Its no secret that I’ve been working on Informant 5 for awhile now. Its still very much in-progress with a dramatically reworked … well everything. My plan for 4.74 was simply to fix bugs and make sure it worked well on iOS 9. For example I wasn’t going to support iOS 9 iPad multi-tasking because that really required major rework of the UI to properly do so.
However sometimes plans change.
First, I added 3D Touch support for the new iPhones. Then while testing in the GM version of iOS 9, I noticed that the Today widget simply doesn’t work anymore. Nothing I did made it work in fact. I was rewriting the Widget for PI 5, but I decided to bring that to PI 4.74 early. Its faster, cleaner, and you can pick what day to display data for and also filter your data (using Saved Filters).
Next, I had an epiphany on how to support iOS 9 iPad multi-tasking – its a hack to be sure and not as clean and smooth as how PI 5 does it (PI 5’s whole UI architecture is based on size-classes which is not supported on iOS 7, but is on iOS 8 and 9 while PI 4.7 is mostly “interface idioms – iPad or iPhone” which is supported on iOS 7). We don’t lose iOS 7 compatibility for the short term, but we gain a major new feature of iOS 9.
So what does this mean for you? You may have noticed we didn’t release an update of Informant for iOS 9 on release day. We didn’t because we’ve learned we need to test with as many of our signed-beta testers as possible with a major new OS before we release; and to test on Apple’s GM (final release) versions – not beta. This delay has also meant that you will get some features we didn’t originally plan…just a bit sooner.
Hi Alex!
Looks like iOS keeps you busy.
I was wondering how OS X releases are doing. Maybe I missed some of your posts or updates, but I applied for the Early bird in April/May and was hoping to get regularly updted releases as some baic features are still missing. What is the plan?
Thanks in advance for the update.
Hi Stephanie. We have been making updates relatively regularly. During the Summer we did take about 4 weeks between two specific updates, but before that – and after – we’ve had many dozens of updates.
Grab the latest copy here:
http://download.pocketinformant.com/DesktopInformant/InformantBeta.dmg
Would be nice to have a Compilation for apple watch. After pressing it it’s nice to see apointments and todos (i. e. from google sync, reminder app and apple calendar) for today and next days.
Also it would be nice have a native app at watch with apointments and todos for the next days.
For 3D touch perhaps it will possible to add apointments and todos by pressing the icon and see also next apointment.
We’ve already have 3D Touch in our next update. Unfortunately a native Watch app is not in the cards until Informant 5.
Wow! I had a minor panic attack when I read that you hadn’t planned to support multitasking in iOS 9, since PI is one of my most frequently used apps and the multitasking would be a tremendous boost in efficiency, especially looking ahead to the iPad Pro. I’m so glad you decided to incorporate that into the next major release, and I’m definitely looking forward to the new filters in the widget! In a foolhardy endeavor, I actually decided to try around to some new GTD software this summer because of wanting a more robust widget option among a couple of other things, and I just have to give kudos to your team because there is not ONE SINGLE APP that I have found for iOS that organizes things the way PI does or handles it with such efficiency. Many thanks for all of your continued hard work!
To be clear, our original intent was to support iOS 9’s split-screen/swipe over multi-tasking in Pocket Informant 5. So we were always going to support it.
The change was to hack in support for 4.8. Its not as good as it will be in PI 5, but it will work very well.