Built slowly, on purpose.
Avenclave is a small, focused product being developed by proving one thing at a time: feasibility before features, and evidence before claims. This page covers how it is being built, the principles that settle the arguments, and where the work currently stands.
Feasibility first, features second.
Before any of this was a product, the two genuinely risky questions were answered separately: can a desktop application hold two isolated calendar sessions and work quietly for a long period without disturbing anything, and can it later prove that a particular calendar item is one it created?
Both were answered with dedicated validation work rather than optimism, and the results are what the engine is now built on.
Running quietly for a full day
A continuous validation run held two isolated calendar sessions for 1,440.7 healthy minutes, completed 289 of 289 monitoring cycles and 578 of 578 session acknowledgements, and made no calendar change of its own during the soak. Network loss, sleep, renderer failure, and lost authentication each recovered without guessing.
Proving a placeholder is ours
A second exercise built the ownership contract as 70 provider-independent tests covering identity, lifecycle, correlation, recovery, and privacy, including surviving a genuine application restart mid-operation without replaying the change.
These were architecture validations rather than product releases. They tell you the foundation holds; they do not mean the product is finished.
Eight rules that decide the arguments.
When two designs both look reasonable, these are what break the tie. They are older than any particular feature and they outlive individual decisions.
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Privacy is a feature, not a policy
Synchronize the least information that solves the problem. If a field is not needed to prevent a double booking, it does not travel.
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Local first
Observe locally, decide locally, store locally. A cloud service may one day make Avenclave nicer; it must never be the reason it works.
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Observation before assumption
Watch how a calendar provider genuinely behaves before automating it. Measured evidence beats a plausible theory, every time.
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The provider is the authority
What a calendar view shows is an observation; provider state is the truth. Every decision that matters is checked against fresh authoritative state.
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Fail closed
When Avenclave cannot establish what it needs, the correct behaviour is to stop and say so. A silent wrong answer is worse than a visible pause.
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Keep the human in control
Automate the work, never obscure it. You should always be able to find out what changed, why, and which account caused it.
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Providers inform the design, they do not define it
The synchronization engine works on plain availability, not on any provider’s data shapes, so Outlook and Google Calendar run through one engine rather than two.
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The smallest thing that completely solves the problem
Ship the narrow product that genuinely works instead of the broad one that nearly does. Scope discipline is why the privacy claim stays simple.
Where the product actually stands.
The rest of this site describes Avenclave as it will be at release. This section is the view from inside the work: what has already been proven against real calendars, and what is still being built and validated on the way there.
It is published because a privacy product that is vague about its own maturity has already undermined the point.
- Reading real availability from connected calendars and reducing it to a plain timeline
- Creating privacy-safe placeholders on each calendar from the others
- Moving a placeholder when the underlying meeting moves
- Removing a placeholder when you are no longer busy at that time
- Synchronizing timed Busy between Outlook and Google Calendar
- Synchronizing all-day, multi-day, and in-horizon recurring occurrences, including a single exception, a cancelled occurrence, and deleting the series
- Running unattended on its own interval with no button to press
- Detecting that a calendar needs you to sign in again, pausing, and resuming afterwards
- Refusing to resume when the account signed back in is not the original one
- Finding availability that is inside your window but outside the currently visible calendar view
- Restarting mid-change without repeating a write it had already sent
- Reporting an unprovable result as inconclusive instead of as success
- Choosing how often unattended sync runs
- A manual full reconciliation that leaves an already-correct placeholder alone
- Like-for-like Tentative and Out of office availability. Google Calendar has no Tentative status for events you create yourself, so those blocks appear Busy there unless you choose not to write them; a Maybe reply still maps as Tentative
- Protecting availability across more than three selected calendars at once, without copying placeholders onward
- Choosing your own placeholder label per calendar
- A configuration page for accounts, labels, cadence, and pause or remove
- Naming whether calendars are protected, catching up, need a sign-in, or are only partially protected when one account is unavailable
- Rebuilding an Outlook pane after the embedded browser dies, without restarting the app
- Running out of sight, in the notification area, with a notice when you must act
- A product window that lists each connected calendar on a compact dashboard and opens a provider only when you must sign in or reconnect
- Cleaning up a placeholder that was created twice for the same appointment
- Hardening of local storage, and recovery from losing it entirely
- Behaviour across daylight-saving transitions, under sustained real-world use
- An installer, and with it a build you can actually download and run
Because there is no installer, there is no download, no trial, and no beta program yet. When that changes it will be announced here first.
One address, read by a person.
Questions, scepticism, and “this would not work for me because…” are all genuinely useful right now. Write to hello@avenclave.com.
Please do not send calendar exports, screenshots of your schedule, meeting details, or anything from your organization. We do not need them, and we would rather not receive them.
Want to know when Avenclave is ready?
There is no signup form and no tracking. Send one email and we will reply once there is something real to try. Nothing else happens to your address.
We will not add you to a mailing list, and we will not share your address.