Hey everyone,
Aaron here.
February 2019 is in the books. A lot has happened, much good, some not as much. I wanted to pause and spend a little time on the context here.
I mentioned in January that we had increased our engineering bandwidth, which meant we were able to pick up more features. I’m happy with the rate of forward progress we’ve been making. However, we’ve had a bumps in February, which is worth covering here.
Server challenges
We’ve had a few service disruptions in the past several weeks. These ranged from inconvenient (syncing issue) to downtime (Rackspace physically moving our servers in January, server migrations in February).
One of the key reasons users choose Toodledo is the rock-solid syncing service. Since the syncing issues started with our provider, we’ve been assessing our options to improve on the quality of service. We didn’t like the deterioration in service and the delayed customer support from our provider. As a result, we made the decision to move to another provider with terms that outlined better service and support.
However, the migration was rocky, to put it mildly. While we now have masters and slaves set up and replicating, we still have our DNS pointed at our old provider. We’ll be switching this over sometime in a few weeks time.
Whenever we do that, it will be after we’ve provided plenty of heads up.
Tags organization
One of the features we picked up from our job board was adding more options for how your tags are organized. Previously, the tag menu would automatically sort in descending order by number of tasks with a given tag. However, many users had wanted to set this as alphabetical order or a static list in their own way. So we’ve enabled that.
We’ve also used this feature as a small test into drag-and-drop functionality (for custom ordering). We planned to use this as the first step to bringing drag-and-drop to Toodledo in the main tasks pane.
Tag colors
While we were on tags, we also added new colors and visual elements. The goal was to use color to increase the amount of information density in the tasks dashboard. We’ve started by adding 12 colors for tags, and we’ll continue to refine this going forward.
Refactoring IOS app
A question I get asked a lot about is “Why isn’t the IOS app updated yet?”. So I’m going to peel back the curtain here a bit. We had two options when upgrading the mobile app: start over from scratch or upgrade the existing mobile app in modular pieces.
When we chose path two, we ran into a lot of tech debt. Even just upgrading subtasks in the mobile app required large rewrites of old Objective-C code dating back years. So while that slowed feature development, the investment in the architecture will allow quicker development in the future.
Upgraded onboarding and new user experience
We are fortunate to have a lot of users who’ve been with Toodledo for years now, who’ve really customized their workspace and made it their own. We are trying to find ways to help new users get started right away, which is why we’ve added quick-start GTD and MYN settings, and have our Getting Started video library.
However, these are buried and many new users never see them. So we’ve brought these front and center in a new user onboarding tour to help them access these tools at the beginning of their experience with Toodledo.
Stomping out bugs
One thing that we’ve done in the background over the past few months is slowly stomp out bugs. However, it’s worth noting here. In February, we’ve fixed nagging issues such as a bug where subtasks disappeared, an issue where search would sometimes not return results, and Saved Search <> Hotlist showing up incorrectly in Settings.
What next?
We’ve been working on a slew of collaboration upgrades (including admin dashboard v1). We are also going work on finalizing the new tasks dashboard so that we can then migrate everyone over.
The rest of our plans and roadmap are up on the feature request board. Curious on what’s next? We work on bi-weekly sprints, so please help shape our roadmap by voting for what you’d like to see added next.
You can click into the cards to see more details, see what others in the community are saying, and add your voice and vote to the feature set. You can also sign up to get beta access here.
Anything else?
February, despite being a short month, had quite a bit of ground for our team to cover. Thank you for your constructive feedback and patience — we really appreciate it. We’re doing our best to improve Toodledo and do no harm. If we ever miss the mark, we’ll learn from it, see what we can do to make it right, and get back on track.
Sincerely,
Aaron
