Egretlist 1.6.1 is now available and supports TextExpander.  TextExpander is an iOS (iTunes Link) and Mac application that allows you to define mappings between short aliases and longer text.  You may define, for example:

“htycu” => “Hello, and thank you for contacting us,”

In a to-do app context, you can see things that you commonly do, and create mappings for them.  For example:

bbossmeet -> “Meet with the boss”

ssoccer -> “Soccer practice”

ttier1val -> “Execute tier 1 validations”

ccoffee -> “I am out of coffee! Buy!”

Also, you can create partial strings for things that may vary:

ppick: Pick up food at

mmeet: Meet with 

ttest: Complete test 

In apps that support Text Expander, typing these aliases “expands” them to the longer string.  In Egretlist, expansions work in the New and Edit To-do text fields and in the Attached Note field:

 

TextExpander is really good - and its usefulness grows the more you use it and identify the types of text that you repeat a lot.  The snippets that you define in it can also be used in other apps that support it, such as the official Twitter client.

Note: In iOS4, an app restart is needed for it to receive new mappings defined in TextExpander.  This will be fixed in the next update.

Additional Features

Another feature included in the update is better feedback to where to-dos are actually added or appended.  

Here is a rough idea of how it looks:

1. You are in “Collectibles” notebook, and want to add to “Food”, so you press the “Add in Notebook” button to choose the “Food” notebook…

 

2. You type your to-dos, press Save & Close, and a new message will tell you that you are changing to the “Food” notebook.  If you choose to append to a note within the Notebook, it will scroll to it and animate.

 

It is a small but satisfying and informative feedback.

Stay tuned for additional updates!

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We submitted 1.6.1 which is a bug fix update. It includes:

1. Bug fixes: crashes that occurred when adding to-do items and deleting them.

2. Fixed appending to lists - it should consistently work now.

3. Small UI tweaks to help make the behavior easier to understand.  They are details (not a big change on how things are done) but they help.

Also, there is one new feature (Probably not one in the most-waited-for list, but a good one anyway).

I looked at the long list of things to do in Egretlist, and found that it would be nice to share three of them (and maybe get feedback):

1. Always show titles

Egretlist never shows titles for single-item lists because it was designed to help you enter to-dos without regard to what note it is in. The idea is that you press (+), type your to-do, press save, and you are done - not worrying on what Evernote Note it is in.

Some people find this behavior confusing, so we are experimenting with the idea of always showing titles (working hard so that they don’t clutter lists).

2. A way to keep a list around even when it has no tasks left in it.

Egretlist deletes lists locally (not in Evernote) as soon as they have no items left (they are all deleted).  This makes sense in Egretlist because it will only sync notes with to-do items in Evernote, so lists with no to-do items are no longer valid by this rule.

The idea is to have a mechanism to keep the list around even when it has no items left, so that you can keep using a list in the future.

3. A change in nomenclature:

A confusing UI aspect is the term “List”.  Right now Egretlist defines a List as “an Evernote note that has to-do items”.  This is confusing when people also consider their Notebooks, Saved Searches and Categories as their “Lists”, which in turn contain what Egretlist calls “Lists”.  

To fix this, we will change the term “List” to “To-Do Note”.  We originally called it this way, and along the way, we unfortunately changed it.  A “To-Do Note” is an Evernote Note that has 1 or more to-do checkboxes.  By doing this, a category becomes a “List of To-Do Notes”, which is more intuitive and fits better with the Evernote Integration.   

If you have any comments please let us know.  We are working hard to keep improving the app, and your feedback is greatly appreciated.

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The new 1.6 update is now available in the App Store (iTunes Link).  We hope that you enjoy it!

Here is what’s new:

Pull-down Calendars

Pull down any list view from a notebook, category or saved search like this:

A calendar appears: 

Press on each day to view the to-dos for that day.  They will be ordered by time, and all-day to-dos will be on top, like the system iPhone calendar:  

This allows you, for example, to create a Saved Search for all your to-dos, then view a Calendar for all your to-dos, regardless of notebook.  You may also create a project, and view the calendar for that particular project.

Send your to-dos to the iOS Calendar app

One our most requested features is alerts.  When designing this, we thought: Egretlist is designed to not only let you track your to-dos in your phone, but also in your computer by syncing with Evernote.  So, if we were to implement due dates and alarms in Egretlist, since we sync your to-dos to your computer it makes sense to send your due dates / alarms to your computer too. But Evernote does not currently have a calendar, so what do we do?

To solve this, we send your to-dos with start date and end date to your iPhone’s calendar, which in turn can sync with the calendar in your computer (or to a Google calendar through Exchange).  Also, you can define an alert for your to-do, which will also sync to your computer, so you also can be alerted by your computer.  Sending to-dos to the iOS Calendar depends on new APIs, so it is only available on iOS4.

To set a date, you use the new Date Stick-it, when creating or editing to-dos:

You will be presented with scheduling options, including any system calendar that you want the dates to go.  You can also choose a default system calendar so that you don’t have to select it all the time.  The alert is also set here:

If you sync your phone’s calendar with your computer or Google calendar, you will see the Egretlist-generated events (with their alarms) there:

Retina Display support

The artwork has been reworked for the Retina Display.  Some of the new artwork was also used in the low resolution version.

Multitasking: Fast App Switching and Backgrounding

On iOS4, Egretlist suspends in the background instead of shutting down when you press Home.  If you are currently syncing, it will try to complete the sync (it will notify you if the OS stopped the sync due to a higher priority process or low memory).

Tighter Evernote integration

Sometimes, Evernote contains additional information that is relevant to the to-do at hand.  We added ways to access this information by launching Evernote from Egretlist in various ways:

1. In any list view, you can swipe on a list title and view its corresponding note in Evernote.

2. In list details, we added a new Evernote button that shows the following options:

- Open the item’s note in Evernote (Same as swiping in list views):

- Search for notes that match all the item’s tags

- Search for notes that match any of the item’s tags

- Search for notes that match the item’s notebook

- Search for notes that match the item’s text

Here is how it looks like:

All these options launch Evernote, showing you the resulting notes.  For example, this is a search for “The Item’s Text”:

Type new to-do lists in landscape mode

Now you can flip the phone, press (+), and the to-do list editor will appear in landscape mode.  Press any of the “Stick-it” buttons, and the ones supported will also appear in landscape mode.    You will notice that it doesn’t have the notebook / tag selection button - you can access it by going to portrait again, by turning the phone.

There is also a new feature called Auto-landscape, which you can turn on in Settings.  If you activate it, the landscape editor appears when turning the phone, without having to press the (+) button.  It makes accessing the to-do list editor faster and feels natural - but we disabled it by default because it is not common behavior.

Check All / Uncheck-All Items

Double-tap a list title to check-all / uncheck-all items in the list. Here is what appears after double-tapping the “Weekend trip preparation checklist” title:

Zoom-in in the Image Viewer

Now you can zoom in by using pinch when viewing a to-do item’s images in the Image Viewer.

Saved Search Improvements

We did many under-the-hood improvements to Saved Search performance, by generating better queries, caching, etc.  We worked with Saved Search responsiveness too, and better activity feedback.  We also record Saved Search performance to update their badge numbers with appropriate priorities in the future.  The overall result is that you can have more Saved Searches and not worry so much about Egretlist performance degrading.

Egretlist also supports new Saved Searches.  They are:

1. Created Date - related saved searches (created today, created since yesterday, etc)

2. Updated Date - related saved searches (updated since 3 days ago, updated today, etc)

3. Resource queries - images, audio, attachment filters.

Limited Saved Searches: Some Saved Searches are slow by nature or take too much memory to execute.  These include AND and OR of many tags using wildcards, and AND queries of many arguments. When Egretlist detects these slow queries, it truncates the number of arguments to a maximum allowed.

Bug Fixes

We fixed quite a few.  One of them was that created dates weren’t being updated when you changed them in Evernote, but not anymore - so now you can re-order your notes in Evernote by creation date and they will update their ordering in Egretlist.

We also fixed crashes caused by Saved Searches.  These were the most serious ones because they caused crashes at random moments.

Japanese and Spanish Localizations

Spanish is our native tongue, so this translation was only a matter of time.  I translated it, so if you see any “disparates” please let me know :). The Japanese translation was made possible thanks to the hard work of our Japanese beta testers @synkuro, @goryugo, @aki19 and @kuroobisanP.

New notebooks icons

We added a few notebook icons, so that you have more customization options.  Check them out!

Tip: Monsters like to be touched.

More Frequent updates now

Granted, this update took quite a bit of time.  Our bug fixes / Saved Search improvements were ready much earlier  than the iOS4 features.  However, in early June, a new requirement that all updates must be for iOS4 made us decide to merge the iOS4 update with the bug fixes update, which meant that the bug fixes wouldn’t be released until the iOS4 features were finished. Looking back it wasn’t really necessary - a release can be compiled/tested for iOS4 without supporting iOS4 features, but at the moment we interpreted it a different way.

Now that this update is in place, I am confident that we will be able to update more frequently.  We plan to keep supporting Egretlist indefinitely, and there is a lot of work left to do.

-Juan

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Yesterday we submitted 1.6 to Apple - and hopefully it will make your experience with Egretlist more enjoyable.  Since a great deal of the difficult code has been done, I think that we will be able to update more frequently.

While we wait, let me share a tip: how to quickly create a text to-do list - by talking to your iPhone.

Dragon Dictation (iTunes Link) is an iPhone app that transforms your spoken voice to text.  I recently uncovered a trick in it: if you say “new line”, it will insert a new line in your paragraph.  This turns out to be excellent for Egretlist! You can say:

“tomatoes” “new line” “olive oil” “new line” “mozzarella cheese” “new line” “mushrooms” “new line” “peppers” “new line” “sausage” “new line”

Here is what you can get in Dragon Dictation (it generally does a good job, unless you give it very complicated words):

You can copy it…

In Egretlist, press the New (+) button (or Append in a list title) to start creating to-do items, then press the Paste button:

Select “Paste each line as an Item”.  Then save the list with Save & Close…

New To-Do list, waiting to be done!

Of course, you can always select the “Add as separate Items” option  to create to-do items in individual Evernote notes that can be tagged, moved around notebooks, etc:

A word of caution: The Dragon Dictation’s EULA states that it sends your contact names to their servers for name recognition purposes.  If this bothers you, don’t follow this tip.

Also, since your voice needs to be sent to Dragon’s servers, this tip only works with a network connection.

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We have been busy!  Here are a few things that we have been working on:

1. Due dates and due date - related features: Figuring out how to best do this given the nature of the app has been a challenge but we are finally happy with the solution that  we came up with.

2. Lots of UI tweaks and bug fixes based on your feedback.

3. Improved Saved Searches: I had to redo much of the SavedSearch generation / execution code to improve performance and compatibility with more Saved Search types.

4. App internationalization with Japanese and Spanish translations: We have actually worked on this a while ago, thanks to the generosity of our Japanese testers.

5. iPad: No word on when this will be out, but we began working on this after releasing the 1.5 version.  We did temporarily halt working on it in order to focus on… 

6. …a biggie: Preparing Egretlist for iOS 4.0.  This has been our most important focus lately, and it has required quite a bit of testing and work.  We are really happy about how it is turning out.  Also, our tests running the new build in devices with 3.1.2 installed have been successful so far (while disabling 4.0 - only features) so hopefully we will be able to support it too in the end.

I probably (intentionally?) forgot to mention a few things but that is good for the surprise factor :-).  Now we keep working so that we can give you a nice, robust update.

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A web clipping may contain many images and links, some of them relevant to a to-do item.  Others may just be decorations or related to other things.

Say you want to buy a journal.  You add a checkbox besides it so that it appears in Egretlist:

You notice that there is a lot of content below the journal and you know that this content is not related to the journal you want.  How do you prevent it from being added to Egretlist too?

You use a Line Break:

Now, all the content below the line break is ignored for the previous to-do item.  If you want, you can keep adding other to-do items below the line break and they will be sent to Egretlist just fine.

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This update fixes:

1. A serious bug that prevented images, audio and documents from being downloaded. This happened when you entered a category.
2. An issue refreshing category lists when you added tags to them.

Stay tuned for 1.6, which resolved many of the issues you are having with Saved Searches, and supports new ones.

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You can follow us here for announcements, tutorials and tips related to Egretlist.  We hope that we can help you exploit all the benefits of using Egretlist with Evernote, including that they are fun to use together.

You may be new to Evernote and Egretlist, so here is a quick overview of them both, and how they work together:

What is Evernote?

Evernote is a note taking application that works on your computer, mobile devices and the web.  It lets you write and capture many things, for example:

• Write rich-text notes from the desktop and browser
• Add website clippings, which are sections of a website that interest you.
• Take pics with your mobile phone and save them as a note
• Record audio notes
• Scan documents as notes and store them in notes

For all this content, Evernote lets you add checkboxes besides them to indicate that it is related to something that you need to do.  Here is an example:

What is Egretlist?

Egretlist is a to-do app with a very particular trait: It works with Evernote by using Evernote notes with checkboxes to generate to-do lists for you.

You might think: “Wait, this is crazy!  Why would I want to use notes as to-do lists?”

Well, you have probably done it before, but you don’t remember:

1. You may have printed out a recipe on the Internet, then went to the grocery store to buy all the items in the “Ingredients” section, checking them off as you go.
2. You may have taken class notes that included several books to read.  The professor asked you to read one of them, so you wrote READ THIS with an asterisk besides the book title.
3. You may have wanted  to buy several computer peripherals, so you stored their store URLs in a text file to check them out later.

We think that this is the best way to make your to-do lists: embedding them in the actual content that relates to what you need to do.  The beauty of this approach is that you seldom need to type, you just collect what you need to do from several sources, copy/paste them into one or several notes, and put checkboxes into each item. In the case of things clipped from the Internet, it is even simpler: you just clip the web-page using Evernote and add checkboxes where needed.  When you synchronize them to Egretlist, the checkboxes appear as a tidy list with all their content easily accessible.

Now you can have your notes and to-do lists in a central place

And you can do so any way you want, with a very flexible system:

Evernote lets you organize your notes in notebooks and tags. Notebooks are like folders for your notes, while tags help you search for notes later.  Many people organize their notes in different ways, for example:

•  Tag notes to identify what kind of activity the note represents (fun, work, research, vacation)
•  Tag notes to identify at what situation the note is relevant (@home, @car, @bored)
•  Use a notebook for each project that you are working on, another for archiving, another for inspiration.

Since Egretlist lists are Evernote notes with checkboxes, these techniques apply.  Even better, since your notes and to-dos are in the same place, you don’t need to organize them using separate systems.  You can come up with your own creative ways to organize yourself, but we also suggest some guidelines that we know work really great, so you can use some of our ideas.  We will discuss them in a future post, so stay tuned.

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