zendone's blog

We are really excited to announce that we will start beta-testing our official Android app this very same week. The Android app has been our most demanded feature since we started. For a long time we have been saying that we were working on it. Today we can say the app is finally here. You are going to be able to try it starting this Friday.

How does it looks like

Our Android app is native, it works offline and it looks just gorgeous:

We haven’t ported our iPhone app to Android. Esteban, our Android developer, has worked hard with Javier, our designer, to translate zendone’s look into a native Android app that feels like an Android app. We have used the latest Android’s recommended patterns and practices. For example, we have opted for a sliding panel as the main navigation mechanism. This is a common mechanism in Android apps that has been recently standardized by Google.

The app requires Android 2.3 or higher to run. That means that it is compatible with 95% of the Android devices out there. It is prepared to work with different resolutions. We haven’t optimized it for tables yet, but we have had them present when designing the internals of the UI. It’s prepared to be adapted in a near future.

Functionality

The app offers a Do and Review and Organize panels that are very similar to the web app’s. The Do sections contains your focus, incoming actions and recently completed actions. In the Review and Organize you can see your whole system of actions and projects. You can see Evernote notes attached to actions and edit all their attributes.

Since we started we wanted to leave some functions out for the initial version. We will include them in future versions:

• Process your inbox
• Filter actions by context
• A next filter as in the web app

How to join the beta process

We will start with an open beta. All the people can subscribe to it. But please, notice that it is a beta. The app, specially in the early versions, will contain bugs. So please, consider waiting a few weeks more if what you want is a polished version.

If you want to participate in the beta process please sign up in our group. We will start the beta process this Friday 31st of May. You will receive a link for joining the during that day.

You can submit bugs or suggestions in our community site and also privately sending an email to support@zendone.com.

Thanks for your patience

Today is a huge milestone for us. We know that you have been waiting too much time for it. We are incredibly thankful for your patience and continuous support.

We really hope you enjoy the Android app. We are very proud of the app and we believe that, combined with the excellent Evernote apps out there, it covers the most important mobile use cases for Android users. We intend to keep improving it in future versions. But we think that waiting with the app in your hand is a much better state than without it.

Also, we have prepared a bunch of nice updates for the web app. We will release a new version in the next days. And the same for the iPhone app. Stay tuned!

We are excited to announce a bunch of new features and improvements for our web app.

Create projects from actions

A common scenario when you are reviewing your actions is to find one that is more complex than you initially estimated. You then need to create a project and decompose them into smaller steps. Now zendone offers direct support for this:

1. Select an action in the Review and Organize
2. Right click on it and select Convert into Project or press ⌘/CTRL-J

Zendone will automatically create a project with the same name that the action. This project will contain the action itself. And what is better, you can do this by selecting multiple actions. This comes very handy for decomposing a project into smaller projects.

Configure the first day of the week

In the preferences of zendone you can now configure your first day of the week. This will be used for displaying calendars within zendone.

Export to Excel

Zendone now offers direct support for Excel format. If you go to preferences and select export data, you will see a new option in addition to the previous raw XML format.

The exported document will contain one sheet per area of responsibility and one more sheet containing actions completed in the last month. In addition to Microsoft Excel, you can also use Open Office or Google Docs for opening the generated file.

Select actions in Review and Organize from the Do section

You can select an action in the Do section and navigate to it in the Review and Organize. To do it, just press ⌘/CTRL+O or select the corresponding option in the popup menu that will appear with right click on it.

No more hidden contexts

If you had more contexts that horizontal space to show them in the Do and Review and Organize, these would be hidden. Since now, a new menu will let you see and select those hidden contexts.

New shortcuts

We have added a bunch of new shortcuts to zendone:

• ⌘/CTRL + O: Select an action in the Review and Organize from the Do section
• ⌘/CTRL + J: Create a project from the selected actions in the Review and Organize
• ⌘/CTRL + B: Select Evernote notebook in the process
• ⌘/CTRL + G: Select Evernote tags in the process

Features

• Configuring the first day of the week for the date selector in the preferences
• New ‘export to Excel’ option
• Browse from a selected action in the Do section to its project in the the Review and Organize section: CMD-O shortcut and popup menu option
• Create an project from an action or a group of actions in the Review and Organize (CMD-O shortcut or popup menu option)
• New shortcut: ALT-G for selecting Evernote tags in the process panel
• New shortcut: ALT-B for selecting Evernote notebooks in the process panel

Enhancements

• When there more contexts that horizontal space in the panels, a new menu will appear for showing the hidden contexts
• Improved technology for managing web processes for faster response time

Bug fixes

• When creating a new user, if you were already logged in, the session was maintained
• The shortcut CTRL-ENTER for adding actions wasn’t working in Windows

We are really excited to announce that today zendone is leaving the beta period.

New portal and improved look and feel

We have reworked our portal, blog and help site. We have worked hard on the new design and we think it represents a huge step forward. We think our designer Javier did an excellent job and we hope you like it as much as we do.

If you were a zendone user you will notice that it now looks even more gorgeous. Many subtle things related with how zendone looks have been improved in the new version 1.0.1. We are specially happy with how much better the contrast is now.

Premium plans

We have been cooking zendone for a long time, growing it slowly but steadily. We have always treated zendone as a business. Even when we didn’t charge for it, we have tried to offer the kind of customer support we would like for ourselves, with the level of security and reliability we would expect of a high-quality platform.

We now think zendone is good enough to start charging for it. As you know we love simple things, so our approach to premiums plans is very simple too:

• Premium subscription of $50/year or $5/month. We support payments with both credit cards and PayPal.
• Free plan with a limit in the monthly usage of Evernote and Google Calendar. Each month you will be able to sync 30 Evernote notes and 30 GCal events.

We also have included a trial period. You can try a premium-like full version of zendone for 30 days (no credit card or payment of any kind required).

You can check the details of our pricing here. The iPhone app and the incoming Android app will remain free for both premium and free users.

Starting today, all the existing and new users will start their free trial period. That means you will have 1 month for using zendone without any constraints. After that period, you will enter into the free plan and will have a monthly quota for Evernote and GCal integration. If you decide to buy a subscription this quota will be removed.

In the free plan you will see a little panel indicating how much quota you have spent. If you buy a premium subscription this panel will disappear.

What is next

Our short term roadmap is:

• Android app: this is now our highest priority
• Web app: We intend to release quite a few enhancements that we have been postponing for a long time

Today we have reached a huge milestone for zendone. We are very thankful for all the support and feedback we have received since we started. We know that nobody likes to be charged for things that were free, but we hope you will understand that charging for zendone is the only way we can support their operations costs and future development.

In this version we are leaving the beta period and starting with the premium plans.

Features

• Brand new portal, blog and help site
• Free, Trial, and premium subscriptions system
• Payment system supporting credit cards and Paypal

Enhancements

• Improved look and feel for the app
• Much better contrast
• Improved sync button. It is now located at the top of the screen
• Many internal improvements for better scalability

Bug fixes

• Retina support
• Some users were experienced a longer delay when syncing GCal events

We are making a couple of great announcements today:

Our iPhone app was approved

Our official iPhone app was approved! Apple only took 6 days to approve it since our submission. You always hear stories about submissions that last forever so we are more than happy.

And why on December 26th? Well, when you submit an app to the App Store you can configure a publishing date so that it doesn’t make it into the store immediately after being approved. We had a huge migration in course this weekend and we didn’t want to have the iPhone app in the App Store at the same time. Now we can’t change the date, so the 26th will be.

It is almost here, finally, after all this time. We really hope you will enjoy carrying zendone in your pocket.

Migration to new server

And the second milestone we accomplished today was migrating zendone to a new home. You can check the list of changes here. You won’t notice big new features this time, but you can believe us that this was a lot of work in the internals of zendone during the last months. We don’t want to get technical in this post but our goal was to prepare zendone for the future. Both in terms of evolution and scalability.

We really hope you won’t find any problems with the new version but if you do, please send us an email to support@zendone.com or report it in our community site.

Thanks for your continuous support and Merry Christmas to you all!

UPDATE (2012-12-27) The app is already in the App Store, but it doesn’t appear in the search results yet. You can download it from this link.

UPDATE (2012-12-28) The app already appears in search results in all App Stores

This was a major upgrade of zendone’s technology. We are using an updated server running Rails 3, running on a new Heroku instance with a new database. Basically our internals are brand new :). The new version also includes other minor enhancements and bug fixes.

Features

• The adjusted width of the 10,000 feet view is saved and persists across sessions
• The collapsible state of the “Review and Organize” filters is saved and persists across sessions

Enhancements

• The web app was reworked to be lighter and work smoother for users with lots of actions

Bug fixes

• Export functionality was failing to generate the exported file under some circumstances
• The dialog for attaching existing evernote notes sometimes failed to open
• The web app was failing to handle dates properly when using zendone at some given moment depending on the timezone
• The ‘deleted at’ column in the Trash dialog was hidden and the dialog had to be resized
• Cancel account functionality was restored
• Fixing problem with automatic timezone detection in some regions
• Fixing problem rendering the context filters in Firefox
• The web app failed to load when having multiple contexts with the same name

We submitted our official iPhone app to the App Store. Now, Apple has to review it and approve it. The review process usually takes one week, although it seems that a couple of weeks is not uncommon.

The app lets you do most of the things you can do in the web app. It is native (which means fast), works offline, it is simple and beautiful and, of course, it is ready for retina displays and for the new iPhone 5 resolution. We think it looks gorgeous:

We will keep you posted on how the review process goes. Hopefully there won’t be any issues and you all will be able to enjoy the app in the App Store very soon.

This is a huge milestone for us. And we have a few more milestones to meet in the next weeks. Stay tuned

We just released version 0.8.1. Don’t expect life-changing additions, but it contains some basic features we have considered a must for a long time. It has been a while since our last update so we would also like to talk about what we have been up to.

Trash

zendone now includes a Trash. It will show your deleted actions and let you restore them. Deleting actions is not an irreversible operation anymore.

We have moved the sync button to the footer and placed the new trash button near to it. It will open a new dialog showing the contents of the trash.

You have two options for restoring actions:

• Automatically. It will place the actions in the original area and project. It will even recreate the corresponding area or project if it was deleted. Notice that this option will be available for actions you delete from now on (not for actions deleted in previous versions).
• Manually. You have to specify the target area and project for restoring the action.

As a nice side effect, we got rid of those confirmation dialogs each time you delete a project.

New data export and cancellation options

We believe that your data is yours. We have included 2 new options in the preferences panel:

• Export your data. This option lets you download a file to your disc containing all your data. This file is in XML format. That means that you can read it with any text editor or with tools that support this format (such as Microsoft Excel). This format is also suitable for being processed automatically, so other tools can use it for importing data from zendone.

• Cancel your account. This option lets you cancel your zendone account and delete all your data from our servers. We would hate that you used this option but we would hate it even more that you wanted to delete your data and you couldn’t find a way to do it.

Timezone configuration

Until now you couldn’t configure your timezone. It was automatically detected by zendone. This worked fine in 99% of the cases but it failed in some countries. Now you can manually configure a timezone in the preferences or let zendone detect it automatically. It will affect to the way zendone processes dates in the server. For example: when creating actions directly from evernote.

What we have been up to and next steps

It has been a while since our last update. This is what we have been doing the last weeks:

• Migration to a newer version of the web technology we use (Rails). This was something we had to do for many reasons, including performance and making sure zendone could continue evolving in the mid-term.

• iPhone beta launch. In the middle of August we started beta-testing our iPhone app. Tests are going great and we are confident that we will be able to submit the app to the App Store soon.

• Payment system. While it is not active, we have worked hard to implement the system that will manage premium accounts in zendone. Don’t worry, zendone won’t suddenly start charging for premium features. We will notify with enough anticipation about our plans. But it is something we will start doing at some point of the near future. We will provide more details about our plans soon.

• New portal. We will rework our portal and make it much better. We have spent a lot of time preparing the new design and discussing about it.

Regarding our plans for the future, we intend to launch another release of the web app in a week or so. It will contain some minor enhancements and bug fixes. We have a number of little things in our backlog we want to dispatch before continue adding big features. For example, remembering the 10,000-feet view width in the Review and Organize or this annoying bug when there are many contexts in use.

We certainly have some exciting milestones ahead. In the next weeks, we intend to launch our new portal, submit our iPhone app to the App Store and start with zendone-as-a-business. We have a long list of features we want to add to zendone but we think it is about time to start with premium plans. Indeed, obtaining some income will be great for the project. It will hopefully give us the resources we need for advancing with the pace we would like. We will talk more about this in a blog post.

And Android users out there, we haven’t forgotten about you. We can’t give a date, but the initial version of the Android app is coming. It will be small and simple, but it will be a great start. Stay tuned

As always, we would love to hear from you. We are listening in our community site, twitter, mail and this blog.

Features

• New trash. It shows your deleted actions and let you restore them
• Export your data to a file you can save locally
• Configure your timezone in the preferences panel. By default, the selected option is to detect it automatically
• Option for deleting your account and data from zendone databases

Bug fixes

• Completing recurring actions within groups broke the way groups were shown
• Sometimes, the search field was filled with a number when reloading zendone
• Groups were broken when using filters in the Review and Organize
• The area selector combo was visually displaced a little bit when using the context filter
• Some rendering problems with newest Chrome version (22.0)
• When there were many contexts shown in the context filter the layout was broken