that neither GitLab nor Ollama Cloud can tell us.

When 'Seen' Forgets What It Saw

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:40:00 -0400

RSS’s beat-the-market review flagged a real resurfacing risk in how PIM tracks which articles you’ve already seen. Here’s the actual fix, and the two other flagged gaps that turned out not to be gaps at all.

A Form Whose Only Job Is to Become an Event

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:35:00 -0400

Why PIM’s form contract lives in the shared events module instead of a JavaFX widget library, and how a sealed interface makes forgetting to teach the GUI a new field type a compile error instead of a runtime gap.

A Quote Character in a Project Name

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:30:00 -0400

The same XSS-shaped bug showed up three times in one week — once pre-existing, once freshly reintroduced while building a new feature, and once finally caught before it shipped at all.

Not Everything That Looks Alike Should Be Shared

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:25:00 -0400

Asked to fully share Mail and IM’s thread-handling code, we found the two were genuinely alike in some places and genuinely different in others — and only unified the parts that were actually the same.

Kanban and Gantt, Where They Actually Fit

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 16:20:00 -0400

Asked twice whether Plan’s apps have the visualizations Trello, Asana, and Motion do, we went app by app and built the ones the underlying data actually supports — and skipped the ones it doesn’t.

What's Changed Since Hello, World

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:35:00 -0400

An update on where PIM actually stands, a little over two months after our first post.

AI Is the Edge, Not the Excuse

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:20:00 -0400

A standing rule — every PIM app has to match its category’s best tool on the ordinary mechanics before AI counts for anything — sent us through all 13 apps to find out where PIM was actually still behind.

Mail Wasn't Actually Extracted Yet

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 15:15:00 -0400

The August extraction moved Mail’s code out of PIM core. A second pass, a few weeks later, found most of what moved didn’t actually belong there.

The Part of Email PIM Actually Fixes

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 14:30:00 -0400

A closer look at why PIM Mail exists shows the old inbox-list problem isn’t really the point — the AI woven through every email is.

The Output Area's First Visualization Also Fixed a Dead Command

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 16:15:50 -0400

Building Calendar’s day/month view settled what the output area is for, chose HTML over native widgets on purpose, and along the way fixed a command that had never actually worked.

RSS Closes Out the Extraction Series

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 17:00:00 -0400

The simplest of the three comm extractions, and the one that finally emptied PIM core’s generated-entity pipeline.

Welcome to the PIM Blog

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:59:15 -0400

What this blog is for, and a bit of why PIM exists in the first place.

Where Core Ends and a Pimi App Begins

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:40:00 -0400

The rule for what stays in PIM core, what moves into a pimi module, and how to leave room for a second variant of the same app.

Extracting Mail Exposed a Real Architectural Wrinkle

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 16:25:49 -0400

Why pulling Mail out of PIM core needed a trick no earlier app extraction did.

IM Was the First App to Leave comm

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:30:00 -0400

Extracting IM turned out lighter than expected — no third-party dependency, no generated persistence, and one bug from the previous extraction along for the ride.

Notes Set the Pattern for Everything After It

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 15:00:00 -0400

The simplest possible extraction, chosen first on purpose — and the point where the plan changed from finishing one module to moving everything.

Switching to a Better Local Model

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 19:56:11 -0400

Why PIM’s default AI model is moving from gemma4 to mistral-nemo.

Hello, world

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 20:09:38 -0400

Why we started building PIM, and what’s coming next.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Knoden builds privacy-first personal software. Its first product is PIM: a personal information manager that puts your journal, todos, work log, calendar, and mail in one place — and gives you an AI assistant that actually knows the whole picture, without shipping any of it to someone else’s servers.

Why we built this

Most people’s personal data is scattered — a todo app here, a calendar there, a journal in a notebook or a separate note-taking app, work notes somewhere else entirely, and now, increasingly, an AI chatbot that knows none of it unless you paste your whole life into a browser tab. And if you do that, it’s sitting on somebody else’s server.

Get PIM

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

PIM currently supports Linux only (Ubuntu/apt-based distributions); macOS and Windows support is planned after initial testing feedback. There are three separate installers — pick the one that matches how you want to run PIM, there’s no in-installer choice to make.

PIM (desktop)

Everything in one process, all-in-one: the JavaFX app, the AI assistant, and your data, all local to this machine.

On first launch, PIM walks you through a one-time setup wizard for your database (a private, embedded option for solo use, or a shared one for family/team use) and for Ollama, the local AI runtime PIM’s assistant features depend on.

License & Terms

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Current status: pre-1.0

PIM is in early testing. The builds on the Get PIM page are free to download and run for your own personal use. Source code isn’t public yet — all rights to it are reserved while PIM is under active development. Redistributing, modifying, reverse-engineering, or creating derivative works from these builds isn’t permitted during this period.

At 1.0

Once PIM reaches 1.0, the full source will be released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3.0 (AGPL-3.0) — free and open, including the right to run your own modified version, as long as source for that version stays available under the same terms. This page will link straight to it once that happens.