Astrid’s goal has always been to be squeaky and reliable. This week Kevin Purdy from Lifehacker describes her as “an extremely tenacious beast that won’t stop reminding, beeping, and buzzing you until certain very important tasks are done” on their recent List of Best Android Apps. We love this description!
Since Astrid version 3.2.5 we have implemented a number of small changes that we think will help some of you be more productive.
1) New handling of tasks that were due when your phone was off
Prior to this update if your phone was off at a task’s due date you wouldn’t be notified that you missed the deadline when you turned your phone back on. Past deadline notification would happen but not immediately after you turned your phone back on. This caused some of us to miss reminders.
With the latest release we solve this. Astrid checks to see if you haven’t received an alarm on/or subsequently to the due date. If not she will show her lovely face and remind you of what you wanted to do. We realize that for some of us this will create a initial flurry of annoying reminders, but this should be a one time temporary experience as Astrid helps you catch up again ( in 3.2.6 this was a little over zealous! 3.2.7 fixed a bug that was causing some of us to get overwhelmed completely by reminders!).
2) Smoother Scrolling of your list
In previous versions info about tags, lists and notes would be loaded separately for each task. There were some good reasons for this, but many of you found it awkward that information would take time to appear. Now after an initial loading of the list your tasks with all their lovely tag information should appear instantly.
3) Made Manual Sync easier
The manual sync button in now one click from the menu. Some of us use this sort of like a refresh button if we are constantly switching between our web based task management service and Astrid. We also move the setting for synchronization services to the Settings menu. (makes sense doesn’t it?)
To see a more detail list of changes in this and previous versions feel to visit http://bit.ly/astrid-changelog.
Thanks again for using Astrid. Your comments and feedback are helpful for us and many others!
22 Comments
Excellent!
Thanks for your hard work.
Your program is awesome and I appreciate the upgrades. Do you have a timeline when it will synch with Google tasks???
Thanks
Nice… I like!
One problem I found with the new manual sync button in the menu… the popup window displays 4 options: 2 RTM & 2 Producteev.
Eric,
The rest is mostly implementing the mapping and sync logic which we have done twice now (for RTM and Producteev). The the first version likely won’t have the manual ordering or true subtasks but we should be able to support indenting and the google tasks list order.
There should be something out before to long (maybe two weeks?). We finished the hard part by reverse engineering the Google Tasks API (google didn’t provide one themselves and we got tired of waiting
Trev,
Thanks for letting us know.
Super strange. Could you post this at getsatisfaction.com/todoroo and let us know what phone/version of android you are using? this might help us figure this out.
thanks for the great program. I installed 3.2.7 and it appears that my notes have disappeared from the task list. I went into a task using edit and the notes are still there and in the settings ‘show notes in task’ is checked. they just arent showing under the task anymore. they were before this update.
You guys have created a great program!
I do have a couple of issues after upgrading to 3.2.7 on my TMobile’s Samsung Vibrant:
(1) The popup window shows 2 RTMs to synchronize with
(2) The tasks I’ve added today in RTM have been duplicated in Astrid
Gil,
Thanks for letting us know. The duplicate tasks is strange. Is this happening consistently?
Chris,
Thanks for letting us know. It seems like there is what is known as a caching issue. We will need to refresh the list when this setting changes. We will schedule this fix for a future update. Super helpful that you brought this to our attention.
Jon
Hi Jon,
It’s the first time I’ve seen duplicate tasks. Two tasks had a future due date (Sun 29-Aug) and one is a recurring task, where the duplicate entry is due on Fri Aug-27.
One more thing: I logged out from RTM and now I cant log back in. After taking me to RTM’s authorization screen, I get an “Application successfully authorized”. After clicking on “Done” I get the error message “Sorry, there was an error verifying your login. Please try again. Error Message: null” I find it odd since I’m already logged into my RTM account. It also happened with my wife’s account using a Samsung Vibrant as well. Bottom line, we can’t sync with RTM.
Astrid will never be a serious contender until you get some project management functionality built in and integrate google tasks. I have a million things to do, one little list does not encompass it all.
I’ve happily downgraded to version 2. I hope that i didn’t loose anything in the process.
Sorry guys, but v3 does have very important issues:
1) The list lags a lot. It’s even hard to scroll because of that! After loading additional data (like times and tags) you resize controls, and shift them on screen. That’s not very usable you know?
2) Gesture detection picks up prolonged scrolling (when you keep the finger on screen). So again, browsing the list becomes frustrating at least.
3) Probably due to a problem with syncing, my done items uncheck themselves. Deleted items tend to pop up again. And I use the sync only for backup. I don’t touch the RTM website at all. It happened twice, rolling back all my “checks” and deletes from last week. The second one made me switch to v2.
4) I’ve used due dates AND deadlines extensively. It was one of the best features of Astrid and now it’s gone
To be honest. It’s worst upgrade I’ve ever seen in my life. Seriously… If you make such big changes, at least run an open beta before making a switch.
By removing my comment you’ve proved my point. Thank you
Rafal,
First of all, as we have said in previous posts we know that this update didn’t go well. Frankly we screwed up in a number of ways. We have done our best to update v3 in a number of ways (with over a dozen fixes updates since its initial release). Our development team has been focusing exclusively on astrid for the past 3 weeks and we are doing our best to make Astrid better.
Which version of v3 have you had issues with? In the most recent update we have improved a number of the issues you raise.
1) Scrolling speed. This was a big fix we did in v 3.2.7
2) I don’t understand the gesture detection issue. Could you share more?
3) the done items unchecking is strange. This can appear to happen with repeating tasks but I can imagine that this would be frustrating. RTM sync is pretty difficult. you might try producteev. RTM doesn’t have (or their api doesn’t have) unique ID’s for tasks. This makes sync a bit of an issue but the issue you are describing sounds strange. You might consider backing up using our native backup and emailing it to yourself. Part of why we have moved to v3 is that it allows us to extend it more rapidly.
4) We understand that the goal deadlines was a unique feature to Astrid 2.x. Unfortunately it was also very confusing for many users.
5) We actually did run a beta but not long enough. Part of what was challenging was that the froyo push was coming up and we didn’t have the developer resources to maintain both versions through the update. Unfortunately we traded bugs we know for bugs we didn’t. Turns out some of the bugs we didn’t know were really bad. We think we have solved most of them but more fixes are coming.
We have been happy to offer v2 and are glad it is working for you. I recommend you come back in a couple weeks and let us know what you think again.
What are we contending with
I am curious if you have tried the integration with Producteev? If you click he little button on the top left of your list I think you will be surprised with quite a bit of powerful functionality and multiple lists.
For some of this functionality visit: http://blog.todoroo.com/astrid-for-android-does-it-again-does-what-you-ask/
We are working on google tasks integration and we hope to have it out in a week or two.
Rafal, we never removed your comment. We do moderate first comments though. Sorry to give you the impression that we were intentionally filtering you.
Gil,
Is RTM sync still not working? RTM periodically has issues. If you are continuing to have this issue if you could post it at http://getsatisfaction.com/todoroo. That is where our customer support guy spends his time and other users might also be able to help you more. If it start working again please let us know!
Best,
Jon
Hi, I just paid for astrid power pack, but it appears that I am not running the latest version of astrid. How can I find what version is om my phone, and where/how do I download the latest version?
Thanks for your quick reply,
Mort
Count me as thick but is there a simple (.exe)file to install from my PC? I am anxious to try Astrid but even though I have adjusted my new HTC Sprint Evo to allow “Unknown Sources”, I cannot get Astrid to download.I have HTC’s Sync and installer running on my PC. Is there a file I can download so I can use the HTC App Installer?
Astrid was working great until the latest update. Now, it’s constantly telling me Astrid crashed and must force close when I’m running other apps. Astrid has stopped syncing with RTM. It says “Not Logged In,” and when I tap on RTM to log in, it just hangs, and eventually says “Activity Remember the Milk (in application Astrid Tasks) is not responding.” Waiting doesn’t help.
I have a Moto Droid running 2.2.
First, sorry but i didn’t know the comments are moderated…
Then to the answers…
0) I always use the newest versions. I’ve decided to downgrade after probably one day of using the newest one…
1) I still had the problems with 3.2.7. Scrolling was very choppy on my Legend. But the most frustrating thing is that when you stop scrolling, lazy-loaded things suddenly pop up, shifting UI elements. It’s hard to read, and painfull to click “Edit” without hitting “Start timer” which shows up in a split of a second.
2) Press the screen and move up/down to scroll the list. Without lifting your finger move to the left or right – Astrid will think you’re making a gesture, show the trace and stop scrolling. I think that after a scroll is detected and “proven”, gestures shouldn’t be picked up.
3) I had problems with reoccuring tasks. I understand problems with RTM sync, but it works well enough on Astrid v2. Maybe you could store some more information in “description” field on RTM. HTC Sense does it with google contacts.
4) Maybe there are confusing, but they should be available as extension (or in power pack), at the time of release. People don’t generally like if you take out features which make the app stand out from the crowd…
5) I understand the pain, as I’m also a developer. I see your good intentions with v3, but i believe that it did more bad than good. I’ll stick with v2 for some time, but will come back now and then to see the development.