Happy New Year, everyone! We can’t believe it’s 2018 already!

2017 flew by pretty fast and below is what we added to Dynalist during 2017:

In 2018, we want to focus on:

1. Making the Dynalist experience more seamless. That means you should be to gather information into Dynalist more easily, shuffle and rearrange items more easily, and export to more formats and third-party apps.
2. Ironing out small issues here and there to make Dynalist smoother.
3. Making Dynalist more extensible so that people can develop for specialized use cases on top of Dynalist.

Happy holidays! 2017 has been an awesome year, and we’re grateful to have you guys around.

To celebrate, Dynalist Pro is now 50% off with the code XMAS17. The code is valid until 11:59 PM EST on January 4, 2018 (2018-01-05 04:59 UTC).

Frequently Asked Questions

Does this discount stack with the early bird pricing, for those who subscribed to Dynalist Pro before July 15, 2017?
Yes, these two discounts stack.

Does this discount stack with the student discount?
Unfortunately, this discount does not stack with the student discount.

Can I take advantage of this sale if I’m already a subscriber?
Yes, you can unsubscribe from your current plan first, and then subscribe again with the XMAS17 code. Don’t worry, you won’t lose any of the remaining Dynalist Pro by unsubscribing.

Is this discount one time only or lifetime?
This discount is one-time only, and the renewal price will be back to normal once your discounted Dynalist Pro expires.

Is there any restrictions on this discount?
Each account can use this count once to get 50% off either 1 month or 1 year of Dynalist.

If I still have Dynalist Pro left and subscribe with the promo code, when will I get charged?
Since this is a limited-time offer, you will be charged immediately rather than when your current Dynalist Pro expires. Say if your Dynalist Pro expires in April 2018, after subscribing to the yearly plan with the promo code, you get charged right away and your Dynalist Pro gets extend to April 2019.

Let us know if you have any other questions!

Note: if you do not use line breaks in items or notes, this change will not affect you.

Have you ever hit return and found it not working? Upon hitting Enter again it works. You might suspect it’s something wrong with your Enter key, but the culprit is actually the browser.

Basically, when you pressed Enter the first time, it worked, but the browser decides that it should hide the last line break, if there’s no text following the line break. This has caused a host of bugs in Dynalist.

We’re fixing it today by automatically appending an invisible line break (hidden by the browser) at the end of each item and note, so that the line breaks that you make will always be visible.

The consequence is that for all the text that you’ve entered line breaks in, there will be an extra line break at the end of the text.

To fix this, we’ve temporary added a new option to each document called “Clean up newlines”. It will remove all the extra trailing newlines in this document, for both the items and the notes.

This option will be available for a month, so clean up your line breaks now before the new year comes! 😊

Feel free to let us know in the comments or via feedback if you have any questions or concerns about this.

Recently we worked on improving the Dynalist mobile app with a laser-sharp focus, and v1.1.17 is our first step!

Released in the Play Store today, v1.1.17 will arrive at the App Store shortly. This update features:

• Share text or URL directly to Dynalist inbox. This is only available for Android right now, and be sure to set up your inbox beforehand. Unlike using a shortcut to capture to inbox on web and desktop, this feature is not a Pro feature and anyone can use it.
  
• Sort tags in the tag pane.
  
• Fixed issues with back button for Android only.
• Fixed checkbox being hard to tap on.
• Slimmer item toolbar for more screen space.
• More intuitive Lock Mode UI.
  
• Allow single tap on folder name of toggle expand or collapse it. Before, you need to tap on the tiny triangle toggler icon to toggle it.
• Added exit button for the date picker interface. Before, if you accidentally opened the date picker, there’s no way to exit it.
• Fixed Ctrl key sometimes gets stuck when using an external keyboard with Dynalist.
• Removed collapse/expand buttons in Search Everywhere results since they don’t make sense.

There are still tons of mobile improvements waiting to be done. Stay tuned for our next big mobile app update! 🤗

Have you ever wanted to find deleted content or check who made changes? Now you can do that!

Meet our latest Pro feature: version history.

To see the version history of a document, right click and choose “Version history”. On the left, you’ll see the list of revisions, and you can click on “Load more” if you’re looking for earlier changes.

After you select a version in the left sidebar, you’ll see the “Before Side” on the left. The Before Side shows the state of the document before a certain version is applied. On the right we have the “After Side”, and it contains the state after applying the change. You can choose to hide the After Side by toggling the checkbox in the top right corner.

On the Before Side, removals are shown in red, and on the After Side, additions are shown in green. By clicking any item on the Before Side or After Side, you can export it. The export interface allows you to export to three formats (formatted, plain text, OPML), or download HTML or OPML files. To navigate from the export interface to the version information, click on “Back to version” at the top of the export interface.

We have some ideas in mind for future improvements on this feature, but would love to hear what you think as well. Feedback are welcome in the comments or on the forum!

We were students just a while back too, so we totally get it that students sometimes don’t have the money to support their favorite tools, even if they want.

So today we’re announcing our new 50% off student discount!

It’s simple to apply for a student discount: use your school email address to send us an email. If the email you used to sign up is your school email, the in-app feedback option works too.

In the email, include the following:

1. Name of your school;
2. Your expected graduation year;
3. The email you signed up Dynalist with, if it’s not your school email;
4. (Optional) A few words on how you plan to use Dynalist Pro 🙂

The student discount needs to be renewed every year.

If you have any questions about the student discount, or want to extend your free trial before taking advantage of the discount, just let us know!

P.S. Early bird pricing is stackable with the student discount.

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!

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.

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.

With the release of the iOS app, the 50% off early bird price will end soon. The price change will go into effect at midnight July 15, 2017 EDT.

If you subscribe before the price change happens, your account will be eligible for the early bird price for life, even if you unsubscribe.

In other words, if you have subscribed before the price change happens, no matter if you decide to unsubscribe or stay subscribed afterwards, you’ll always be eligible for the early bird price.

Feel free to let us know if you have any questions about the price change!