Author Archives: Dynalist Team

PSA: shortcut changes

The motivation

As some of you may know, we’ve been wanting to tweak our default shortcuts for some time now. There are three major reasons:

  1. Some shortcuts conflict with typing certain characters in certain keyboard layouts such as French and Polish. Examples: Ctrl+Alt+1 and Ctrl+Alt+3, since Ctrl+Alt is equivalent to AltGr on those keyboard layouts. Our current workaround is to provide an option to choose your keyboard layout, but honestly it sucks because it’s hacky and unintuitive.
  2. Some shortcuts conflict with browser default shortcuts. Example: Ctrl+L is used to go to address bar in Chrome, but in Dynalist it formats text as LaTeX.
  3. Some shortcuts are not usable on Mac. They input a character and is never captured by our system. Example: Alt+C to toggle checked items.

The solution

Our solution is to change all of the problematic shortcuts at once, to avoid having you guys adjust multiple times as we iterate on this, hence this PSA. The following is what going to change:

Removed but still customizable

  1. Toggle checked item visibility (previously Alt+C)
  2. Toggle notes visibility (previously Alt+N)
  3. Insert LaTeX (previously Ctrl+L)
  4. Make heading 1~3 (previously Ctrl+Alt+1~3), clear heading (previously Ctrl+Alt+0)
  5. Make color label 1~6 (previously Ctrl+Shift+1~6), clear color label (previously Ctrl+Shift+Backtick)

Changed

  1. Make checklist is changed from Ctrl+Alt+C to Ctrl+Shift+C.
  2. Make numbered list is changed from Ctrl+Alt+N to Ctrl+Shift+X.

Added

  1. Toggle heading, which is Ctrl+Shift+H.
  2. Toggle color label, which is Ctrl+Shift+L.
  3. New shortcut to add strikethrough or mark text as strikethrough. It’s empty and customizable.

Changes can be a bit hard to adjust to at first, and we hope you can bear with us! The existing conflicts have caused much confusion and annoyance, which is why we’re changing them for the better.

Thanks for reading!

Weekly update: 2017 week #39

This is our weekly update for the 39th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Feature

  • [iOS] We added Slide Over support for iOS! It will come in version 1.1.16, which is in review and will be out soon.

Improved

  • [Search] Improved link and tag clickability when they match the search query.

Weekly update: 2017 week #38

This is our weekly update for the 38th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Feature

  • [Import] Import from OPML. Now you can click on the “+” icon at the top of the file pane and directly import an OPML file into a new document.


Improved

  • [Search] Search Everywhere results now correctly use the checked item and note visibility settings. For example, if you’ve set checked items to be hidden and notes to only show 1st line, this will now be consistent in Search Everywhere results.
  • [Daily backup] Now you can move the Dynalist backup folder in your Google Drive root, as long as you don’t rename it.

Fixed

  • [Print] Fixed printed document doesn’t take full page width when the Shortcut & Formatting Help pane is open.

Weekly update: 2017 week #37

This is our weekly update for the 37th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Improved

  • [Search] Always show completed items when searching for “is:completed”, even when you’ve set completed items to hidden.
  • [Mobile] Allow opening all external URL schemes. That is, you can open links to open other apps (e.g. opening an Evernote link that starts with “evernote://”) in Dynalist.

Fixed

  • Fixed pasting from Microsoft Word randomly deletes spaces.
  • Fixed Up/Down key not working currently in the current zoomed in item title when there are multiple lines.
  • Fixed “**#tag**” doesn’t correctly show up as bold.

Weekly update: 2017 week #36

This is our weekly update for the 36th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Feature

  • [Mobile app] True black mode. Under this mode, the background color is true black, which is softer on the eye during the night, as well as saving battery on AMOLED displays.

Improved

  • [Inbox capture] Added global shortcut to invoke Dynalist capture to inbox on the desktop app (coming in version 1.0.40).
  • [Mobile app] Made Tab to indent and Shift+Tab to unindent shortcuts work with external keyboards on the iOS mobile app (coming in version 1.1.14).
  • [Shortcut] Pro users can now customize the shortcuts for indenting and unindenting as well.
  • [Account] You can now delete your account on your own.
  • [Account] You can now unlink your Google account on your own.
  • [Support] We updated most how-to guides to include instructions for the mobile app. They used to only contain instructions for web/desktop app.

Fixed

  • [UI/minor] Fixed document/folder context menu is sometimes blank when you resize the app.

Weekly update: 2017 week #35

This is our weekly update for the 35th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Improved

  • [Inbox] Added option to capture to the top of the inbox item rather than the bottom. This option can be found in Settings – Preferences – Your inbox.
  • [Infrastructure] As mentioned in our postmortem, we’ve optimized database indices to make a particularly slow query run much faster to reduce risk for downtime in the future.

Fixed

  • [Sync] Fixed some client sync issues that were related to the downtime last week. We also added warning when sync fails and edited the “make backup” explanation to be clearer to avoid accidental data loss.
  • [Copy/paste] Fixed links sometimes not properly converted to Markdown when pasted into Dynalist.
  • [Referral] We’ve set referral pages to be not indexable by the search engines to prevent referral abuse, after discovering that a referral link appeared as the top result for “dynolist” on Google.
  • [Inbox] Fixed cursor position not being restored after capturing to inbox.
  • [UI/minor] Fixed cannot view created date when hovering the bullet point on desktop app (will be released in the next desktop version).

2017/08/28 outage postmortem

For those not familiar with the word “postmortem” in our context, it’s a report after a serious incident that explains the causes of the incident and comes up with ways to prevent such incidents in the future.

Background info: Dynalist was slow and sometimes inaccessible from 2 AM to around 2:28 PM EDT on August 28, 2017. No data was lost.

Link to the postmortem (analysis): click here.

We’re really, really sorry for this incident and the inconveniences it caused.

Weekly update: 2017 week #34

This is our weekly update for the 34th week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Feature

  • Real-time sync. Now instead of asking the server “is there any changes?” every few seconds, the server “pushes” things to the client whenever there’s change. This is only being tested on the web app right now; soon it will be available on desktop and mobile apps too. (So Francisco you guessed right last week! 👍)

Improved

  • [Infrastructure] On Saturday night, we migrated and scaled our severs as server usage has grown a lot. With the new setup, we expect server availability to be better in the long term.

Fixed

  • [UI/minor] Fixed “Ctrl+Enter” to enter global search doesn’t show up as “Cmd+Enter” on macOS.

Weekly update: 2017 week #33

This is our weekly update for the 33rd week of 2017. The features and fixes might arrive at the desktop and mobile app a few days later than the web version.


Feature

  • Capture to inbox! For details, please see the blog post here.

Sneak peek

  • We’ve been working on something related to sync and it should come out next week. Stay tuned! 😇 (You’re also welcome to guess what it is)

Improved

  • [File finder] Now when you first open file finder with Ctrl+O without no search keyword, you see the last 5 documents you accessed rather than random results.
  • [File finder] Updated the UI:

Fixed

  • [Mobile app] Fixed the toolbar disappears sometimes when you create a new item (fixed in version 1.1.13).
  • [Mobile app] Fixed view not scrolled to cursor when you focus on an item or continue typing (fixed in version 1.1.13).

Capture stuff to your inbox!

As promised at the end of 2016, one of our focused areas in 2017 is to make capturing information into Dynalist easier. Now we’ve made the first step towards it: capture to your inbox!

It’s really simple: set an item or a document as your inbox by selecting “Set as inbox” in the menu. Then, invoke the capture screen with Ctrl+Shift+I (I for “inbox”), type your thought, and hit Enter. Voilà! What you just typed will be sent to your inbox item.

The capture feature is Pro-only, but free users can set an inbox location for future capture features too (e.g. a Dynalist clipper/capture browser extension).

We hope you like it!

 

Footnote 1: The shortcut for invoke the capture screen is customizable under Keymap – General too.

Footnote 2: This feature will come to the desktop apps soon.