jpulgarin

Your feedback is super useful to us. The ability to turn off the active task is probably something we will incorporate in the next release. Having the ability to add tasks without a timer needs to be thought through a bit more by us since many users use their Effortless task list as a sort of notepad. Please let me know if you have any more feedback!

Comment · 7 years ago

There's a quick add functionality which allows you to add a task with a keyboard shortcut. Would Alfred integration still seem useful to you?

Comment · 7 years ago

Thanks Matthew!

Comment · 7 years ago

Thanks! Let me know if you have any feedback.

Comment · 7 years ago

Definitely! I got lucky in the sense that wanting to create Effortless forced me to learn Swift. I wanted much more control than something like Electron or BitBar could give me, and I wanted to make this app a reality. I had also been working professionally with Python for the last few years, and the codebase at my previous company was so large that I started to miss working in a statically typed language.

I didn't do anything that special to learn it. I gave the The Swift Programming Language book (1) a read and then started to get my hands dirty, using Google when needed. I had done some iOS development a long time ago, which also helped. I almost immediately found it just as easy to write as Python (and in some respects easier) but with a stronger type system. It also has a lot of great tooling like Playgrounds. So I guess my advice would be to give yourself a project which you want to use Swift for, ideally where you have no other alternatives. I've also tinkered around with using Vapor to create web servers using Swift, so that might be another option.

1. https://docs.swift.org/swift-book/

Comment · 7 years ago

There is one global keyboard shortcut that is available everywhere, and that can be changed from the preferences window. You can change this shortcut to be something that doesn't conflict with any of your existing shortcuts. The other shortcuts only work once you've pressed the global shortcut. So for example, if your global shortcut is (the default) ⌘E, to open the task list you would press ⌘E and while still holding down command press F.

Comment · 7 years ago

No blog post yet but I'm happy to answer any specific questions here. Effortless is a fairly simple app although there were some tricky edge cases to handle like when the task name is too long for the menu bar (especially when dealing with multiple monitors), and how to update the current task in the menu bar when making large edits to the task list. Making the app simple to use and cutting down the list of features to the bare essentials was also a process that involved a lot of iterations and talking with early users.

I learned Swift and native Mac app development in order to develop Effortless and have since fallen in love with Swift. It has replaced Python as my language of choice for many tasks.

Comment · 7 years ago

We have no trial version to download right now unfortunately. If you want to try it out feel free to send me an email at [email protected] and I can send you a promo code to download it for free from the app store.

Comment · 7 years ago

Thanks! We considered a subscription service with some added features but decided instead to focus on simplicity. Right now there is no syncing, but we will definitely consider using iCloud if we implement it in the future (and once it's back up).