"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.