Checkvist story
Helping people easily create, share, and collaborate on task lists and outlines
List wide operations
Checkvist is so good for creating hierarchical lists, that very quickly you might find yourself staring at a large and unwieldy construction.
With focus you can filter out just one piece of it, but after un-focus you’ll get the same long list, completed and open tasks mixed.
There are several list wide operations, that can help you in this situation. We’ve just updated the server with a new one, but I think it’s better to remind of the rest as well.
Hide all completed tasks
When you need to concentrate on what’s left to do before a deadline, then it’s really useful to hide the ‘done’ part from the page.
How-to: check the ‘Hide completed’ option in the ‘View’ menu, or use the hc (hide completed) shortcut to toggle completed tasks’ visibility.
Affects only you, the rest of the team will see the list as they prefer.
Move completed tasks down
Not only completing the tasks, but also following the progress? Then it’s better not to hide what’s been done, but simply move it down.
Completed tasks will stay on their hierarchy level, so you know what part of list they belong to.
How-to: check the ‘Move completed down’ in the ‘View’ menu in the toolbar.
Affects only you, the rest of the team will see the list as they prefer.
Reset or clone?
If you use checklists, chances are you go through the same lists periodically. After completing one list, you need to re-create it for the next occasion. And here you have two main options: just re-open all tasks in the list, or keep the completed list for your records, and create a clone. If you don’t need any records and archive, simply type reset on the completed list. All tasks automagically change their ‘completed’ status to ‘open’.
If you want to keep the old list, click ‘Copy’ in the toolbar (there’re many options, like keeping tags and notes, using the same permissions, etc) and create a new clone of the old list.
The new option: wipe completed tasks
And now we came to the last and the newest option: ‘wipe’. When you have a really large list, keeping completed tasks hidden will anyway make the list heavier and slower. If you don’t need to see completed tasks after they have been done, type wipe to delete all of them at once.
The last two options affect all people working on the list, so when you ‘wipe’ or ‘reset’, you ‘wipe’ and ‘reset’ for all.
Some other fixes that found their way to the main server while we’re woking on the new mobile app:
- Fixed the Markdown recognition of_underscored_text (thx @cwithoutfail)
- Fixed the Markdown recognition for [link text](link_url) syntax (thx Erez Zukerman)
- Added timestamp to the filename of the downloaded backup file (thx Philippe Demoulin)
- Distinguish the ‘US’ and the ‘European’ week starting day patterns in the ‘Repeating task’ dialog window. The americans will see Sundays first, the rest of the world, Mondays. (tnx John Winstanley)
Well, that’s it for today :) Off to work!
Repeating tasks and due notifications improvements
Repeating tasks
We always thought Checkvist was more an outliner, than a task manager and delayed the repeating tasks request for quite a while. Well, better late than never!
The repeating tasks settings are invoked with the dr shortcut, or from the Due date dialog window:
There are many options, but in the bottom section of the dialog you can see the text description of the repeating task and preview the next 3 repeating due dates.
You can also pause a repeating task. In this case the repeating pattern will start working again from the date you resume it. (No ‘overdue’ tasks for the paused period).
When you delete a repeating task, it deletes the pattern only, leaving the currently set due date. If you want to completely remove due dates, use the cd (‘clear due’) shortcut.
All repeating tasks are listed in the Repeating section on the Due page.
Due notifications improvements
Notifications are a very sensitive matter — everyone becomes angry about extra emails, but no-one wants to forget about planned things and important events. We tried to rework the due notifications mechanism, so they contain more signal and less noise.
Your due tasks or all due tasks?
When you’re in charge of a project, you might want to watch all due tasks, regardless of their assignees. To do that, you must only click the email icon in the list’s toolbar and select the notification type.
But if you are not controlling the whole thing, you don’t care about someone else’s tasks. In this case chances are you want to watch only those notifications you set yourself (or the ones that were assigned to you). To watch only ‘your’ tasks, select the ‘Send me daily reminders about my due tasks’ option on the Profile → Notifications page, and unselect all due reminders for the lists (if you have any), on the same page.
Select dispatch time
Another small but often requested improvement is an ability to select the time when the daily notifications are dispatched. Previously they would go only on midnights, now you can change this vampire mode to your morning coffee time, for instance.
Both features are available in the PRO plan, but you can always try it free for 14 days. If two weeks are not enough, we can always prolong your trial term, just ask.
Other fixes
- You can exclude due and changes notifications made in the archived lists (request in the uservoice).
- Clicking on the due date results in showing due date dialog (previously we filtered the list by due date)
- iCalendar integration was reworked to support notifications about own due tasks
- Some UI enhancements and bugfixes
Next steps
It seems like Checkvist has become a rather feature rich tool now, but when it comes to mobile experience, it looks and feels really antique. The recent survey shows it’s the largest problem our customers have.
So the next steps will be dedicated to closing this gap. If you feel like helping us develop nice Checkvist app for mobile devices, please join Checkvist friends, our Google+ group which we’d like to make our main discussion forum. See you there!
New print superpowers
This is a small update, dedicated to the fellow tree destroyers. Rejoice! From now on Checkvist offers full print view customization.
Owners of free accounts can use the new enhanced Print options. (Click the Print icon in the right side of the toolbar to see the Print view.)
The PRO customers can customise print view further on, technically as much as CSS allows. (See the new CSS customisation box on the profile page)
The recently added hoisting feature comes in handy when you want to print a part of the list — Checkvist will print only what is visible on the screen.
Other fixes
As always, there’s no server update without bugfixes. Here’s a handful:
- Fixed ordered list rendering (switch to ordered list in the View options menu)
- Fixed formatting of the daily digest emails
- gg shortcut opens local links in the same window, links to other sites in a new tab
- Some UI improvements
Thanks again to all those who participate in the development, helping us with their ideas and comments. We hear you all, and we’re already coding on the new things you’re eager to see :)
More concentration with focus (hoist)
List making is addictive - you start with a small flat list and end with a huge hierarchy full of tags, colors, notes, and attachments. And while browsers can handle a large list nicely, our brains need some help to concentrate on a specific task.
Focus
In this update, we introduce a classic outliner feature - focus or ‘hoist’. Press Shift → to zoom in the selected list item - and all its siblings and parents will be hidden. To unfocus, press Shift ←.
The primary purpose of the feature is to hide all non-relevant information while working on a particular part of the list. So, when focused, we even hide the list name and all parent list items (but you can click the ‘…’ control above the list to see them).
Focus mode allows all usual operations: add, edit, copy list items, filter the list, print, etc.
If you create a permalink or share a list when the focus mode is active, the information about the focus will be included into the link.
Bulk share
A new quick way to share several lists, easy as one-two-tree:
- Select lists you want to share on the lists homepage (if you work on a list, press hh to get to the homepage).
- Click Share in the bottom bar
- Use “Select existing users” link to choose people you want to share the lists with.
This is particularly useful when you have a new team member and want to jump start him with all materials you already have in different lists.
Other improvements
- Smarter processing of sub-items when filtering by assignee/due and text
- Fixed some bugs in the URL recognition
- In public lists, it was impossible to hide popups with click outside them
- Ongoing design fixes and polishing
As always, many thanks to those who support us with their ideas, comments, likes and dislikes :) We’re going to make the tool awesome, one server update at a time.
New reference and more search options
Help’s getting closer
Checkvist’s reference was quite outdated for some time. And the situation was getting worse - you can hardly get time and hands enough to code new features and put them into the reference, especially when you know it’s already obsolete :-)
But somehow we’ve managed not only to completely re-write the whole thing, but make it smaller, and (we’d like to believe) better structured.
We’ve also added visibility to the help-related things and collected all of them under a typical Help menu in the toolbar:
Now we promise not to publish a single little feature without documenting it first :)
New search options
To view recent changes in Checkvist one can use the changed: search syntax (both for filtering and for global search). We’ve added more options to this query to make it more flexible. Now you can ask for changes within hours, days or weeks:
- 1h - 1 hour
- 2d - 2 days
- 3w - 3 weeks
For the ‘month’ option you can use the old ‘current month’ and ‘previous month’ syntax.
You can find all search reference by typing ? on any list page.
More to come
We plan to continue balancing between developing new features and improving old ones. The next targets are hoist, due notification improvements, and repeatable tasks along with UI polishing and bug fixes, of course.
See you soon!
