zendone's blog

We finally released the version 0.6.13 of zendone. It contains a bunch of features and bug fixes. Let me give you some highlights.

Editing the area of responsibility of actions (finally)

You can now change the area of responsibility of an action by dragging it to other area’s icon. This works with multi-selection too. Just select the actions you want and drag them to the new area.

This was one of those very-basic functionalities we didn’t have implemented when we started with the beta. We are happy to finally have it here.

New calendar for completed actions

If you have zendone integrated with Google Calendar zendone will create a new calendar named zendone-completed. This calendar will contain the completed calendar actions (actions with due date that has been completed in zendone).

This means that now you will have your calendar of actions clean. Completed actions won’t interfere with pending actions when you are reviewing them. After all, completed actions are far less important than pending ones when you are reviewing your calendar.

Depending on your needs you may want to:

• Hide this calendar of completed actions (you can even hide it permanently in the calendars list at Google Calendar’s preferences). This will simulate that completed actions disappear from your calendar view.
• Choose a proper color for this calendar, so you can easily see which actions are completed at a glance.

And now you can also complete actions from Google Calendar. Just move its corresponding events to the zendone-completed calendar. And the actions will be completed in zendone.

Button for syncing changes

Until now, you couldn’t manually sync changes in zendone. zendone did that automatically. Now, zendone will still automatically synchronize changes in the background, but you can also trigger that process at any moment.

We included a button for doing so in the bottom-right part of the zendone screen. It also indicates with a nice animation when the syncing process is happening.

Assigning contexts to actions created directly from Evernote

zendone has a syntax for creating actions directly from Evernote. Until now, we didn’t let you assign contexts to actions created this way. Now you can. Just type the name of the context separated by a dot. For example, if you want to create an action Buy some milk and assign it to the errands context you can type:

- Buy some milk. errands

And as usual you don’t have to be precise. This will work too (errands is mispelled):

- Buy some milk. erands

And you can even create a new context “on the fly”. Imagine that you want to create a new context “shopping” for this action you are about to create from Evernote. Type:

- Buy some milk. t: shopping

And that’s it. We also improved the help section on how to create actions from Evernote with a few examples. Have a look at it if you are not using this functionality. It let you, for example, create actions in zendone using your mobile phone (or any other device/software supported by Evernote).

Improved keyboard support

We added some new shortcuts:

• T: Edit the context of the selected action
• CTRL+ENTER: It will “collect and close” when used in the process dialog. In the quick add dialog it will create a new next action
• J: Create new project
• CTRL+DEL: Delete the selected project

We also improved the keyboard support for the contexts control. When focused, you can use the arrow keys for opening it. Or just type normal characters for opening and start typing on it.

Finally, when you have an action selected, or a field inside it is being edited, you can use TAB for tabulating the rest of attributes. Now, contexts can also be reached using TAB.

What’s next

These weeks we’ve been busy with other things. In parallel to this release, we have been working on some new zendone capabilities that you will be enjoying soon (version 0.7.0 codename is ‘zendone reloaded’). We can’t wait to release it, we think you’ll be impressed with the result :). We are also working in the native iPhone app. But we would like to talk a little bit more about that in a future iPhone-specific post.

We will dispatch the fourth round of invitations in one day or two. We have already dispatched +600 invitations, and our invitations list keeps getting bigger: we now have +5500 invitations pending to be sent. Once we release version 0.7.0 we will empty our invitation queue in a few days and we will enter a phase of “open beta”. We hate not emptying it right now, but we still need to tune some things before going officially out.

We know there are people who have been waiting months for their invitation and we are sorry about that. We have been sending individual invitations to those people who have requested it. If you really want to try zendone in this private beta phase just send us an email or sends us a message in twitter and we’ll send your invitation as soon as possible.