When you install, you’ll notice few changes. The UI is streamlined and more consistent. Top bar is now working as identical as possible, both on lists and on items view. This is lists view:

And this is items view:

The UI is also working consistently and enables / disables buttons as needed. Thus now, when you’re in Edit mode, add-new-list or back-button are inaccessible. This lessens the available workflow paths and allows you to focus on singular tasks.

Import / Export

That new button next to Edit is where the main 1.4 feature is. Tap it on lists view and you’ll see the options slide down:

Here you have the option to add lists in, from another device (more on this later). Tap at least one of the local lists and then the other two options become available:

Of course, you can still import lists, regardless of what is locally selected, thus middle option is not disabled.

On the items view, this is almost identical, with the difference that all 3 options are always available, except when list is empty.

So, how this works?

Mailing

If you mail lists, it will open the mail controller inside the app, including all the lists you have selected. If you do this on items view, it will naturally add items from that list. This is how the mail contents looks:

- - - - [only to do items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

2 large mochas

1 large late

- - - - [only done items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

*1 small late

- - - - [all items] - - - -

Coffee for the office

2 large mochas

*1 small late

1 large late

The layout is pretty clear; list items are shown in 3 groups:

• only to-do items
• only done items
• all items

This corresponds to the three tabs you see on the items view in Quickie. The * in front of the item denotes a done item. In order to get this into Quickie, select whatever group you want and copy/paste it into Quickie’s Add new list (+ button on lists view) or Add more items (+ button on the items view) screens.

If you mail out multiple lists, their contents will simply be added to the mail body, one by one.

Of course, you can also copy this in the mail controller screen before sending, then close that screen, switch to Messages app and send the list over SMS. From then, copy/paste into Quickie on receiving end.

Bumping

Bump™ is a service that exists for quite some time, but which recently got a big stamp of approval when PayPal implemented it in their iPhone app.

How it works in Quickie:

1. Select some lists in Quickie that you want to transfer to another iPhone. Tap Bump lists out
2. Tap Bump lists in on the other iPhone
3. On both devices, the Bump connect screen will show up. Once you see this screen

   
   then simply bump one device with another. You don’t have to bump the devices themselves, it’s enough to bump hands holding the iPhones (as the Bump logo shows).

4. You’ll be asked to confirm the transfer on both devices and after that, the magic happens. Data will be transfered, Bump screens will go away and you’ll see the lists on the target phone.

You can bump any number of lists you want. The common way I use this feature is when I get home from work and my wife bumps me the list of things I need to fetch from the store; pronto. :)

I hope this above is correct in all the languages that Quickie is now localized: German, French, Spanish and Hebrew. :) There’s also support for my own, Serbian (both in Latin and Cyrillic) but since Serbian is not an official language on the iPhone, it will have to wait until Apple adds it to iPhone OS.

Translation is the main feature of Quickie 1.2. I built Quickie to support localization from the first version and this is just the first fruit of that work. German, French and Spanish translations were done by LocalVersion — major kudos to Toni Rovira for great response times, mostly under a day. Swedish is done by my brother Damir, while Hebrew translation is by Ziv Kitaro, a writer and journalist from Israel. Big thank you to all of them, for the generous help and their time and effort.

The new icon is the most obvious visual change. I’m pretty happy how it turned out, I hope you will like it too.

One of earliest requests was for the application badge. I was thinking how to do it, since there’s room only for one number. One option was to add up all the to-do items in all lists and show that; I quickly gave up on this, it would not make much sense if you have one week-long list and one for the day.
Thus I decided to use the number of to-do items in the top most list. That would probably be the most urgent/important list to you, so it makes sense to use it. Re-ordering lists is easy, in case you want to change which list is connected with the application badge.

Minor improvements: UI is refined, buttons are re-drawn, a list with no t0-dos left is grayed out a bit.

Please note that while Quickie is now localized into 4 more languages, I don’t speak any of them. Thus if you write to me, please do so in English or Serbian. As usual, comments and suggestions are more than welcome.

First, you can now add multiple items to existing list at once, in the same way as when initially creating the list — using separate multi-line input field. When in items view, tap Edit then the + button in the top bar and type in. I was contemplating other solutions but in testing they proved to be counter-intuitive and surprising. This solution adds to the consistency of the interface, which I value greatly.

Second, you can now re-order both items and lists. This was originally planned for later versions, but I switched gears due to UI changes and features got moved up a bit. This is primary reason why I never publish road maps for my apps. Things that seem easy when outlined can turn out to be quite a challenge and could actively prevent the releases.

Third, in-app help is gone. Quickie is very simple and that icon was taking space that can be used better. More important is that help text, as the single largest body of text, was actively stopping the internationalization process. Apart from the help, the Quickie UI has about 20 words and short phrases — help section was like 20x that. So it’s gone and translations are coming in.

I intended to ship 1.1 with at least 2–3 translations, but decided to leave them for future, as I did not want to postpone the 1.1 anymore. Once first translations are in, you can expect 1.1.x in the updates.

Forth, the green check-mark for done item is now on the left. I really liked the left/right split, as it clearly separated the done and to-be-done items. However, with such layout, there was no place to put additional stuff I want to implement; I tried all UI layouts I could think of, nothing worked satisfactory. Thus, change. The space on the right is now free and will be used for a lot of stuff soon.

Fifth, audio cues are changed. Hopefully for the better. :)

Sixth, the UI widgets are re-visited, as they were few pixels larger than regular iPhone OS widgets. The interface is also polished a bit and extraneous movement of the items when entering/exiting edit mode is removed and whole experience is better. Widgets now slide in and out while the text stays in place.

I hope you’ll like the changes; please let me know in either the comments or through Feedback page.This is by no means an end, there are quite a bit more useful additions already in the works.

A review on the App Store page for Quickie is also very welcome. ;)

P.S. Quickie got great review on Smoking Apples. Very happy.

What Quickie does

Quickie is to-do application, made for people who occasionally need to quickly write down a list of things to do, checked them off one by one as being done and forget about it. This kind of ad-hoc lists is usually done in a hurry, of the top of one’s head.

Take this for example, a take away list of food to get for the office co-workers or for friends who dropped in to watch a movie or football game.

Creating new list

This can be typed in 30s — you don’t really want to spend any more time on this.

So the fast entry is paramount and Quickie delivers – list of things in Quickie is created by typing the list name, followed by items, each on separate line. No back and forth through multiple screens, no picking items from endless lists — just type what you need. I often just type-in shorthands for the things I need, not full names. Here’s the usual shopping list

• br
• che
• yog
• milk
• apl
• ora

which translates to bread, cheese, yogurt, milk, apples, oranges. On tapping Save, this text is instantly transformed into list of items ready to checked off.

List items, instantly ready to be checked off

Don’t worry if your forget something - adding items is just as easy and quick. Tap Edit and type-in new item, directly in the list.

Adding new items

Convenience and fast entry again — no need to go to another screen to enter the name, just type directly in the list. If you need to add multiple items, tap the green + icon and new placeholder will show up. Keep repeating that and you can add several entries as fast as you can type.

More goodies to come

Quickie’s development is driven by my needs so far and there’s already few new features planned for the future. I would really like to hear what you need. Few suggestions from beta testers are already in development for one of the next versions. Let me know what would you like to see in the comments, or through this Feedback form.

All suggestions will be considered, taking into account the basic Quickie premise — simplicity and speed. Give Quickie a go through the App Store. Or watch the demo first on Quickie pages (where you can find more screenshots) and then decide. I’m sure you’ll find it useful.

Editing sequence in Run Mate

I first heard about the competition through this post by Dan Grigsby of the Mobile Orchard fame, when I started reading blogs again after finishing initial Quickie development.

What

I nominated Quickie in the Best Productivity Enhancer category and Run Mate in the Best Outdoor Use App category. These are the links for nominations:

Quickie nomination
Run Mate nomination

If you like our apps, please visit these links to help us spread the word.

Why

Since its inception in July, Run Mate is still (to the best of my knowledge) the only running trainer app that allows you to fully customize your running plan and individual sessions. As such, I can say — with no faked modesty — it’s a welcome change in the sea of similar apps that offer hard-coded single plans. With the planned feature upgrades in the next several months, I aim for the Best running app on the store, period.

Lists view in Quickie

Quickie on the other hand is as simple as simple can go. Combining beautiful interface with simple and fast execution, Quickie is (again) a welcome refresh in the sea of GTD-monster apps. Experience tells me that most people don’t need full GTD productivity and only need a simple list of items that can be checked off and possibly an alert (n.b. alerting feature is coming in future upgrade). Quickie is a young app, but already indispensable in my daily routine — I built it because I needed it. I’m certain there’s a bunch of people that would also find it extremely useful.