Checkvist story

A forgotten milestone: 10000 lists

As our friend mentions, Checkvist is already over 10 000 lists, which can be considered a humble milestone. While thanking him, I was wondering why I do not really find numbers that important. What are we developing for? What is important, then?

• It’s not money - the tool is free and we do not aim to get ourselves a Ferrari by adding a paid plan, or selling it to a big company.
• It’s not market dominance - we’re pretty aware of other tools, their smart and rich features.
• It’s the joy. The joy of making a tool that would prove useful not only to ourselves but to some number of people who’d love it and use it. The joy of communicating with those people, discussing future plans and features, creating the tool together.

This is it, I think. We see a long road ahead - adding search and tags, and dates (and other attributes), creating new web app for iPhone, improving UI look and feel, polishing existing keyboard support, etc, etc. With your help and participation it’ll be the biggest fun a software developer can get.

10000 lists is great, but let’s continue. For the joy of it :)

Read-only publishing and HTML support

Disclaimer: this is not a fools day issue. This is a normal, ordinary update of the server. No surprises. Here’s what kept us busy:

• Read-only publishing of your checklists/outlines (suggestion)

To share your outlines with anyone on the web, press “Publish” button in the Share dialog, then copy the URL and send it to your boss, friends or put it on your blog. The readers cannot make changes to it, but are able to copy or export your outline (useful if you want to share something other people can utilize in their work).

If you or your co-workers make changes to that outline, they’ll be immediately visible to the public. To make the outline private again, simply click Un-publish in the same dialog panel.

• Support HTML in tasks and comments (thanks joebadmo for suggestion)
• Fix problem for multi-line task rendering in preliminary mobile version of Checkvist + add support for HTML as well (thanks Serge Beauregard for this report and for many others)
• IE8 support, including option to add numbering to outline (see view options in toolbar)
• Allow to send a copy of Checkvist invitation to self when inviting people
• More fixes and improvements. Among them a fix for the bug when creating a checklist in Safari 3.1.2 or AJAX update of sharing information.

Enjoy!

OPML import and a handful of fixes

The only new feature in this update is OPML import. We thought it would be rather important to support two-way integration with, let’s say your favorite desktop outliner and Checkvist. Please bear in mind that this file format is not strict, and sometimes importing/exporting OPML needs some manual fine-tuning.

With OPML import you can:

1. Backup your checklist offline and import it back if needed. Statuses, notes, coloring - all this stuff can be exported and than imported, so the list presentation will stay intact.
2. Provide some interoperability with other outliner tools. For example, Checkvist understands some non-standard attributes from OmniOutliner.

Besides, many Checkvist reviews claimed that it supports OPML import. We had to turn these claims into the truth.

We’ve also made several minor fixes, which are worth mentioning:

• Fixed wrong outline numbering after closing/opening/editing a task in Safari/Chrome
• Fixed recently damaged keyboard support in Opera (version 9.5 and newer should work flawlessly now)
• Delete a task when the user has deleted its text (in the editing mode) and pressed Enter (or Save)
• Fixed a curious interaction bug: pressing TAB could totally conceal a task if there was a hidden completed node above it
• Support Shift+1, Shift+2, Shift+3 for setting background color (in addition to 1,2,3 for foreground color)
• Option to export color. For plain text export this option is not supported, for Confluence Wiki background color is exported as foreground color, for OPML we add ‘color’ and ‘bgColor’ attributes to an outline element
• Fixed a nasty bug introduced by the previous update when task status change was incorrectly reported in notification e-mails
• Added the explicit “Rename” command to the options for checklist modifications (which are available on title hovering)
• Show a message on clicking the toolbar “add notes” link when no task is selected
• In the View options popup the whole line is clickable, not only its text
• Fixed a bug in URL parsing - now several URLs are recognized within task/note text
• After pasting (or duplicating) a task with Ctrl+V/Ctrl-D we set selection to the duplicate and scroll to it.

And we’d like to say huge thanks to all those people who send us emails with feature requests and bug reports, who participate in the user forum, tweet @checkvist_news, and leave comments on this blog. Your help and feedback help us greatly. Thank you!

Server update: improvements and fixes

It’s hard to concentrate when your product begs for a dozen of big features and dozillion of small ones. Of course we want Checkvist to be able to do all that’s mentioned on http://checkvist.uservoice.com. But we want to do it as perfectly as possible, hence the importance of “small things’ updates”.

This update features:

• Number your list items: select the “Show as a numbered list” option in the View options pop-up to create an ordered list. Very convenient for those who take a large outline of tasks to the meeting: it’s easier to reference a task or a group of tasks by number. (Sorry, Internet Explorer users. Let’s wait for the 8th incarnation of this browser. Or - while we are waiting - please try FireFox or Chrome?)
• Change status of a parent task: now changing status of a parent task will also work (via updating status of its children). Undo it (Ctrl-Z or uu or click the Undo link) if you did it mistakenly. Please, note that if the group is collapsed, the first key press will open it and the second one will change status. So to complete a collapsed group of tasks, you must press Spacebar twice.  
• Add new task above the selected one: press Alt+Enter instead of Enter and a new task will appear above the selection.
• Paste task below the current selection It looks like this behaviour is more natural and more predictable.
• View Options popup is visible even when you’ve scrolled down the list (type oo and it will appear in the top right corner of the screen).

Fixes include:

• When task is closed and “Hide completed” mode is enabled, the selection is moved to the next task in the list. Previously, the selection was lost in this situation.
• When “Tab” is used to move the task one level right under a parent, we expand the parent group. Previously, the moved task disappeared from view because it went to the collapsed group.
• Undo link will disappear after a minute.

And speaking about more significant stuff … yes, we’re working on it :-) . Stay tuned!

Adding colors to tasks

Weekends are for doing something nice. For fun and bright colors. So we picked a couple of features that would add color to Checkvist and make it more fun to use.

• Mark tasks with color - a feature we longed for ourselves. Open the Colour dialog (6 letter spelling for three colors) from the toolbar to select one of the coloring options. Or simply type 1 to mark task with red, 2 - with blue, 3 - with green, 0 - yes, to get back the defaults. Update: Shift+1, Shift+2, Shift+3 will change the background color (Thanks Noel for suggestion!) 
  
• Icons for FluidApp - finally, you’d say. Yes. Took some time first to get the icons (thanks, Fruttacotta, a wonderful graphic designer, but alas with no web-site to link to!), and second to overcome a couple of nasty Fluid misbehaviors. 
• Fresh updates bar - a feature you didn’t ask us for, but we hope you’ll like it nevertheless. To ensure you don’t miss any new goodies, we added a light unobtrusive bar at the bottom of the page. Read it, close it, and it won’t appear until we update the server with something new and useful. 

Want more? Less? Don’t forget to tell us what you need or (god forbid) the bugs you’ve encountered at our user forum. 

Print: the first icon on the toolbar

Checkvist was thought, designed, and created with support for printing. Print.css has been there since version zero. And still we hear questions: but how do you print it? Will it print? And even - I’d use your tool if it could print my checklists out. 

Ok. Lessons learned. Nobody wants to explore an application, they want to use it. “Don’t make me think” is not just a nice title of a bestselling book, it’s a law.

So we thought and added a small print icon to the otherwise icon-free toolbar. Click it - and see your checklist stripped of all extra UI elements, just your list of tasks, ready to print. 

And if you want to print tasks with notes - there’s a link in the top right corner of the preview screen that shows or hides all notes in your checklist.

Other small enhancements that went into the same update include:

• Home, Page Up, and Page Down keyboard shortcuts (doing just what you think they do but with task selection)
• + and - on numeric keypad to expand or collapse a branch of tasks
• Notifications about notes are not sent automatically anymore (you must press “Notify about changes” button to let your peers know what you’ve done, with one single email).

Enjoy!

Mobile UI

Hello everyone,

The holidays are gone, and we’re glad to offer one of the most requested features for Checkvist - a mobile interface. It has beta quality, i.e. we are not aware of any serious bugs. Mobile UI was tested on iPhone, Opera Mini, and IE mobile.

The current basic functionality includes:

• Create/rename checklist
• Create/delete tasks (deletion with undo)
• Edit tasks and change task status
• Add subtasks
• View task notes and details (last update information) 

We plan to add more features in the future, probably some iPhone nicities or even offline support (as a premium feature).

But we need your feedback on how does current version work for you, do you have any problems with it, and which functionality you really miss.

Please check it out: http://checkvist.com/m/ and write about your impressions to kirsa@checkvist.com .

Please use http://checkvist.uservoice.com to request improvements in mobile UI.

Thanks! 

Small improvements: Hide completed tasks

Today’s update features a small but noticeable improvement we’ve made (while working on Checkvist mobile UI): the “Hide completed tasks” option. 

Find it under “View options”, in the toolbar:

As always, we did our best to support our own habits keyboard navigation:

• Press oo to open the View options pop-up (particularly useful when you’re working somewhere at the “bottom” of a very long list)
• Use arrow keys to navigate up and down the list
• Select checkboxes by pressing Spacebar or Enter

Besides, you can toggle completed tasks visibility with the hc shortcut (aka hide completed), and viewing details - by holding the Ctrl key.

Enjoy! 

Duplicating vs. Templates

Recently we have received a couple of questions regarding possibility to use templates in Checkvist.

And though the tool doesn’t have a feature explicitly named “templates”, we ourselves use a similar thing quite often.

In most cases the answer to the problem is duplicating a checklist and giving it another name, right? Today we use “Release test, Dec 2008”, in a month we’ll create a copy and call it “Release test, Jan 2009”: 

1. We will open the initial checklist, our “template”.
2. Open the Copy dialog by clicking the corresponding toolbar link



3. Check the options - we want to create a new checklist (default option in the Target checklist dropdown), we’ll keep the notes and clear task status, so all the new checklist items will be open.

Press Copy - and all you’ll have to do is to give your new checklist a name and share it with your co-workers.

Have you tried using the Copy feature to emulate templates? Encountered any other problems? Do you need more sophisticated templates? And if yes - for what kind of tasks?

Checkvist reviewed by Lifehacker

A very nice review on Lifehacker brought Checkvist a wave of new users. Positive feedback by email and tweets, new feature suggestions in our uservoice forum, some questions we’ve never thought of… 

Now the main challenge is to prepare Checkvist for its 1.0 release keeping it “darn simple” with all those new features waiting for implementation!