Habits: what's new!

We just posted a new update of the My Effectiveness Habits app, aka Habits. It came out just 5 days after the previous release, and, since it introduces some nice and useful features, we decided to roll it out today. This is what it has:

1. Drag and drop for sub-actions in Project and Checklist actions.
2. UI redesign - moving to less elements on the screen + searching for better usability. You will like new screens, they're better enough, and not complete rework at the same time. Evolution.
3. Action name 'tap to edit' on the action screen - making life easier, trying to avoid as much unnecessary steps as possible.
4. delete backup file from app directly - use long-click menu. Reason - same as above, as before, as must be: make it simple, pleasant to use. Very useful if you want to cleanup your backup folder and not launch heavy file explorer to do that
5. ss - seconds added to backup file name: ddMMyyyy_hhmmss. You might want to make 10 backups in 1 minute (or, even 60, if you can). Previous naming template didn't take that into account. Now it does.

Priority Sorting

As we noted before, we've started to move to KISS principle, to make the app simpler and more intuitive to use. This leads to removing some elements. For example, on the Goal page we have removed the "set at" time indicator. It was quite useless and even probably a bit irritating.

The other thing we've started adding - is drag'n'drop sorting. With the latest two updates we did that to goals and roles sorting. As my partner stated - arranging items from Top to Down is the most natural way of sorting. You have your top priority goals and roles at Top, lowest priority - at the bottom. We will proceed with adding that to Actions, too.

Important thing about drag'n'drop sorting - we tried to make it simple and easy to use, without the need to long-click - you just take the holder at the right side of a role or a goal and drag it up or down. Very simple, natural and pleasant to use.

Habits: Current Action Widget

Idea behind the widget is pretty simple. Though they say it is important to be able to multitask, there're many who say that you're much more productive if you single-task. Because you concentrate fully on one task at a time, you're more effective in doing it. And that feels pretty natural - since you do one thing, all your time and thoughts are dedicated fully to it. If you do several things at a time, you spend some time and energy on switching between the tasks. Some (trainers, authors) say that this switching in fact takes a lot of time.

So, we introduced a Current Action widget on the Home screen. The function of the widget is to identify the task you're working on now. Whenever you look on the screen, you'll see it written there, thus reminding you not to distract:

If you click on the Action name or Action details - it will lead you to the corresponding page with the Action loaded.

If you have an Action added to your Home screen, you can set another Action as your Current:
1. You can do it on FTF or Actions page: choose more > Current
2. You can do it on Action page: choose menu > Current.

Note: doing steps above will update the widget, if it has already been added. If not, it won't do anything.

Some updates

We haven't posted for quite some time, have been quite busy last weeks. So, it's time to share some news.

1. First, going back to implementation of the FirstThingsFirst shortcut - as you already know, the first version we added actually did add the second shortcut to the app list. But, at same time, it made it impossible to start the app from the android market. This lead to a noticeable number of uninstalls, and the first negative review on the app. We removed that version and added two new: real android OS supported "shortcut" to the FTF and a shortcut widget - both will the work and lead to the First Things section of the app.
2. Returning to the Habits: we started evolution to make the app simpler, the so-called KISS approach. To do so, we started to remove abundant and redundant UI items. UI looks even nicer and will improve furthermore.
3. Two other new cool functions added: Current Action Widget and Goal Priority Sorting drag'n'drop. We'll dedicate separate posts to these two, giving some screens.