zendone's blog

Features

• Next actions redefined: before, next action was an action to do by yourself as soon as possible. Now, next actions area:

  • All the single actions
  • The first action of each project
  • Actions contained in a group placed as the first step of project

• Project actions can be grouped in the Review and organize. Grouped actions are actions that can be performed at the same time. They all will be considered next actions when previous actions are completed

• The Do section includes a panel that will let you filter focus actions and today/overdue actions
• The Do section includes a switch for including/excluding next actions from the view
• New shortcuts CTRL-G and CTRL-SHIFT+G for creating/removing groups
• New search filter in the Do and Review and Organize panel
• New shortcut for searching: /
• The selected area filter will persist across sessions
• The next filters in the Do panel will persist across sessions

Enhancements

• Reinforced the nature of projects as “sequence of steps”. A number will indicate the position of each action or set of grouped actions in the sequence
• The selected project and scroll position will remain the same in the Review and Organize, when navigating to other sections
• Big images in Evernote notes will be auto-scaled to fit in the available space in the editors and tooltips in zendone

Bug fixes

• Creating an action from a collected item without comments created an empty note in Evernote
• Failed to create a new project using the projects combo in the quick add dialog, when the selected area was ‘All’
• zendone was failing to recognize ‘X’ or ‘F’ as proper keys when using the Evernote syntax (case was making it fail)
• zendone was failing to sync Evernote notes with long titles

Enhancements

• Improved load time: zendone will start faster for users with many actions
• Shorter sync time with Google Calendar
• zendone will run in iPad’s Safari. The web isn’t totally functional but most features will work

Bug fixes

• zendone sometimes generated multiple zendone-completed calendars
• The “connection problems dialog” indicating the need of restarting zendone should appear very rarely now
• In the popup menu for moving actions to other areas, only the first menu entry showed an arrow

Enhancements

• The week days in the date selectors always refer to dates in the future, and are displayed starting with the day of today.
• In the Review and Organize section, the ‘add action’ button and the counters of completed actions are not displayed unless the corresponding module is selected or the mouse is moved over them.
• Actions created via the Evernote syntax will be added to the last position of their container
• Scrollbars are a little bit wider for making it easier to use the mouse with them

Bug fixes

• Evernote notes without associated urls could be rendered with urls from other notes
• Contexts which name started with symbols like ‘@’ or numbers were being displayed with these characters at the end and in wrong order in the Do and Review and Organize sections.
• After editing the comments of actions linked with Evernote, there was a window of time (few seconds) when new changes could be overwritten automatically.
• The order of Evernote notebooks was affected by the case of the names
• The confirmation dialog for deleting areas was being displayed under the areas editor
• The loading of new Evernote notes was slow after deleting items in the Process panel
• The synchronization of Evernote notes with titles longer than 255 characters was failing

The most voted idea since zendone was announced has been mobile access. In its current version, zendone already offers some mobile capabilities:

• Collecting stuff and creating actions. Evernote offers official apps for all the mobile platforms and many third-party apps that integrate with the service. All these solutions can already be used for collecting stuff in zendone or for quickly creating actions using our syntax.
• Managing and reviewing your GTD calendar. Google Calendar can integrate with most mobile calendar systems. And in zendone Google Calendar is your GTD calendar.

But we always wanted to provide a more complete mobile support. After a lot of research we decided that we wanted native apps instead of web-based mobile apps. We started with the iPhone first, and some weeks ago we launched the development of our native Android app. In this post we would like to talk about what is coming for the iPhone.

The development started many months ago. Juan, a great developer with a wide experience in many platforms, joined our team and started to work in our iPhone app. Our goal was to develop an app with similar functionalities to the web app, that worked offline and that synced with our servers using the same API our web app was using.

The development had a number of interruptions and many things had to be rewritten when a big part of the internals of zendone were rewritten in the version 0.7.0. Today we can we can finally announce that the app is almost ready to be released.

And if being simple and beautiful were core values of zendone, our iPhone app wasn’t going to be different. Javier, our awesome designer, worked hard for translating these values into a beautiful app that looks like this.

The app will require iOS 5 to run. It will be prepared for both normal and retina displays. In Retina it looks just terrific.

As with the web app, we plan to launch a basic version and to evolve it by adding capabilities incrementally. But the initial release will offer many features:

• Offline support.
• Review and Organize section for managing your whole system of actions.
• Process section for emptying your inbox.
• Do section including three subviews, just like the web app.
• View Evernote notes attached to actions or inbox items.
• Quick add for quickly collecting stuff in your inbox or adding actions.

Participating in the beta

UPDATE: . Sorry, we are out of invitations for the beta. Due to the way Apple works, we only had 100 invitations available. After publishing this post we quickly received +100 requests. The beta period will be short so you won’t have to wait too much for enjoying the iPhone app.

We will launch the app with a short beta period first. If you are interested in participating, you can sign up for it by following this instructions. Due to the way Apple works, there is a number of limited invitations available. We plan to launch the beta **in the middle of June**.

We know there are many people out there waiting for the launch and that it is taking too long. We just wanted to tell you that the app is real, that is coming soon and that it will be great.

UPDATE 2: We plan to start with the beta of the iPhone app in the middle of June.

Enhancements

• Added new shortcuts for selecting fields in the process dialog
  • ALT + R: title
  • ALT + P: project
  • ALT + U: delegated user
  • ALT + D: due date
  • ALT + T: context
  • ALT +.: area
• The first time the evernote integration is authorized zendone will create a new default notebook in Evernote named @Inbox
• Support for multi-word Evernote tags in the process dialog
• Support for Chrome Frame (for running zendone in Internet Explorer with Chrome Frame plugin installed)
• When generating the next instance of a recurring action the focus attribute is removed
• The evernote toolbar let you open the context menu on it (e.g for copying links)

Bug fixes

• When clicking the Evernote button for opening notes in Evernote a blank page was being opened in the browser
• Evernote notes marked as done when processing your inbox were not being tagged with ‘zendone-completed’
• When attaching an existing Evernote note to an action the Evernote note was not being tagged properly
• When attaching an existing Evernote note in your default notebook to an action the Evernote note was not being moved to the archive notebook
• Deleting Evernote notes in Evernote will remove the attached Evernote note in zendone dynamically
• If the contexts edition dialog was opened in the process dialog, some icons overlapped the floating window
• The move-to context menu vanished off screen when the user had a long list of projects
• Combos of projects and delegated users didn’t let you create elements with certain symbols in their names (such as ‘[’)
• When pressing ENTER in the Evernote tags control the currently selected tag was being truncated instead of properly selected.
• High number of connection problem errors

Enhancements

• When attaching an existing Evernote note to an action, if the Evernote note was in the default notebook, it gets moved to the configured archive notebook

Bug fixes

• When creating actions while processing your inbox, some Evernote notes attached to actions were not stored properly and they were marked as ‘pending to load’ in zendone.
• Deleting an instance of a recurring action with an attached evernote note failed
• zendone failed to create actions from evernote when starting the title with ‘-’ followed by a ‘.’

The main goal of this release was making the Evernote integration faster and more reliable. It doesn’t include new big features but many core internal components were rewritten.

Enhancements

• When the Evernote integration is canceled externally, or its Oauth token expires, zendone detects the situation and warns about it.
• When authorizing the Evernote integration, zendone will try to link all the actions with previous Evernote notes, if the user had previously integrated Evernote with zendone.
• The project combo box is wider in the process dialog.
• zendone favicon has now a higher resolution

Bug fixes

• The Evernote notebook was not being reset after processing some items in the Process dialog
• Sometimes, the evernote notes attached to actions appeared unloaded (pending icon)
• Under some rare circumstances, the Google Calendar synchronization process of some users never ended and the user experienced a long delay in the sync of zendone and GCal.
• When adding time to an all-day action the event expanded to 2 days in Google Calendar
• Action’s contexts were lost when a recurring action was completed and the new one was generated
• In some cases, the Google Calendar integration wasn’t working properly due to a read privileges error in Google Calendar
• When creating actions using the evernote syntax the first area by position was not being considered the default area in some cases

Features

• Evernote checkboxes are properly displayed in zendone
• When editing comments in zendone, you can check/uncheck Evernote checkboxes and changes are propagated to Evernote

Enhancements

• When a project with uncompleted actions is deleted a confirmation dialog is shown (temporary solution while a proper trash is not implemented).
• When deleting a recurring action, a dialog let you choose if you want to delete the single instance or the whole series of recurring actions
• Recurring actions can be completed in Google Calendar by moving its events to the zendone-completed calendar
• When clicking a link contained in a comment in the comment’s tooltip it is opened in a new window

Bug fixes

• Long Evernote urls were not being displayed right in the comments editor
• In the Review and Organize, when there were actions containing comments with tables, the edition of actions wasn’t working properly.
• Some users had to wait a long time for zendone to sync with Google Calendar
• zendone was removing descriptions from google calendar items in the synchronization process
• The user’s timezone wasn’t being properly detected in some cases and this made time in actions appear to be wrong
• When the Evernote notes contained references to missing resources zendone failed to propagate changes to Evernote
• When a recurring actions is completed, the old occurrence is moved to completed in google calendar
• When removing a recurring action in Google Calendar, the whole series of recurring actions was being deleted
• When completing a recurring action in Google Calendar, the next occurrence were not being created
• When Evernote notes contained invalid ENML markup (e.g when pasting from web page), zendone failed to sync them
• When creating an action from Evernote using the supported syntax, if no proper title was provided, zendone failed to create the action
• When creating an action from Evernote using the supported syntax, zendone wasn’t recognizing the time properly in some expressions
• Evernote notes containing checkboxes wasn’t being synced with zendone (zendone could not propagate changes nor archive them)

It’s been a long since our last update. We have been working hard on a set of new features. And we we think they will take zendone to the next level:

• We have reimagined how comments in zendone works. Now, both actions and inbox items can have rich comments. And they sync with Evernote bidirectionally.

• We have improved the design of the Do section and Quick add to make better use of space.

Rich comments

In previous versions of zendone, inbox items and actions didn’t have comments (textual notes associated to them). They could have attached Evernote notes that couldn’t be modified within zendone. Now both actions and items can have comments. They are rich, you can use different styles for structuring them, as well as hyperlinks, images or tables. You can edit them without leaving zendone. And they will sync with Evernote, in both directions.

Editing inbox items

When you are processing your inbox, you can edit the contents of the processed items (no matter if their source is Evernote or zendone itself). The process panel now includes an editor embedded in the right side, in the place previously used for rendering Evernote notes.

Editing your inbox contents is very useful when you have collected some raw content, such as a long email, and you want to leave only the interesting information for performing the action. Also, this is the perfect mechanism for capturing your thoughts regarding some action you are about to create. No need to leave zendone for doing these things anymore.

Processing your inbox should feel much more faster now. In general, the next item and its contents should load instantly after processing the previous one. No need to wait every Evernote note to load as in previous versions.

As always, we wanted to integrate the editor in the process panel in a beautiful way. If you are not editing you will barely notice the editor is there. When you do, its toolbar will appear smoothly.

Editing actions

You can now edit the comments of your actions by clicking its icon. This will show a new dialog with a rich editor.

If you have the Evernote integration enabled, these comments will sync with Evernote. This means that the corresponding Evernote notes will be modified (or created) when you edit the comments of actions. This is an awesome way of managing your reference stuff for doing your actions.

As usual, editing comments is keyboard-friendly. Press M for opening the editor on the selected action. Press CTRL-ENTER (or CMD-ENTER in Mac) for saving the changes and closing the editor. Or press ESC for canceling the editing.

You can still see the comments in a tooltip displayed when you move your mouse over the comments icon. Now, they will appear instantly. Not more Loading Evernote note… messages every time you want to visualize them.

Attaching existing evernote notes to actions

You can now attach any existing Evernote note to your actions in zendone. People were sometimes confused about how to link their Evernote notes to actions. Before this update, you could only do it by processing Evernote notes or by using our syntax for creating actions from Evernote. Now you have 2 additional options:

• Just edit the action’s comment. This will transparently syncs with Evernote.
• Press the button Load existing note… in the comments editing dialog.

When you press the Load existing note… button zendone will show a place for pasting the link to the target Evernote note. This way, you can use the famous Evernote’s copy link feature for attaching Evernote notes to zendone actions.

Copying links to Evernote notes

The brand-new rich editor also support pasting links to Evernote notes directly in the text. When you copy the link to a note in Evernote and paste it in the editor it will create a green link that will let you open the Evernote note at any moment. This way you can now effectively have many Evernote notes attached to some action.

Quick collect

We didn’t include rich text editing capabilities in the quick collect (yet) but we let you collect items with rich comments using Markdown syntax. The first line will the be the title of the item and the next line will be its comment. Don’t be scared, markdown is very simple! Let me show you an example using zendone. If you collect something like this:

You will see in your inbox something like this:

We will include rich editing capabilities in the future. In the meantime, the current quick collect is a very convenient way for quickly collecting stuff without leaving zendone.

More effective use of space

More compact do

The Do section has been redesigned. We wanted to make it more compact, so you could see more actions without scrolling. With the new design, you can see twice the number actions you could see before. This is a great improvement that will benefit everyone, not only the people with smaller resolutions.

As always, we tried hard to make it look gorgeous. We hope you like the new design.

Improved quick add

In the the new quick add, the combos for setting the attributes for the new action will get collapsed/expanded automatically depending on whether they have the focus or have been filled. This enables a much better use of space. The previous version didn’t perform well for users with small resolutions. And it made it very difficult to include new fields (such as the action’s area).

What’s next

So this was certainly quite an update. We didn’t want to take shortcuts for supporting comments and there were some challenges implementing our approach. We think the result is totally worthy, and we hope you love it.

As of today, we have many things to do in many parts of zendone. Our short-term roadmap is:

• Give a (definitive) boost to the iPhone app.
• Empty the very long queue of people wanting to try zendone. We will do this gradually and checking that everything scales right.
• Polishing many aspects of the web app.

Thank you all for your continuous support and feedback. See you in the comments to this post and in our community site

Features

• New rich text editor for editing the contents of your inbox items
• Edit the contents of inbox items will sync with Evernote once the item gets processed
• Actions have rich comments
• New rich text editor for editing the comments of actions
• Creating a new comment for an action will create a new note in Evernote
• Modifying the action of a comment will modify the contents of its corresponding Evernote note
• Option for attaching existing Evernote notes to actions
• You can paste Evernote links into the comments of actions and inbox items
• New design for the Do section. Tt shows about twice the number of actions that the previous version.
• New design for the quick add that make the combos collapse/expand automatically depending on whether they have the focus or some selected value.
• The web app can detect when zendone has entered into maintenance mode, warn properly about it, and reload zendone automatically once the maintenance is over.

Enhancements

• The contents of Evernote notes will load much more faster
• The quick add tabulation is now circular
• The add action button placed at the left on the Review and Organize

Bug fixes

• Creating actions with due date later than 14 months duplicated events in Google Calendar
• Writing contexts in the syntax for creating actions directly from Evernote prevented the next attributes to be interpreted
• There were some problems analyzing due dates in the form HH:MM in the syntax for creating actions directly from Evernote
• When setting the time in a recurring action in the combo text field the recurring attributes were lost