beorg news - July 2022
News, plans and how to get organized using beorg
3.16 - 3.17 - beorg update - UI update and more
Since beorg 3.15 there have been many improvements, some of which you’ll have already noticed in beorg 3.16 released a few weeks ago. The most visible is a minor UI refresh which replaces some of the custom iconography with Apple-designed SF symbols. Additionally, more context menus are replacing action sheets where it makes sense.
The majority of the work in the latest release, which may be still a few days away on the App Store if you are reading this newsletter before the end of July, has been on making beorg more robust when moving in and out of the background. Read on to find out more.
If you are reading this newsletter out of curiosity and haven’t yet got beorg installed head over to the App Store:
If you have any feedback to share on the new update, or anything else beorg related, join the beorg forum. 💬
✍️ Drafts
If you’ve tried using beorg for note taking you may have found sometimes what you were working on disappeared. This can happen if you are working in the item editor, switch to another app, forget about beorg for a while and then return at some later point. It is likely that iOS has killed beorg to free up memory and lost your latest changes.
As more people use beorg not just for task management but for note taking it has become important to resolve this deficit. beorg now saves a draft of changes in the item editor when switching to the background. If when beorg restarts it finds an unsaved draft it will put it onto the screen so you can either continue working or cancel if no longer needed.
📝 Further note-taking improvements
When you create a new note in beorg 3.17 (assuming you have the notes tab enabled) the title will now be automatically focused, and when you tap Done the notes editor will be automatically shown. This makes it quick to take a note in a new file.
If you have subfolders enabled but don’t want a Notes tab, you can now disable the notes tab. To do this you need a beorg init.org, which you’ll have if you’ve got subfolders enabled, and add:
(set! show-notes-tab #f)Many thanks to the user who suggested this change 🤗
🧹 Sync workflow
As beorg works with files with a UI based around editing small parts of those files, i.e. a single task, sync is more complicated than it is with many simple apps. beorg 3.17 includes a couple of minor improvements to assist with sync:
The last sync date and time are shown in the top right context menu on the Agenda and Tasks tabs.
If you try saving the item editor while a sync is in progress you’ll be told you need to wait until it has been completed. This prevents you from saving a change only for it to be overwritten by the sync after beorg has analysed which files should be scheduled for upload/download.
⛷ Further improvements based on user feedback
There were a couple of additional changes in beorg 3.16/3.17 which were suggested by users:
Support for the filetags keyword. There isn’t yet a UI for editing these but beorg will now use filetags when searching.
Deleting items directly from the Agenda/Tasks tab is now possible by long pressing an item and selecting Delete from the context menu.
Dates with a repeat and an end date will now use the end date as a termination of the repeat.
Some uses of repeat were stopping beorg generating the agenda for anything other than the current week. This has now been fixed.
Thanks to everyone who gets in touch with suggestions via the forum or by raising a ticket.
What’s next?
I have made a start on playing around with ideas for improving the outliner. This work is ongoing and don’t expect to see anything this side of Autumn.
In the last edition of this newsletter, I mentioned making better use of the cache database. I haven’t done much on this, but this is my next priority.
If you want to help support future beorg development there are several ways you can help:
🪄 Take out a subscription to beorg Premium or purchase beorg extensions (depending on whether you prefer subscriptions or one-off purchases)
❤️ Use the tip buttons at the bottom of the Settings tab
👋 Mention beorg to others on social media, or write a blog post about how beorg is useful to you