Habits update.

Have just updated the Habits, should be out in the store within the next few hours. Main updates are about enhancing the usability.


First, we've done some modification to the Action page. We've moved some of the elements from this page to a secondary screen, which is opened by pressing a special square button in the lower right corner:

                 

                               

Items moved: Goal, Recurrence, Reminder. This gave some additional space for the screen, which was especially necessary when your action was a Checklist. On my phone, I could only see 3-4 check items, which irritated me a lot. As you can see, now there are at least 6 items, which is almost a 100% gain :).

We are thinking of moving some more stuff to the right, so, if you think you'd need that additional space, too, let us know we are on the same page.

We've also changed the icons to the new ones, to look more plain.


Next, on the secondary screen, where the items have been moved, we have put everything in a separate panel, with clear title and controls. One small and simple improvement made the usability of this screen much more better: instead of letting user click just the required control as the button, we've made the whole panel clickable - this makes using the app much more pleasant.

All the functionality previously associated with these moved items (like click on goal to go to goal or long-click on it to change) is kept functional.





















We've used same approach on the main screen's Today/Tomorrow buttons, on Goal's Progress panel and some other buttons, so you'll have to notice and like it pretty soon.

Another notable improvement is the ability to mark the action Done/Un-done by swiping right-left on the Week Plan page. This way you can 'finish' an action without opening the action itself.

There are other changes that we won't mention just to keep this post short. Also, we uploaded a broken .apk (application) to the Play Store and noticed that after it had been published. Sorry, if you caught that version - we've uploaded the fixed one as quickly as possible.

New icons.

Came across a tool that creates different types of icons for android apps: ui tools. Decided to refresh the app icons. Hope you'll like :)

Update also brings fixes to some UI layout and functionality bugs.

On Ads.

As we've wrote recently, we added ads to the app. We know, that for some this is a normal process, for some - an additional irritation. We want to decrease this irritation as much as possible. Thus, if you think that on any page the ad banner hides important functionality, important data or just placed bad, you can propose us a better place, we'll try to move it :)

Habits tip 2.

Short tip about a nice new functionality, just forgot to mention it yesterday, sorry:

You can now copy an action within the same level. The app will create a copy of the action you chose to copy, with the name prefixed with the "Copy of: " text.

"Within the same level" here means that if the action copied is under a goal, the new action will be created under the same goal. If the action copied is under another action, the new action will be created under that same action.

Data copied - action and all its sub-actions, names with details. No recurrence or reminders are copied. Hope you'll like the new feature :)

Habits tip.

Want to share a tip for today's update (yes, just rolled out :) ).

From some time before, you could share the backup files using the
    Backup/Restore > Manage > "click on backup" > Share

sequence of actions. This would trigger a choose-program dialog to choose among the programs that accept file sharing. If you have a dropbox installed, it be in the list.

Choosing the program (dropbox, e.g.) you pass your file to this program, store it in its folder. This way your backup becomes stored in a cloud service. On some other device, or on the same device later on, you can restore to this backup. To do so you have to take the following steps:
   Backup/Restore > Restore > Restore from file system

This will open a similar dialog, but this time you'll choose the file to backup from. So, choosing the backup created on other device and shared with a cloud service (dropbox :) ), you can transfer your data from one phone to another.

There's just one minor flaw - it doesn't copy the pictures, if any, attached to your roles. To have the pictures be shown, you'll have to copy them manually, to the same folder structure (MyHabits/img).

Upd.: This is not the only new functionality in the update)

Upd. 2: To ease the process described above we've added 2 menu functions to 'Backup/Restore':
'Backup & Share' - to create a backup and share it immediately to the dropbox-style app
'Restore from share' - to trigger 'Restore from file system' dialog without going inside the menus.

Habits update.

Earlier today we released a new version of the app with some new features. Though it was quite a time after the previous release, we've managed to release the next version after that within the same day :). The latter was absolutely essential since it fixes some serious, and not so much, bugs in the former release. By the way, thanks a lot for your reports with messages - it helped localize the bug in just 2-3 minutes!


This new update (I'll consider it as one update) adds Concern/Influence syncing to the Google Tasks. It will look for a list called 'My Influence' under your google tasks. Within it tasks 'Influences' and 'Concerns' will be looked for. Tasks under first one are treated as 'Influences', under second - 'Concerns'. All other tasks at other levels for the list are ignored.

The sync operation itself is just like the one for Notes - you can see what has changed on both sides and decide what changes you want to take place.


There are some other improvements in the app, which we don't want to describe here, but rather let you yourself investigate them :). Functionality in this area will probably be one of the major areas of future development.


We did fix bugs and made several UI and usability enhancements. Particularly, gradually making the app more tablet-friendly (increased text sizes, spaces, layouts, etc.)


And the last major update is about adding ads. We long tried to avoid it, but eventually had to go in this direction. The reason is pretty simple - the app development is too slow to continue it doing the way we did (only in rare free time). So, we are investigating the possibility of switching to working on this app fully or at least devote much more time. That of course requires some financial support. We tried to put the ads in the places where they would not affect the usability of the app and minimize the cosmetic effect. Hope they will not annoy you much :).

As always, we welcome heartily your feedback, especially the negative one, since it helps us improve the app! And do hope the app helps you increase your productivity.

Habits backup to/from file: small but powerful update.

What have changed:

1. Backup/Restore menu 'Rename/Delete' has been renamed to 'Manage'

2. On the newly renamed 'Manage' page you can now share the backup file by pressing on the backup name and on the 'Share' button on the dialog that follows. Programs that accept files as a sharing item will appear in a choose-dialog. Usually, these are programs like Dropbox. When you choose any of them, the file will be sent.

If a file is sent to Dropbox, it will be synced across all the devices you have your dropbox account activated on.

3. On the 'Restore' page there's a big button with the label 'Restore from file system'. Pressing on it will launch a third-party app that can provide you with a file. This can be any program like Dropbox, file explorer, etc. Using this functionality you can restore to a file backed up in step 2 on another device! This way, you can copy all your stuff from one device to another! 

So, it's quite a small, but very powerful update :). This was  proposed by users long ago and I actually don't know why we hadn't implemented it. Now it's here and we hope you'll like it. The only drawback is you can't copy images that you might have linked your roles to, but that's something to think about.

Habits. Notes sync.

Notes sync resembles that of the My Mission - it follows the same approach that all the sync actions are ordered by you, no auto-background note moving/saving that might lead to results not really expected.

When you press the sync button on the Notes page, it will lead you to a 3-paged/tabbed sync page (called Google Notes Sync). Here you can load the notes saved locally (left tab), those saved on google (right tab). The middle tab is used for merging - process of defining what notes have been changed on either side and what should be done with that.

On Google tasks notes are saved under the list 'Notes'. All the tasks under this list accounted as notes. When you press Load on the Google tab on the Google Notes Sync, these notes will be loaded to the tab. You can view any particular note on any tab - click on an item in the list and it will lead you to the Note page.

After loading the google notes (if they exist), you can run the merge - the program will step through all the notes and try to find out which of the notes have been changed.

A note might be in any of the several states: local new - new note on the device, not synced to the google. The action for such note might be - to sync it with google (i.e., copy it there), do nothing or delete it. Similarly, a note might be a new one coming from google. Same set of actions can be used for such note.

A note may be modified after being synced previously. For example, modified on google. In this case you can copy updated note from google to local storage, restore google note with the local version, or do nothing :).

Convenience filters on the top of the page: you can view only those notes that have been changed in any form - press the Updated text button. You can view only those In sync. Or, you can see them All.

Finally, a note may be modified both locally and on web. The app doesn't try to be too smart, so it doesn't really do the merge or anything. It just sygnals you the situation and let's you take the action.

Pressing on the Apply button will do the sync operation - save new local notes to google, update local storage with new items from google.

Habits. My Mission sync.

Let us describe the new functionality we've just rolled out, after several months of "silence" :). The main parts are sync of the 'My Mission' and of the 'Notes' sections with Google tasks. First, will talk about Mission syncing.

If you're reading this, you probably know that google provides a small but neat easy-to-use online todo list integrated into their mail and calendar. They provide an interface for third-party apps to integrate with, which means they let other apps to sync users' lists to local devices and back. We've started our work in that direction, posting the results recently.

Google tasks represent a list of list of items. You can create lists, give them names, then add tasks to those lists. For 'My Mission' storing we've chosen the list called surprisingly :) 'My Mission'. Within this list we search for the task called, again, 'My Mission'. We use this task to sync your local mission statement with.

Starting from current version of the app, when you enter the mission page, you'll see an additional button in the form of two half-round arrows:

Pressing on this button will lead you to the sync page.

The sync page consists of 2 horizontally scrolling pages (tabs), one for the statement stored locally, the other for the statement stored in the Google task mentioned above.






















You can load both separately. You can Edit both in place and save them separately - one locally, the other to Google task. As we think, this is a very simple but at same time very powerful.

First, you have two places where you can have the statements. You can compare one to another, use different text in similar meaning. You can edit them separately and save them to different places, or you can completely replace one with the other.

But, the most important thing about all this is that You are in control of what needs to be saved and where. The app doesn't decide for you which version is actual and which should be saved (some other apps did that automagically in the background, often leaving me without valuable information).

Upd.: we are getting error reports, thank you, they'll definitely help to fix the issues.

Upd. 2: Uploaded the fix for the FC when trying to save local Mission statement to google when there's no list 'My Mission' on google. Thanks for the reports!

Habits update

Have just released new, 0.7.11.1 version of the Habits app. Contains the sync capability with Google Tasks - for 'Notes' and 'My Mission' section. Since Google tasks have a structure a bit different from that of ours, we have to invent some kind of mapping. In case of 'Notes' and 'My Mission' it's relatively easy, so we decided to start with them. The mapping for Roles > Goals > Actions is not invented - any suggestions are highly welcome.

Many thanks to those who give the feedback for the current and future features - your help is invaluable!

We'll describe the sync functionality a bit later in more details.

Early access

Will be uploading new version soon, if everything goes fine, with the, I'd say, prototyping functionality of syncing 'Notes' part of the app with the Google tasks. But, before doing so, we want to try a so-called early-access distribution - will give away from 5 to 10 versions to those who want to try the functionality first. It is still in the process of implementation and not everything works smoothly, but works already. So, if you want to try it out, write us at ksasdk@gmail.com.

No special requirements, just to be in the first 5th to 10th. Ok if you are first to fourth :). If you want, you can share your feedback with us, and even influence how the final functionality will look like.

Habits update.

Just have uploaded new version of the app - 0.7.10.9. We did it just seconds ago, so it hasn't even appeared on the Play Store, but we immediately want to write what's new.

First of all, we've fixed a bug that we would not notice if not reports from you - in the previous version we've introduced the password timeout setting. It controls how many minutes to wait before rechecking password when you re-enter the app, provided the system hasn't killed the app completely and cleared the resources. This shouldn't be the case when you return to the app within the few minutes after closing it. So, when you entered a high number into this field, the app crashed. And couldn't be restarted withouth re-install. We've got a report about this bug, and fixed it. Thanks a lot for taking time to send it to us!

We've also fixed the 'Move to action' functionality. It was not really visible, but inside it wasn't working quite correctly. We've also optmized the algorithm.

In the previous versions of the app, when changing the goal of an action (the set goal functionality), the app didn't let you move the action which was either a child of another action or contained sub-actions itself. This was rather annoying and the app missed this what seems to be natural operation. Now everything is ok with it :).

The logic for moving an action to another goal is simple and intuitive:

• if the action is simple, just move it (i.e., set new goal)
• if the action is a child of another action, you can change its goal, but it will be a top-level action - its parent will be cleared
• if the action is a parent of other actions, you can change its goal, too, but then all the sub-actions will have their goal changed, too.

Another improvement - 'Goal unset' filter on the First Things First and Actions pages. You can now filter actions which don't have any goal set.

Hope you'll like the new features.

Again, thanks a lot for your feedback - here, in the reviews or as part of FC reports :). We do really appreciate it!

Habits hard-delete

We've added a very useful, but same time very dangerous feature - hard-delete. It is related to complex actions - projects and checklists.

Before recent update when you tried to delete an action that had un-done sub-actions, you'd get a popup saying you can't do so and suggestng you should do or delete all sub-items. This is a needed precaution so you don't accidentally miss some sub-items. And often you actually wanted to delete them all without going through all of them, with just 1 click, saving time and effort. Well, now you can.

When deleting an action with not done sub-actions, you'll get a popup with 2 buttons, one of which will be called "Hard-delete". Pressing this button will delete this action and all it's sub-items.

We suggest you try this feature first on some test actions, so you see what consequences it might have. And don't forget to make a backup!

Habits Notes

If you still didn't know, then now you will :) We have added the "Notes" function to the habits app. You can find it under My Mission > Note icon at the bottom write.

The icon looks like this:

This is a simple notepad that you can use to store your notes, thoughts, ideas, and memories. At least that's what I already use it for :).

It's quite simple, you can add a note, which is a pair of title + body. You can skip the body. On the My Mission page you will see trimmed title of the last note you've added. It is actually clickable and will lead you to that last note you've written. This is to be able to quickly re-write it, if you want. Or, to recall what were you thinking last. Or, for some other reason, which we leave you to imagine :).

To see the notes page, click on the icon above on the My Mission page. This will lead to the Notes page. Here you will see the list of your notes, sorted by the time you last modified them, and you can click on the note you want to read (edit) it. To delete the note, long-click on a note on this list

And many thanks to John for pushing us to add this function! :) We'd put it off again, if not him.

How do I use it. Recurrence. Part II.

We've just rolled out a new update with some enhancements to the recurrence functionality and some fixes and improvements. As usual, please, backup before updating.

Before I go on with describing the update I want to thank those who sent error reports, wrote us emails on few bugs we'd introduced before. They would have gone un-noticed if not you - thanks a lot! And, big thank you to those who send and write feedback here - for your suggestions on how to improve the app and new cool features to add.


As the result of such feedback, we've added an "All" button to the My Influence page. Now initially all your concerns are shown when this button is selected. By clicking on the Concern or Influence button you can see only concerns or influences. This filtering was suggested by Lennart. Thanks, Lennart :)


Here, I must (I just must, to free up my mind :-D) make a small note, that recurring actions bring tons of additional complexity into the app. That complexity not only comes in the form of technical implementation, but also in the app logic. For example, what do we have to do when we have a goal with a recurring action and we mark this goal as reached, then use "delete reached goals" functionality? Should we delete the action even if it's not marked as done today? Such questions arose during the whole process of implementing, and we're actually not sure everything is smooth in the logic, but we wanted to share the update so much, that we did it today, crossing our fingers :).


Now let me describe the functions. After adding initial recurrences, we (me, particularly) started using it actively. And almost immediately found out that we had missed important type of recurring actions - those to divide the actions into ones I do on weekdays and weekends. We've started working on them and were almost ready to deploy them just few days after first recurrences that we found out some nuances in using such actions. Nuances made up the next part of development and today we deployed following new functionality.

The new recurrence types are:

Every weekday recurring action is an action which is only actual for every weekday out there. That is, for Monday-Friday.

Every weekend day recurring action is active for Saturday and Sunday, only.

Once until done - this is my favourite recurrence. I call it Today action. It is also known as Sliding action. The idea is, as always, quite simple - this type of action is shown for today. Until you check it as done. So it kinda slides from Monday to Tuesday, from Tuesday to Wendsday, etc. Until you check it as done. I think, pretty cool :).

One more problem with recurrence we tried to solve - do the actions have to repeat forever? Is there a way to say it not to continue? One way was to delete the action, but then you wouldn't see them on screen. So, we've added a "Stop" button on the recurrence setup page. If you stop recurrence, it won't repeat anymore, starting from tomorrow. Why not from today? We don't know, just decided to try. If you find it more convenient to stop showing it from today, tell us (and don't forget to tell why you think so, to be more convinsing :)

That seems like all, if I remember anything, will add to this post. And your feedback is warmly welcomed!

How do I use it. Recurrence.

Note: This is a new functionality. It is still in beta (beta functionality in a beta app - this should show how unstable it is ), so there might be errors or discrepancies - please, backup before updating. We are also very grateful if you write us about errors, misunderstandings, etc. Also, we're not 100% sure that the logic we're implementing is what is expected, so any suggestions are welcome, too.

The problem is that actions in our application are a bit different from usual todos in other apps - they are tied to goals and roles and they are assigned to days. Because week day logic has been in the application from the beginning, we had to align new recurrence functionality with the old weekday functionality. We are in the process of creating general logic for the recurrence and weekday assignment now, part of the work is presented in the latest update.

Just to give you a glance on the problem being solved, let's say we have an action assigned to the weekday "Wednesday". Now, you go and set recurrence of this action to "Once a day". So, the action must be shown everyday on the WeekPlan and at the same time it has a weekday set. We can go on with the decision to count recurrence of a higher priority and ignore weekday if recurrence is set to "everyday". But, what if you set recurrence to "Once a month" and select to do it every month on 22nd day. The question again - under which day should we show it now on the weekday?

The logic we're trying to follow for recurrences is as follows:

1. No recurrence, no weekday set - Action is shown in the Unset section of the WeekPlan.

2. Recurrence exists and set to Once. No weekday - same as above, unset section.

3. Recurrence exists and set to Once. Weekday is set -  action is shown once on the WeekPlan.

4. Recurrence is Once a day - action is shown for every day in the WeekPlan.

5. Recurrence is Once a week - action is shown for the week day chosen. e.g., Monday

6. Recurrence is Once a Month - action is shown on the day selected. E.g., 20th of each month.

7. When you do ( = set as done) recurring action for a concrete day, only that day's recurrence is counted as done. E.g., every day action done yesterday is shown as crossed, not done today - shown as usual.

8. Deleting a recurring action deletes all the instances, with the recurrence history. - This might be subject to change, we (meaning we and you :) ) have to think about it.

Below are some screenshots of the Action page and Recurrence setting page. It will definitely change in the next updates, since what we have there now is not how we wanted it to be, it's rather just a working prototype to be able to use and test new functions.

1. You can set recurrence by openning the dedicated page by clicking on the round arrows icon:

2. Initial view of the page. Choose recurrence by clicking on the text-button "Once":

3. Currently 3 types of recurrencies are supported:
Once - one-time action (default, no recurrence);
Once a day - every day action;
Once a week - every week action, you have to choose which weekday to repeat action on;
Once a month - have to choose day of month.

4. After recurrence is set, icon changes from grey to black:

And, as always, there are some nuances:

1. Choosing monthday is very simple and doesn't take into account amount of days in a month - will be improved.

2. Interesting side-effect of using week-plan: if it is a sunday and you look at the tomorrow's action count on the main page - it will show count for tomorrow, i.e., next monday. BUT, if you open the weekplan, you'll see actions of the previous monday there :). It looks like a bug, but it actually is not really - it is a real side-effect of using such WeekPlan system. If (or when) we move to more calendar-style WeekPlan showing, this should get fixed.

3. some other (they just MUST be there :-D) which we either don't remember (after sleepless nights implementing the recurrence :) or have not come around yet.

Latest updates

This is an update post - will describe in a bit more words recent updates added with the latest app version.

1. move to action: now you can move your action to other actions or out of any action, if has been a sub-item already. This moving is possible within one goal only, BUT, using 2 functions at the same time - move to action  and set goal, you can actually move an action to any goal: first, use move to action to clear actions parent; then use set goal to move it to other goal.
2. today/tomorrow widget: one of the often used steps in going to an action is thgrough Today notification on the main page. This notification shows how many actions have you set to be done today, clicking on it will lead you to the Week Plan page, to the corresponding day. So, we got rid of some extra steps in this procedure by adding Today/Tomorrow widget on your phone's home screen. It looks unmistakably similar to that notification bar on the home screen and now you can jump straight to your today's (or, tomorrow's) actions.
3. vibration made optional: on the main screen do the following: Menu > Settings > Vibrate on/off. This has been asked for by several users, so here it is.
4. details conversion: this is great feature to use. It came out of practise and the feeling that the app is missing important functionality. Before this update, when we added an action, while it's still a Single action, in it's description we often used to write the steps to be done to complete it. You often write those steps quickly when creating the action because you have them in your mind, you're concentrated on that action and see clearly what you have to do. It is pretty much like brainstorming. Later on we wanted these steps to come to life as real sub-actions of this action. To have that we had to either copy-n-paste text from description to new actions or to remember each step and type it later. Both ways were very inconvenient. Now you can have those steps be auto-magically converted to sub-actions. You still should write your steps as sentences of the description to an action when just creating it. Then convert those sentences to concrete sub-actions by choosing corresponding menu:
1. write the steps as before in description, separate them either by "." or by ";"
2. convert the action to project or checklist
3. choose Menu > Details to Actions.
5. expand button on FTF: on the First Things First page you can now hide everything else except the squares themselves. This will give you some more space. Choosing the action is still same + you can now have long-click functionality, that was previously avaiable only on Actions page to delete, move, view, and set action as current action-related functionalities.
6. move "done items down" menu & button: this item came out of practise, too. When using checklists or projects, when you check or finish some of the sub-items, they occupy the necessary screen space, hiding the un-done items. To see them you have to scroll. To organise your lists, you had to drag-n-drop done items. Now, using this button, which appears in the items box when parent action is a project or a checklist, when you click on it all the done items are moved down the list and you have your actual actions on the top.
7. actions menu long-click now on First Things page: now same menu as on Actions page.

As you can see, latest update introduced some good features. Hope you'll like using them in action.