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my mac app didn't open at all for 4 months and i had no idea

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there's no changelog for PopTask anywhere, the app store "what's new" box is read by roughly nobody, so from now on every update lands in this thread, small ones as replies, bigger ones as their own post

what's shipped since july:

👉🏽 the app learns your times now, correct a suggested time once and it remembers for that kind of task, so if your gym is an evening thing, "gym at 6" starts meaning 6 pm for you .. weekdays and weekends stay separate

👉🏽 it picks up your shorthand and your usual typos too, and a name it doesn't recognise gets left exactly as you typed it 👨🏻‍💻 all of that follows you between iphone, ipad and mac through your own icloud

👉🏽 a speed pass, so the suggestion card lands while you're still typing instead of after you stop

👉🏽 and one i'm not proud of .. the mac app wasn't launching at all on MacOS Sonoma, had been that way since april, and i only found out because someone sent me a crash log instead of deleting the app [ a big shoutout to Chris 🏆 ]

 

what's next: 

at launch someone here [ narek ] made the point that voice input is useless if your hands and eyes are both busy, because you can't check what it heard .. it should read the task back, that's on the list

also on it: microsoft calendar, and proper two-way google calendar

 

which of those three would you actually use?
or is there something more obvious i'm missing 👀
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The shorthand and typo learning sounds surprisingly useful. Does the work completely on device through iCloud or is any of that processing hapening is the cloud?

 good question 👀 two separate things here so let me split it ..


the learning itself (your shorthand, your typos, what time "gym" usually means for you) happens on device and syncs only through your own icloud, so that part never touches a server, mine or anyone else's

separately, when PopTask reads what you typed to figure out the date and time, that runs on device on newer OS versions, and falls back to a cloud step on older ones .. the learned corrections are what get fed into that step locally, not sent up

so: learning stays on device + icloud, corrected text CAN go to the cloud depending on your OS version

I would use Google Calendar first. two way sync is one of those things you dont appreciate until it breaks.

this is exactly the problem, one way sync looks fine right up to the moment you move an event in google and PopTask has no idea


For me voice would win. if i am walking or cooking, i don't really want to look at a screen just to confirm what i said.

 yeaa this is the case i keep coming back to 💯

I agree with Narek on voice. if i am using voice because my hands are busy, making me check the screen afterwards kind of defeats the point.

 agreed 💯 if i make you check the screen, i've just built a slower way to type

i would probably do Google Calendar next. once tasks and calendar start talking to each other properly, the time suggestions become way more useful.

 that's the strongest case anyone's made for calendar and it's not the one i expected 😀

The Mac issue makes me wonder do you have any monitoring now that would catch something like that before a user has to report it?

 Same shape here. My UI tests launch the app every run and still missed it: CI strips the iCloud entitlement to sign the build, so the iCloud startup path never runs there, and that path was the crash. The check has to be on the signed build you ship.

 honestly no, and that's the uncomfortable part 😖


worse .. apple's crash data probably had it sitting there the whole time, i just never filtered by os version because the aggregate looked fine .. a launch crash on one os version disappears into a number that's mostly healthy

i would actually vote for voice before the calendar integrations. a task app that works properly when i am away from my desk feels more differentiated than another calender integration.

 omg, true .. calendar sync makes me match everyone else, voice away from the desk is a thing only i'd have hadn't weighed it that way round, thanks 🙌🏽

  Haha exactly 😄. Calendar sync is useful, but voice could give PopTask a much stronger reason to exist on its own. Now I’m curious how the voice workflow turns out.

Answering the question at the bottom first: read-back, easily, and it is not close. Calendar integrations are table stakes that people will wait for. Voice input you cannot verify is a feature that quietly teaches users not to trust the app, and that damage does not show up as a bug report.

But the actual story here is the four months, and I would not file it under embarrassing. It is the most useful thing in the post.

Nothing was broken in a way anything could see. The app did not crash on your machine. Downloads kept happening. There was no error rate to watch, because a launch that never happens does not emit anything. Your dashboard, whatever it is, could not distinguish "nobody opened it today" from "nobody could". Those two render identically as a flat line, and the flat one looks calm.

Which is why Chris is not just a nice person, he is your only instrument for that class of failure, and instruments that depend on someone being unusually generous are not instruments.

The cheap fix is not crash reporting. It is a heartbeat: the app phones home once on successful launch, and you alert on the absence, not the presence. Zero launches on Sonoma for a week is a signal you can act on. Zero crashes on Sonoma for a week is the same data wearing a reassuring face.

Same shape as the changelog thing you opened with, honestly. The app store "what's new" box being read by nobody is also a silence you had no way to measure.

this is the best thing anyone's said  🫠


the flat line is the part that got me .. i'd been telling myself "woahh i had no crash data", but the real problem is i had no shape of data that could have told me :') zero launches and zero crashes draw the same picture and one of them is a fire