We are continuing to put out rapid releases on Informant 5 for iOS. Release 5.2 (beta 2) is now available to the beta group (as of June 28, 2017). We are expecting this to be available to the general public next week.
New in Release 5.2 (beta 1 & beta 2 release notes)
Beta 1: Release Notes
• NEW! View Picker “Shortcut” Bar has been added to solve the issue of “one-click” between most used views.
Customizable “Shortcut Bar”
- In the “Enable Views” setting, you can now pick views that you would like shortcuts to. Those shortcuts will appear in a bar that comes out of the View Picker button. This gives you 1-tap access to your favorite views. On iPad, all view options show, but you can still choose which shortcuts to show when Informant is in “compact” mode on iPad (like when it’s presented in a slide-over view).
• Improved! Main navigation SmartBar now appears faster.
• Improved! We spent some time improving the color scheme for Dark Mode to improve readability
• Improved! Tasks on iPad now have a full swipe action set and doesn’t use the “force touch” menu
• Improved! On iPad, we no longer hide the master view controller in landscape
• Fixed “Stable Connection Error” when trying to log into certain mail servers
• Fixed issue with Google Task sync where clearing a due date wouldn’t sync that change back up to Google
• Contacts were not sorted properly if you had a mix of company and people contacts.
• Trigger fixes:
• Fixed issue where the duration picker would remain on screen if you didn’t close it before dismissing the Trigger Editor
• When backing up to the main trigger list, it now properly deselects the previously selected trigger
• Fixed issue where the location address couldn’t be cleared from a Trigger in the Trigger Editor
• Improved date formatting for the columns on days / column week view
• Fixed 5.1 regression that would cause crash when choosing an auto-suggested contact in the title field of a new event and choosing “Meet With”
• Fixed date formatter regression in 5.1 (this affected display dates in a few areas, like the notes list)
• Fixed regression in 5.1 where force-touch-add-note was failing for Apple Events.
• In rare cases, the App Badge might be a day off when setting it to show “today’s date”
• Fixed issue using “Jump to Date” when using the Buddhist Calendar
• Added button in Advanced Settings to force-reset Apple Watch data
• A few stability improvements
Beta 2:
• NEW! You can now make a trigger out of an existing event or task
• NEW! You can now set the “All Day” flag in Event Triggers (it’s the first option in the Hour field)
• Improved! When choosing to make a Trigger event-only or task-only, the opposing section is now hidden
• Improved! When viewing an event or task in the “Summary Popover”, we have added data detectors to make more things clickable (like tracking numbers, flight numbers, etc)
• Improved! In the focus view, you can swipe left/right on blank space or a header to navigate between days
• Sometimes a saved filter had to be selected twice before it would actually get applied
• When in a event/task editor, only show triggers relevant to that type of calendar item
• If you were typing a keyword in the trigger editor and didn’t hit *Return* before saving the trigger, the new keyword would not have been saved
• The subtask & tag sections are larger in the Trigger Editor
• In certain situations, triggers would incorrectly autofill the Trigger name into the title field of your calendar item if there was no title defined in the Trigger itself
• When using a keyword to invoke a trigger in your event/task editor, we now remove the keyword from the title field
• The “+” button is now centered across all views so that it can be easily reached when holding the phone with either left or right hand
• Project folder icons were hard to see in Dark Theme in the Trigger editor
• Another improvement to sorting the Contacts list (to better handle the case where a contact is missing either a first or last name)
• When throwing a location alarm for a context, don’t include tasks that haven’t started yet in the alert text
• Various visual / UI improvements
• Numerous stability improvements throughout the app
Beta 4 Beta 4 is processing – should be released tonight July 6, 2017.
Here are the release notes:
*NOTE:* We’ve been doing a lot of work on the logic that controls our Apple Watch complication. The good news is that Time Travel now works! Please note, however, that the logic isn’t fully tested yet and this is our first release to test on an actual device. One thing specifically that might not work is if you make changes to events that occur “today”, the complication might not update itself to reflect those changes. We will be addressing this in the next beta.
• Time Travel now works on Apple Watch complication
• Fixed a few logic issues relating to what to show in the Apple Watch complication. Specifically some situations where events for “tomorrow” would show prior to 5pm “today”
• Improved the “first time initialization” of data for Apple Watch
• The Small complication on the Simple watch face is now available (simple calendar icon to launch the app)
• Fixed issue where location alarms on Contexts might show “More…” even when there weren’t more tasks to show
• Fixed issue where you couldn’t hit “Done” or “Cancel” when setting a due date on a project
• Fixed issue where multi-day repeating events might show duplicate occurrences in certain situations
• Using an emoji as your search string to search for Apple Calendar events should now work properly
Beta 5: Release Notes (Aug 12, 2017)
• Better handling when you use emojis as keywords for triggers
• When you apply a trigger to an existing event with a title, there are no longer multiple spaces between the original title and the trigger title
• Improved performance on calendar views in situations where you had “a lot” of events/tasks on a given day (i.e. hundreds or thousands)
• Task triggers were not properly preserving project information when syncing to another device
• Uncompleting a Google Task now syncs that change back to Google properly
• Continued improvements to the logic for Apple Watch complications
• More proactive about updating the content on an Apple Watch complication
• Improvements to help keep Apple Watch data up to date
• Potentially resolved a rare crash when adding contacts to a group
• Fixed issue where only one alarm would fire if you added multiple alarms to an Apple Event
• Removing / Cancelling an alarm on an Apple Event didn’t always work as expected
• The wrong saved filter options were showing on task and notes lists
• Continued tweaks to the Today Widget. Took some steps to reduce memory footprint.
Beta 6: (Aug 13, 2017)
Release Candidate
• Fixed issue where changing your Apple Calendar settings would throw a notification on a background thread on Apple Watch
• Apple Watch complications are updated a bit more aggressively now
• Deleting an event didn’t update Apple Watch complications
• Fixed a situation where sometimes the “more…” indicator on Today Widget wouldn’t show when it should have
• Attempting to avert a crash when we hit low memory conditions in the Today Widget
To make suggestions for new features or to vote for existing suggestions check out our user feedback forum.
I LOVE it ! You guys have done it again. The view picker is perfect. It is now the easiest to navigate of all the productivity managers I have tried. Kudos to the entire team for working through this. I must admit I was concerned, but you came through.
Two questions when time allows: 1- When adding a new event, why does the time default to 11:59 and not an even hour? 2- I haven’t figured out how to make a current task into a trigger as per the release notes. Will there be some instruction for the release?
Again, thanks and keep up the good work!
My Informant Sync subscription finally expired, Apple automatically took 10.99 GBP for an alleged <>, and the account shows as expired. I’m locked out both of Informant 4.9 and 5. We’ll done, really! Productivity down the drain.
An alleged “Informant – Agenda, Tasks, Notes Planner, Premium Pack + Informant Sync (Automatic Renewal)”
It is better than before ; however I prefer the new shotcut icons to be fixed in their locations once configured as it is a burden to keep finding them in new location and I never saw any UI do that! To get more space for shortcuts, I am totally fine to optionally remove the filter and map buttons as I never use them.
Thanks for listening to our concerns. (“On iPad, we no longer hide the master view controller in landscape”. Thanks God!). This looks like a step in the good direction: the shortcuts are a good idea, although I still consider the view picker of PI4 much better. To give full thoughts I’ll need to use it. Please notice that on iPad there is space for more than three shortcuts
Where do I comment on bugs in beta release? I have found a couple to report.
Is the beta program open for public participation?
athani,
If you are referring to 5.2 we do take request for beta via the support portal. However, as of today, 5.2 is in General Availability so you should be able to get it.
Very excellent to see more progress! Excited to try to the new view picker–I think it is a fantastic solution to the “one tap view change.”
Back to the date picker, though:
The calendar grid is, of course, wonderful. However, the time picker still needs a lot of work. First of all, the vertical scrolling is problematic because the entire form is vertical scrolling. So I scroll the form to get to bottom options and accidentally scroll the am/pm… bam–very bad.
Time picker needs to be horizontal scrolling with a decent amount of room for actually scrolling with your finger. And minutes needs a 5 minute interval option. I can see the dilemma here, because 1 minute intervals will be needed occasionally.
Horizontal scrolling makes a lot of sense. I was going to suggest going back to the PI4 number keypad, but this is a workable and neat solution.
Triggers need work.
Now that the view picker and calendar picker are sorted out, with good solution designs, the next issue needs to be sorted out.
Triggers don’t save as many fields as the old templates did. I depend on templates/triggers extensively. I need the following 2 fields to work on Task triggers:
• project/sync field
• tags
I tend to agree on next effort needs to be triggers. I too rely triggers a lot, and find them more restrictive then templates, due to the lack of field choices.
Ren,
We DO have some improvements coming to Triggers in 5.2 (later this week), but…. you can already set Projects and Tags in a trigger in the current shipping version of Informant
If you having problems setting tag or projects in a trigger – refer to support. Those should work already. We can help you in support.
Thanks for confirming. Other fields would also be very useful, but I’m glad those two are included.
I’m still on 4, but I’ll be diving into 5.2 when it’s available, as the main issues I was waiting for, seem to be finally resolved. I’ll raise further issues as I see them, but it’s good to see the main issues impacting speed/productivity/efficiency have been resolved well, and I5 is improving, and the team are listening to concerns.
Thanks Ren,
It is good to hear the positive feedback. We should be finishing up the final testing on 5.2 this week and it will probably be available for download by next week sometime.
Chris, Keith and the team thank you for all your hard work and I’m really liking Informant 5.
So many great improvements and I’m a happy user again.
Triggers need work and the time picker is what I hate the most but it’s great to finally read positive comments on this blog 🙂
Thanks Sarz.
I agree with Sarz. Informant 5 is becoming a great utility. I too have some dificulties with the timepicker. Not with the iPad but our iPhones (6). But else: GREAT WORK 🙂
Thanks for listening to user feedback and bringing back some of the better features from PI 4 that were removed in early versions of PI5 – like a date picker with an actual calendar you can tap on, and access to a view picker from the calendar screen. Now if you would only bring back tappable numbers for entering time, I might start using the app (instead of 4.x)!
Heads up to all fans of the old, PI4-style time picker – much of the user feedback requesting a reversion to tappable numbers was mixed in with the date picker request on the feedback website which is now listed as “Completed.” So please consider adding your voice to a call for tappable numbers at:
http://feedback.webis.net/forums/562453-pocket-informant-5-for-ios/suggestions/20017018-bring-back-numeric-buttons-for-entering-time-of
If I wanted to edit an existing “task”, it seems the only way to go into editor mode is to tab on the task once, and on the pop up task summary screen tab on the right-pointing arrow again to go into the task editor. If I use 3D touch on the task, the circle disc pops up with various functional setting, but non of them go into the task editor mode. Is there a way to edit an existing task in one go? Such as swipe from left to right, or add in the edit task option in the 3D force touch disc etc. The current way to access task editor is indirect from usability point of view.