To be honest, Pocket Informant 4.80 took up a lot more of my time than I expected. I originally expected 4.8 to be a small 4.7x bug-fix to make sure that Informant ran well on iOS 9. As time went on, I found that even though the programming interfaces in iOS 9 didn’t change much, the behavior did and I needed to do a lot more work to support iOS 9 nicely.
My original plan was to put all of our iOS 9 eggs in the Informant 5 basket simply because there were things I wanted to do that to support iOS 9 perfectly required dropping iOS 7 support. I knew it was going to take me too long. However as time went on, I realized that Informant 5 is turning out to be our biggest update in 7 years (and one that is going to run faster and more reliably thanks to Apple giving us 2000 tester slots), I knew I couldn’t get it done in time. 4.8 was borne out of the desire to get Split-Screen productivity on iPad, 3D Touch, and a new Today widget to you guys now rather than wait longer until 5.0 was done.
And – as always happens when you get the app into the real-world you find edge cases and configurations of settings that need some touch up – and you get a large volume of feedback. So here comes Informant 4.81. We’ve touched up a few things on Informant Today, fixed a few things, and in general made 4.8 that much more solid and reliable. Here is the official What’s New:
- We’ve improved link handling when viewing Event and Task popovers, includings locations and web links
- Improved the Event Priority Color background setting
- Improved Today Widget’s performance and drawing
- Improved Toodledo Task Comment sync
- Added all Flag emoji and some others
- Improved handling of “No Color” tags syncing with Informant Sync
- Improved Slideover/Split Screen launch of Informant
- Fixed adding Locations to Saved Filters
- Fixed a few crashes here and there
- Improved iPad Pro optimization
4.81 is being submitted to Apple shortly (most likely today or this weekend – we’re just making sure no new issues were introduced) and if all goes well, we expect to have it released to you by November 23rd.
BTW – Informant on the iPad Pro is beautiful! Don’t take my word for it – here are some screenshots.
And now…back to my Informant 5 work 🙂
Will there be a way (please) to not show tasks on the Today Widget?
Actually what would be WONDERFUL would be the option to select a smart filter to choose which tasks to show on the today widget (besides an option not to show tasks at all). Wish the sort order was part of a smart filter too… that’s often a key part of the custom view you want of tasks (by project, or by due date, etc).
Blind users can use Informant in IOS by turning on VoiceOver and using the Agenda view. In the latest release under IOS 9.1, this doesn’t work. VoiceOver does not say the date when you touch it in the Agenda view. This worked in the earlier version. Please fix this in the next release!
Hi Mike. We’ve made no changes at all to how we support VoiceOver. We take advantage of the fact that iOS automatically provides Voiceover for all “text” fields without us having to do anything.
In other words, we’ve never actually fully supported VoiceOver directly – because we never had to. iOS was designed to make VoiceOver support as easy as possible – meaning, automatic. So its most likely iOS broke something and you need to wait for Apple to fix it.
Alex, it might be how the field is defined. The earlier version of Informant worked with IOS 9.1. But when she upgraded to the new Informant, nothing happens when the date is touched. However, the event is announced properly when touched.
Did the definition of the date field change in the new version?
Nope, nothing has changed at all.
I opened case 999860087 with Apple Support. They have referred it to engineering and hopefully correction in a subsequent IOS release.
Hi Alex,
here are some wishes from me for PI 5.0. Perhaps you are able to make some true:
– Peek & Pop at weekview.
– Nativ app for apple watch.
– Having a complication at watch where I can see todos (from google task) and time from
next event.
Example: (3) 12:00pm [ ] –> (3) are 3 todos (from google task!) and time are from
next event.
– Seeing appointments and todos (from google task) in one list by pressing at complication
at watch.
– Perhaps you can make it possible to configure the complication like in fantastical.
I just purchased the mac OS X version of Informant. However, there was no download information on the purchase form and I have not received download information by email or otherwise. Did I miss something? If not, please let me know what I need to do to download the app. thanks.
Hi David. Please contact support – you should have received an email with a serial number and download info. Also, download info is on the product page as well. http://staging.pocketinformant.com/support
The update to 4.8.1 has been working wonderfully! With the original widget, there was the ability to check off tasks & complete them right in the widget without having to unlock the device and open the app. That feature seems to be missing in the new widget. Will that be returning by version 5?
Maybe. The reason I removed it was that its not possible to 100% guarantee that alarms can be removed when you complete a task from the widget.