Purchases

Sorry for the long silence and no new updates in the app - we have been pretty busy with other stuff in our lives. With this update we are trying to start being back on track and more focused on development, let's see how it goes :).

In the currently rolling out update we are trying to add ability to make purchases in-app. There's only one option now - 1 month ad-free access. Though we try to show as few ads as possible to make any sense, many people were complaining about them and asked for options. Hope this would be helpful.

Since this is a complex and new feature, we'd be very grateful for any feedback, especially about problems/errors/misunderstandings.

0.20.5 update

Started rolling out new update after long pause, it's mainly about fixing reminders for Android8+ users. If you see problems with reminders, would be happy if you told us.

Workodoro pause + more

The workodoro timer is aimed at helping you concentrate better on the work. It's a popular technique and is to many users very effective to overcome the procrastination urges. It consists of work periods of usually 25 minutes (adjustable) interleaved with break periods of around 5 minutes (also adjustable). The idea is to stay focused during the 25 minutes and then have rest during the breaks. It's said to help get into the so-called focused mode during working, overcome procrastination, better learn and do the work.

But often interruptions are inevitable - some short but urgent call, someone asks you something, etc - some actions that you have to react to. If you stop the work timer and start it over again, it'll break the smooth process. That's why we've added the 'Pause' function.

If you press the pause button during the work period, it will pause the timer for 1 minute so you finish with your interruption, then will return to the minutes remained in your work period. We think it will let you keep the idea in your brain that the work process is on, thus you don't switch the contexts and then have hard time to return back.

You can pause once only during a work period, and during a break period pausing seems not needed.

Also in the current update, as said before, trying some ads in the app, only on the one screen now. And some UI/UX changes.

Change role and filter by 'this week' actions

Have pushed two new features to the Play Store: ability to change the role of a goal and an additional day-filter 'this week'.

'Change role' has been asked for many times, it's pretty simple and easy to use, and it does what it says - if, at some point, you decide to split a role and move some goals to a newly created one. Or, just move a goal to a more appropriate one, then use the menu on the goal page.

The 'This week' actions filter let's you see actions that are either recurrent and their recurrence falls into this week, or those that have their date set to an exact calendar day and that date also falls into the current week.

The plan is to help one have a better overall view of the actions to do and improve his/her planning. There are more ideas how to further develop this, stay tuned. And, enjoy!

'Filter by day' on the FTF/Actions pages

We've started changing the logic for the day-filtering on the First Things First and Actions pages (and eventually the corresponding filters). Take a look at the screenshots below.

 

This is just the first part of the work, eventually we want to have a more natural and, at the same time, comprehensive system for actions daily planning.

Korean translation

Korean translation is out there. Hieroglyphs look a little different than Chinese, but, too, small, neat, and pretty. 

Thanks for the translation to our user, Kim J.!

Another quick update

Just pushed to the Play Store. Sorry for such a rush and quick update after having one just a few days ago. We are going on a short vacation and wanted to do it before, so that some of the users that are having problems would use the program without any problem.

It brings Vietnamese translation (thanks for the help!) and some fixes and adjustments. In particular, on the My Achievements page clicking on an achievement to share it lead to error. Now fixed. Enjoy.

Chinese translation

Just pushed the new update, will be out there in a few hours. It contains a few fixes, like letting us select any file type for the 'Restore from Share' function, and the Chinese translation.

The 'Restore from Share' was written quite long ago and it appears that it wasn't always letting choose the appropriate app to restore the backup from a cloud storage. We've modified it, it should help now those who faced that problem.

Also, the problem with the Google Drive sync that I've wrote about in the previous post, still persists. It's a strange bug in the google code which is seen in some other apps as well, but hasn't been nailed down yet. As soon as they (google) do, I'll inform separately. Not everyone is seeing it, but those who do can use 'Backup 'n Share/Restore from Share' pair from Backup/Restore menu. You can even use the Google Drive as the 'share' program because when saving (pushing) it saves the correct version. But when restoring it restores some old one.

The Chinese translation was done by one of our users - many thanks to him! In fact, all of the translations are done by you, so many thanks to all of you.

When I tried it on my own phone, I was very surprised. It turns out Chinese is so short in terms of string lengths, that the UI looks very neat in it. Take a look yourself:

I don't understand a single word of it, bit it really looks nice. I'm even thinking of using the Chinese interface for some time :) (and learning the Chinese in some near future).

Hope you'll like the updates!

Strange google drive

Something strange is happening to the Google Drive sync - when pulling, it doesn't pull the latest version. Anyone else seeing it? Is it a common bug or just my phone's?

Dark theme

Is pushed. Original light themes have changes, too - many pages are not completely white now. Let's see if want to keep them gray or return to the white. If you think where we may tweak the colors - welcome!

To choose the dark theme open Settings > General Settings > Productivity mood:

Translation doc

This post is added to featured.


Here's the link with the text labels used in the app. We've created sections for different languages, not in the order of importance but in the order we recalled them.

If you want to translate into your language, click on the link - I'll give you permissions to edit the file. You can then add the translations into the table. Later we'll add them into the app files.

Link to the translation doc


If anything is unclear, try to comment it there or here, I'll give details. There are some duplication, but don't worry, eventually we'll clear them all. This is all because we haven't done the cleanup, but wrote the code :)


Some notes about strange characters in the text (thx to Olaf for pointing):

'\n\n' - this is a special character working as a new line separator. Actually, 2 separators here. Leave it as is.

'Don't, Can't, etc' - these are (you know of course) all English language constructs. Since I'm pretty sure there are no such constructs in other languages, use the correct form for your language.

For example, in Russian one'd write for "Don't delete" - " Не удалять". In Turkish it would be  "Silme" or similar (I knew the language, but haven't practiced in some 15-16 years :) ). So, please use the one appropriate for you.

Can\'t - the backslash here is also a special construct for using in programming languages. Please, ignore it. Same case with a you\'ve - first, it's a special backslash char, but then it's an English language construct that would be written differently in other language.

\u0020\u0020 - also special characters, ignore them or use as is.

Apostrophe used in languages

Adding the Italian translation to the app now, the one that was kindly done by our users. Interesting thing noted - Italian version so far has the largest number of ' apostrophe used in the texts - 77. I thought English would be the first, but it has only 50 ones. German has 10 (!) and Lithuanian 13 :).

Portuguese has 8 and the Russian only 3 :).

Add note button disappeared?

Some users complained about it, anyone else seeing this problem?

The 'add note' button in Androids 4 and above is a round colored button with a + sign in the center. The button is placed at the bottom right part of the screen:

"This a testing app, shouldn't be used any more."

If you see this message when opening your beloved My Effectiveness, don't panic. Just !!! UPDATE !!! to the newest version that has just been pushed to the Play Store. This is completely embarrassing, we are very, very sorry!

Update 14.06.16

We've been pushing updates frequently recently. This is because there were some urgent Force Close issues for some users, so we wanted them to have the working app back again asap. Also, we decided to use a tactic of pushing new stuff almost immediately as it is ready. Let's see how it works.

Among the recent changes:

• on today's action lists we now show the type of the action - simple, checklist, project
• added notes full text search for Android 4.1+ users. For lower versions there are some incompatibilities in platforms, so had to not use same implementation. Later will add for them, too
• we are moving away from the weekday idea - so 'Today/Tomorrow' in week day dialog now set the calendar dates, not the abstract week days
• weekdays have been removed from the week day dialog - only Today, Tomorrow, Now!, and Calendar date left.

Other news - published the translation doc which is being now filled by those who know the language - many many thanks to them!

Workodoro fast-forward

We've added a new nice feature to the Workodoro (based on the Pomodoro) - period fast-forwarding. It's very useful when you, for example, want to skip the current period and go straight to the next one.

When and why may you want to do so? Remember, the technique is intended to help us get a better concentration on the current work. Imagine you are working on a task that would require more than 25 minutes to fulfill. You are fully into your work and then the break time comes. What would you feel? Having a break is a good thing for your work, but sometimes switching the context may be just too expensive. Skipping a break may be quite useful in such situations - you click the button and continue doing the work.

What if you'd want to skip a work period to have another break? Though it may seem like you'd be cheating yourself, sometimes it, too, is a very needed feature. If your previous task was too hard and exhaustive, you may want to allow yourself a longer break. Of, if you'd previously skipped a work period you have the right to prolong your current break. Without this 'fast-forwarding' we were too bound to the timeline of the periods.

Hope you'll like the update and it will help you be more productive.

Translations

We plan to start translating the app into various languages, starting with German, Spanish, French. Since there have been many suggestions to help with the translation and we don't want to offend anyone, we were thinking about doing it via the blog so that anyone could participate. Haven't thought about the details, yet, but we'll probably publish the texts in English and let the users post their translations. Then we'll use them in the app.

0.17.17-.18 versions

We've updated the component used for My Roles and a role's goals. Now the drag-n-drop is much smoother and nicer. The long-click context menu has been moved to popup menu using 3-dots. And the layout widened a bit.

There were several bugs in the update. One of them was for Android 4.x users - the bug is caused by update in the development library provided by google. Thanks to you, we've learned about it quickly from your reports. For know, until google fixes it, we've reverted to previous version of the library. It does not anyhow affect the app.

Another bug is Android 2.x users - again, something broke in the update library and it failed on list holding pages. We've added a workaround in that part for Android 2.x version users and now waiting for update in libraries.

If you still face these bugs or know about others that don't let you work, please, we'd be grateful if you wrote us here or on email. Thank you!

Anti-procrastination feature

now has its own page. Currently with the timer only:

Also, you can set in the Settings whether the alarm should be on by default when you open the program.

Expand entering goal, role, etc. - anyone uses it?

Upd.: Since it turned out that there are still user who use it, we'll not remove it! Thanks for the feedback!

Long time ago, on smaller screens, this was a necessity for some users (including me) to enter more text than is visible.

Time goes on and bigger screens gain more and more market place. It seems like it's not that useful anymore and even may lead to confusion to new users.

So, if there's no serious objection, we'll gradually remove them from most of the screens.