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!

Long silence

Sorry for such a long silence in the blog, and especially in the app updates. Can't say we've been working on something important all this time. Rather, there was a big personal challenge for me during this 1.5 months, which seems to be over soon. So, hopefully, will get back to the app and fixes and updates.

Android 2.3.x and 3.x

We will probably stop supporting these versions of android soon. Although we wanted to keep them as long as the first web integration is available, currently it seems there's no much need. These android versions are quite old and their number is declining every day. Even 4th version seems to be old enough already, though most of our users still use 4-based devices.

This will let us use some simpler programming things in development without trying to make it backward compatible. Decision is not final yet, but I'd say 80%.

Merry Christmas And A Happy Coming New Year!

Latest update was the last in 2015, if no urgent bug appears - fixed restoring backup failing in some cases, goal page reworked a bit to try to ease typing, some other minor improvements.

We wish you all the best in the coming year!

Recent updates 16.11.2015

Released version is 0.17.10. There are two new features, if I remember it right :). First of them is the ability to copy action's details (notes) to a separate note in the whole app's Notes-Ideas section. Use the menu on the action page. The note will be created and it's title will be "From action action_name_here". A bar will pop up clicking on which you will be able to go straight to the note. This often comes handy if you keep notes related to some actions while working on them, and want to keep the notes once you finish the action (which I usually delete).

Another feature - when you filter by goal or set an action's goal, you can now create a new goal and use it. Just press the (+) round button in the goal list that opens. It will ask you to choose a role you want to add the goal to, then enter the goal text. This goal will then be either applied as the filter on the FTF/Actions pages (if you triggered the page by filter), or will be set as action's goal.


There are still bugs known to be fixed, will look at them next. Among them - setting filter on FTF/Actions to 'Today' ignores calendar dates, only abstract week days are used. For example, today November 16th, 2015, Monday. If you set the filter to 'Monday' it will ignore all the actions that have their action date set as 'Nov. 16th, 2015'. This is the result of the evolutionary development - as many of you know, calendar dates for actions have come not long ago. Before that we had only week days. The filter worked with those week days, but has not been updated to use the calendar dates as well. We are working on fixing it.

On vacation.

We are on a short vacation, so please forgive for some delays in replies to letters, questions and reviews.

Random productivity mood

New feature published yesterday. The idea is: if you set the option on in the settings, almost each time on start the app will randomly choose the productivity mood color.

It is still in experimental mode, may remove it if we get many complains. We had to publish it since there were complains about FC on FTF page for some users, we had to publish fix for them, and this feature was already implemented and went public together with the bug fix.

As said above, you can turn it on/off in the settings. And see if it's on or off in the mood selection area:

Update: This change lead to a funny bug on the weekplan page:

If you don't like this side effect, just switch the feature off in the settings.

On procrastination, again.

Procrastination is when you avoid doing something important that you have to. Your brain doesn't like new or hard work. It likes things pleasant, fun, easy to do. It likes things it did many times before that it knows well.

Technically, it just tries to save energy: new things tend to take more brain time, because the brain has to learn how to do them. That's why it tries to "trick" you into not doing that important thing. And instead of getting ready to your next exam or tomorrow's meeting at work, you go read some interesting article on a blog or watch again an episode of your beloved series, surf the facebook or instagram (or, another blog on how to fight procrastination :) ).

As a result, in the beginning you feel yourself better - because you do what you like, not what you have to - but that's just for a short time. After some time, your brain (the same brain that made you procrastinate, remember?) now "whispers" into you the feeling of guilt, makes you unhappy you didn't do what you have to, that you're lazy. Now you end up with a not finished task and with a movie (blog post) that doesn't make you happy.

That sounds bad, but here are the good news - there's a way to make yourself into doing that important (but "unpleasant") task. And the trick is - simply start doing it.

It turns out (some scientists found out, if you want to learn more, you can search for it) shortly after starting doing the work, you forget about that fear and reluctance and do what's needed much better. You get a working mood and have a better concentration on the work, too. You get into the process. After some time of doing your work, you forget that feeling of fear and discomfort and work normally. So, the only thing left is to just start doing it.

One of the ways that may help you get into that working mood is by dividing your work time into periods, interleaving them with breaks. The length of a period is rather personal, I try to change it time to time, some times using 21 minute work periods, some times 44. You work for 21 minutes, than have short break, than again.

This is what this page about:

The post seems a bit cumbersome and not complete, but you have to forgive me - I'm neither professional psychologist nor professional personal trainer. Procrastination is one of my main problems, probably, thus I started writing the app - first of all to help myself do better and do more. If you google on the topic, you can find a lot of information and tools. I learned something from a course on Coursera called "Learning how to learn": https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn. It is a great  help to anyone  who wants to improve his learning, working skills. And it is free and easy to follow, take it - won't regret.

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.

Main page scrolling and more

Main page scrolling enhanced: now all the items in action list are used to scroll the screen, before it was only the today/tomorrow counter section:

Week plan calendar view can now be scrolled by 3 months back and forth:

Weekly goal view shows up to 3 of its actions (Four, One, Seven are actions):

I like how it looks much better now, but we still want to continue improving it.

Enjoy!

One of the updates in the next release

 




But, not the only. In fact, there will be several very nice, almost not noticeable, changes that should make your app experience much more pleasant. Enjoy!)

P.S. Don't forget to rate us on the Play Store - it is very important for us and keeps us awake working on the app better than anything!

Weekplan page look and feel updated

Now it looks something like this:

Other changes are: use left menu from Google (the look has changed, too), improved note editing, other fixes and improvements.

What's new in recent update: weekly goals and other

Earlier today we have launched new update distribution. It is mainly about improvements to the week plan page and various fixes and improvements to other pages.


On the weekly goals page we've reused the layout used for actions - horizontally scrolling lists for each day. Also, the goals now take calendar day and filter into account.


The layout of the goal item also has changed, too - no more expanding panel, clicking on the item you go to the goal page straight. It is also not final change - we still are not happy about its look and functionality, so it is subject to possible change in the future.

An open question is - is it at all useful? The idea was to have an overview of what goals you need to reach during the week or at concrete day. One of the problems is - goals are shown based on actions for that day - if all the actions of a goal for that day are done, the goal is shown as done. But, the goal might as well contain actions for other days, which are not done. And when you'll go to that goal's page, it won't be shown as done.


There was a bug on the weekplan page - it FC-ed when you scheduled an action for the August 31th - we've fixed it.


Some other changes: home and some other pages' background changed to grey - seems like we had too much white on the screens. The form of some elements also has been tweaked a bit. What do you think?

(yes, I didn't do today's morning workout)

Our greatest achievement...

in breaking the app in one day is definitely today. We managed to break it 3 times, latest fix just has been published

:(