Author Archives: Dynalist Team

Weekly update: 2016 week #25

Hello friends, happy Monday!

As mentioned in last week’s update, we’re now focusing on laying the foundation for desktop and mobile apps. During the past week, we made good progress on offline support, and we now have a plan to make mobile better. By the way, we’re still looking for feedback on the date feature. Let us know what you think before it’s too late!

Bug fixes

  • Fixed icon of uploaded files. It used to be like those Unicode characters that your computer can’t display.
  • On Android, when you edit an item and tap on the “more” option (three vertical dots), the continued menu used to appear at top of page, which is the wrong position. Now that’s fixed.
  • Last week we improved the experience of keyboard users by auto-focusing on the first item when you switch to a new document. This is very annoying on mobile though – just fixed that.

Improvements

  • Did some performance improvements on mobile. Everything should be more responsive now.
  • Made the document finder prettier to match the other parts of the mobile web:

mobile file finder before mobile file finder after

That’s it for this week, have a great week everyone!

Weekly update: 2016 week #24

As usual, here’s what’s new with Dynalist last week:

Bug fixes

  • The shortcut for “Search everywhere” (Ctrl+Enter) wasn’t working on the mobile view (or when your browser window is really narrow on desktop. Now it works.
  • When you choose to hide checked items, it means that you don’t want to see them. However, these checked items used to still show up in “Search everywhere”. Now this is fixed.
  • Dynalist had another bug with “Search everywhere”: sometimes after you’ve made a checklist, it doesn’t show up as a checklist in the “Search everywhere” results. That’s fixed now!

Improvements

  • Now note gets exported in plain text and formatted. Yay!
  • Adding to the previous improvement, numbered lists also get exported now.
  • We added shortcuts for toggling checked items and toggling note. It’s Alt+C and Alt+N, respectively. You should be able to tell which shortcut is for which! 🙂
  • For those of you who don’t like to leave your keyboard, switching to another document was pretty annoying. You have to click somewhere to make the cursor show up. Now it automatically appears at the end of the first item.
  • We’ve decided to change the default font to Whitney (it used to be Roboto). The Roboto we use (it’s Roboto Light actually) is pretty thin and a little hard to read. The default document alignment is changed to center alignment. If you would prefer the old defaults, you can change them back in Settings.
  • Now in the note hidden view, when you put your mouse over the “…”  icon for a second, you can see the note content in the tooltip.

Features

  • Added “Teaser” mode for note. Under this mode, only the first line of the note will be shown. You can try it out by clicking the toggle button that was used for toggling between showing and hiding note. You can also use the handy shortcut (Alt+N) as mentioned above.
  • We posted a V1 spec for the date feature, and we really need your input on this! If you’re interested in this feature, please read the spec here and share your thoughts! Feedback on this would be much, much appreciated.

A little update about offline mode and mobile apps: starting next week, we’ll be spending more time on those things. The backend development for offline mode is wrapping up, so we’ll be spending lots of time preparing for the mobile app.

As you might expect, once we start working on the mobile app, there may be less new stuff in the weekly updates. Please understand if that happens! We’ll certainly fix serious bugs if any comes up, but we’ll be heavily focusing on building the mobile apps as well as date support. We’re not slacking off, just working on bigger things 🙂

Cheers and have a great week y’all!

Your input needed for the date feature! [Ended]

The feedback phase has ended and we’re now planning out the work. Stay tuned!


We’re starting to working on dates, woohoo!

After reading through feedback from you guys and the discussion on Trello, we also referred to what the other apps do (primarily Evernote and Slack). Below is what we plan to include in the very first version of dates:

  • You will be able to bring up the date picker with a special trigger character, “!”. There must be a space before “!”, or it must be the first thing in an item.
  • You can pick the date and time in the date picker. There are maybe 7,352 types of date pickers out there that looks and works differently from each other; we’ll try our best to pick one that’s both efficient and good-looking.
  • After you pick a date, a date that roughly follows the ISO format will be generated for you. Something like YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM. Not finalized yet, but it would something that’s usable for people from all around the world and is relatively easy to understand. Without the date picker, you can probably write it yourself if you want to.
  • We haven’t decided on what the date markdown should look like, but it’s gonna be something that’s easy to write.
  • When displayed (when you’re not editing the item that contains dates), the date will show up as a relative date (e.g. “Today 3 pm”).
  • You will be able to filter items by a date range relative to now. The syntax will be something like “within: 1d” or “within: -7d”, which would show all items that contain dates during today (from midnight today to midnight tomorrow) and during the past week, respectively.

As mentioned above, we can’t stress enough that this will be our first step to incorporate dates in Dynalist. We know that other things are super important too: date sorting, integration with other calendar applications, task snoozing, etc. The purpose of building it in chunks like this is to adjust early if we make a mistake, and also to put something in your hands as soon as possible.

We might have missed some scenarios or use cases in the design proposed above, so here’s where we need your help. There will be another week before we start to work on this, and until then, please send in your feedback if you have any comments! You can comment below, @ us on Twitter, or send us a message inside Dynalist. Any way of contacting us would be fine. Thanks!

Uploading any file

We just expanded the image upload Pro feature to allow any type of file! The upload process is the same: simply drag and drop to upload. A link markdown to the file will be generated for you.

We also made the file name of the uploaded file more friendly (it used to be just some random characters), so that when you download it, the file name still makes sense.

The monthly quota remains 1 GB for now, but if you ever feel that’s insufficient, let us know! We  might bump it up even more.

Weekly update: 2016 week #23

Hey guys, welcome to a new week!

Here’s what happened at Dynalist last week:

Bugs fixes

  • Fixed demo not working at all. This is a pretty dumb mistake on our end 🙁
  • Fixed bug where when dragging, releasing your mouse over the zoom icon would zoom in. Zoom should only happen when the icon is clicked.
  • Fixed layout bug where the note section doesn’t align with the item title if the item is numbered.

Improvements

  • We just realized that Cmd+` is a commonly used shortcut on Mac OS X, so we changed the shortcut for code block from Cmd+` to Control+`. This change would only affect Mac OS X users.
  • Now you can open the item menu for the currently zoomed in item, including the document itself. This means that you can make the entire document a checklist or a numbered list!
  • Now the item menu works for multiple items as well! Simply drag to select multiple items and open the item menu.
  • Added the Arial and the Helvetica fonts.

Features

  • Now Pro users can upload any type of file, not just images! The file name of the uploaded file also became more friendly. Thanks again for supporting us!

Have an awesomely productive week – we’ll see you next week!

Numbered lists

Some lists are meant to be numbered. Recipes, instruction steps,  your top 50 movies… the list goes on. So the newest feature addition to Dynalist is to be able to number your lists!

Similar to making a checklist, you can make a numbered list by either selecting the option in the item menu or using the shortcut Ctrl+Alt+N.

Hope you guys like it!

Weekly update: 2016 week #22

Hope you all had a great week! This is what we did this week:

Bug fixes

  • Fixed browser freeze when tag auto-completion is triggered on the anywhere other than the first line.
  • Fixed bug where clicking on “Search everywhere” link underneath the search bar would lead to the “No document is open” state. (The Ctrl+Enter shortcut was not affected by this bug.)
  • Fixed an item merging bug. (Bug detail)

Improvements

  • The “search and add link” popup now displays the compete path to the item. So, instead of just “Item 4”, you would see “Document > Item 1 > Item 2 > Item 3” beneath it.

Features

  • Numbered lists. It’s accessible either by choosing “Make numbered list” in the item menu or using the Ctrl+Alt+N shortcut.

Cheers and have an awesome week!

PSA: update about who can see your uploads

Uploaded images used to be visible to anyone with links, but realizing that some people are not comfortable with this, we recently changed all uploads to private. Now we added a new option for upload permissions so you have total control over your uploaded images.

How to update it: go to Settings, and under “Dynalist Pro” there’s an option called “Who can see what you upload”. You can choose between “only me” or “anyone with link”.

Weekly update: 2016 week #21

Hey guys, welcome to a new series of weekly posts suggested by our awesome user Goklayeh!

In these weekly updates, we’ll post about what we did for the week, be them bug fixes or improvements. Since most of the support emails are private, and Trello is a poor way of getting aggregated information, this is our new attempt to keep everybody in the loop. We hope this would work out, and we’d love to hear about your thoughts on this!

This is week #21 of 2016, and this is what we did:

Bug fixes

  • When creating new files under a collapsed folder, they used to be hidden. Now the collapsed folder automatically expands to show the new file.
  • Up/Down was broken if you zoom into a collapsed item. Fixed.
  • Underline markups are stripped in WorkFlowy imports, now you don’t get “<u>” and “</u>” all over the places when you import from WorkFlowy.
  • Fixed bug where bookmarks would disppear from the UI after being moved.

Improvements

  • The page now scrolls when you drag items to the top or bottom of the page, so you can reorder things in a long document more easily.
  • For Polish users: when typing ć, it used to trigger toggling checklist, and now you can choose the Polish keyboard layout to stop this from happening. Please use Alt+C instead of Ctrl+Alt+C to toggle checklist.
  • Added Calibri in addition to Calibri Light, since we realized that some people may like Calibri but find Calibri Light too thin.
  • New iOS menu bar when editing an item. The menu bar won’t display reliably at the bottom because of technical difficulties, so for iOS, we changed the menu bar to hover over the item you’re editing. This change only affects iOS users.
  • Added an option to make your uploads to anyone with link. The default is that only you can access to what you upload.

Hope you all had a great week – see you next week!

Hiding notes

Quick update: just added a handy utility to hide notes when you don’t feel like seeing them for some reason.

In the future, we’d possibly provide on more options for notes: show a teaser only, e.g. the first line of the note. If you think this is a good idea, please vote for this card on our roadmap!