TaskPaper 3.6 Preview (281)

  • Added Palette > Date for inserting dates
  • Tag > Tag With … inserts dates for @due, @start tags
  • Fixed iCloud Drive to include TaskPaper folder
  • Fixed Refresh of “Hoisted” item search works correctly
  • Fixed Date parsing to support ISO week and day formats like 2016-W51-4

To use the date palette:

  1. Use arrow keys to change selected date in calendar
  2. Select a date using TaskPaper’s date/time formatting. For example “next mon”
  3. Press Return to accept or Escape to cancel

I’ve also updated the two embedded configuration files to:

// tags.taskpaper
Include Tags: @due @start @today @done
Exclude Tags: @search
// searches.taskpaper
Searches:
    Today @search(@today union @due <[d] tomorrow)
    Not Done @search(not @done except @done//*)

But unless you delete your existing config files those new ones won’t be installed. So you might want to add at least the @due and @start tags to your always included tags list so that you can quickly Tags > Tag With > @due even if it’s not already defined in your document.

Next step is to add some UI so that you can easily move items between your TaskPaper file and Reminders.app.

Issue Tracker

If you don’t see your problem in the issue tracker then I’ve missed it. Please help by adding an issue or sending me a reminder. Issues in Ready and In Progress states are for v3.5.

Download

4 Likes

@jessegrosjean, a great release as always. The date picker, especially, is excellent work. I love the inclusion of a calendar. This is one of those things that gets me especially excited about TaskPaper—because now I can recommend it to people who don’t have Keyboard Maestro available to help with date stuff!

My two cents: if a date is entered in units greater than hours, it seems like the resulting date shouldn’t show hours, minutes, and seconds.

For example, if today (Oct 21) I enter

1 day

The current result is

2016-10-22 11:32:31:382

even though what I think what most users are expecting is:

2016-10-22

Also, I would vote in favor of removing milliseconds entirely!

Thanks for your hard work!

When the TP window is not full screen, backspace deleting in a note (but not in a task or project) causes the screen to jump a bit at each letter deleted. I’m not sure if this is new in this preview version, but it seems tied to TP’s behaviour of shifting the edited line halfway down the window.

Jesse, where can I delete those cofig files?

The config files are stored in TaskPaper’s application support folder … you could get there by:

  1. Window > Stylesheet > Open Stylesheet Folder
  2. Go to the parent folder (that’s the application support folder)
  3. Look for a contained folder named “Configurations”, delete that.
  4. Then restart TaskPaper

I’m not immediately able to reproduce this, can you post a screencast demoing the problem?

i can’t figure out how to upload an mp4, so here’s a download link that i made in Camtasia (first time using the app) dropbox_download_link

I agree, I actually though I’d already disabled that in the preview release, but I guess I must have disabled it right after posting the preview. In any case I just format to minutes right now.

I’m not sure on this one.

First let me adjust your terms a little to match up with:

https://guide.taskpaper.com/reference/dates/

Using that terminology “Dates” do normally resolve to midnight of the given date (meaning no hours, minute, seconds are displayed). With dates the way to get the advance one day result that you are looking for would be “today + 1 day” or just “tomorrow”.

The trouble is in the current system “1 day” is matched as a “duration”. And durations are supposed to be offset from whatever the current date/time is. And if not specified that defaults to “now”. So in the current system “1 day” should really be read as “now + 1 day”.

Other duration cases to think about would be:

  • 2 minutes
  • 2 hours
  • 2 days
  • 2 weeks
  • 2 months
  • 2 years

I’m not sure that I see a good solution, but I’m open to more suggestions.

2 Likes

My two cents: if a date is entered in units greater than hours, it seems like the resulting date shouldn’t show hours, minutes, and seconds.

Using that terminology “Dates” do normally resolve to midnight of the given date (meaning no hours, minute, seconds are displayed). With dates the way to get the advance one day result that you are looking for would be “today + 1 day” or just “tomorrow”.

True—okay. That makes perfect sense from a technical perspective, and I can easily learn the habit of writing “today + 1d” instead of “1d.”

I would still say that if we are shooting for NLP perfection, most people mean something different when they say “in one day” than they do when they say “in twenty-four hours.” And I think most users would be thrown off to find that TP interprets those terms interchangeably.

Other duration cases to think about would be:

I’m not sure that I see a good solution, but I’m open to more suggestions.

I would say: let any hours or minutes entered resolve to a date and time, but let any days, weeks, months, or years entered resolve only to a day.

But! I understand if you aren’t crazy about that idea.

One alternative would be to have a shorthand syntax for today + . For example, ++. If you think other people than me would use it, of course!

I think that would still lead to oddities. For example “3pm + 1 day”.

When I do the final calculation I do it by first calculating the base date–midnight of some day. Next I set the time of that date if any time is present (such as 3pm). And finally I offset that date time by the durations detected. I think the current implementation works well for cases like:

  • today + 1 day
  • 3pm + 1 day
  • 20 min + 1 day

I agree that it’s not obvious what “1 day” does, and many/most people might expect it to work different then it does. But as part of the whole date language I think that problem is better then adding special case rules that will complicate the description of the entire system.

This is the first preview of TaskPaper that really exposes dates to end users. I think I’ll leave the current behavior in and see how it goes for a bit. But can revisit if it continues to show as a problem.

Thanks again fro the great feedback!

2 Likes

Thanks I can recreate the problem now and will look for a fix.

I agree that it’s not obvious what “1 day” does, and many/most people might expect it to work different then it does. But as part of the whole date language I think that problem is better then adding special case rules that will complicate the description of the entire system.

This is the first preview of TaskPaper that really exposes dates to end users. I think I’ll leave the current behavior in and see how it goes for a bit. But can revisit if it continues to show as a problem.

True—that makes sense! Thanks!

1 Like

This should be fixed in the next release… had to dig deep to find this, good news is the fix should fix other cases where scroll jiggles would periodically happen. Thanks for reporting this!

Great news. I live in TaskPaper…