The Roadmap is solid for short- and medium- term.
I suggest that “attracting new users” is a goal, not a Task.
I disagree with the long-term list, though sharing would be the first of them after what we’re talking about here.
I agree with most of @LauraH’s comments (surprise!). Some personal perspectives:
Mobile
We all know this has to happen. Plenty of bugs and glitches in there. I’m wondering if mobile can support themes, since it’s a bummer to set up a nice theme on desktop and then be dropped into an alien landscape on mobile?
Repeaters
Long overdue to be brought up to snuff. This is a core feature and likely relevant for most users. They’re certainly not as bad as some other apps, but also not good enough to brag about, either.
Popup panes
One of those half-done features with worlds of potential. Hotkeys don’t work within them. Can’t insert new items, can’t apply hyperlinks, can’t edit Notes. Drag/drop is crippled. Not enough options for opening them. No way to transition from them to the main workflow (Board). But HUGE potential for both enhancing workflows today and as a springboard for future features. And they are a substantial differentiating feature, too.
Group-By Panes
Another powerful feature that really needs to be “finished”, though farther along than popups. What keeps me in Legend is the ability to apply parallel organizational structures (tags, priorities, etc.) to a single set of items – and then pivot the display to reorganize those items in terms of those structures. Filters are just selective display, not reorganization. That’s what GBPanes do, and nothing else can do that. They are critical for working with high-complexity Outlines.
- GB-agenda is generally fine but has room to improve. I presume this is the most commonly-used.
- GB-tag, contact, project, & header are relatively robust but crippled in some frustrating ways, largely (but not entirely) relating to their options (“exact matches” and “anywhere in hierarchy”).
- GB-date Panes are a bit jacked up and some settings don’t even make sense. Being unable to edit many of the item-dates also hampers their utility. They make me want to throw things.
- I’d like to see the various display options for GB Panes turned into explicit choices available for all GB types, rather than rolled-up into the type of GBPane. Item breadcrumbs, for example, only seem to be included in Panes where I don’t want them – and not in Panes where I do. I’ve seen a similar comment from another user about the right-margin ‘timestamp’. Maybe they can default on/off according to today’s arrangements – but let us change them if we need to.
Just…Panes
Pane manipulation should be slick and easy, but a number of “misses” just add up to a hassle in certain situations. And boy do I seem to always find them. Most of my workflows end with a PLAN Pane at the rightmost edge. I often want to jump straight from that PLAN into a pane zoomed to a single project. This should be easy, everyday, one-click stuff. But it sucks. My options are:
- First doing a global search on the project, then clicking to open in popup…clicking again to actually zoom into that project, then closing the Pane because oh yeah you can’t do squat in a popup.
- “Open in new Outline Pane”, which spawns an appropriately-zoomed pane to the right. But it’s as narrow as my PLAN pane; I want it wider. If i click the rightmost edge to resize, it just zips down to minimum and I can’t make it wider. Maybe if i drag the pane to the middle, then resize it? Except I can’t because there’s no way to ‘grab’ it!
- Best option: “Open Pane in New Board” from the Pane’s kebab menu. This is basically the result I want, but it’s done from a very weird place, and once I’m done with that Board I have to click to another one first, before I can RMB–>delete it to clean up behind myself.
Sometimes I feel like I’ve sat in a Ferrari but the steering wheel’s gone and the gas pedal was moved to the passenger side.
Expand/collapse
Definitely has some aggravations, and that is a high-touch feature. Over-aggressive auto-expand (for my use style) means I’m constantly re-collapsing my Outlines just so I can navigate. Interaction with filters compounds this.
Filters
Are profoundly better after the last overhaul (thank you!) but while they work better for those who have wrapped their heads around them, the learning curve remains a bear. They are a cornerstone but their power makes them a challenge. A final level of polish would help tremendously here. Briefly:
- Locking/Hiding isn’t at the same level it was pre-update. I still get nonsensical dashed lines on items that shouldn’t (and don’t) hide – and have to switch Boards to force items to show/hide after a change – that was never a problem in the past. How is nobody else talking about that?
- Consistent and defined terminology for terms like “filtered” “shown” “visible” “match” and (oh god) “inherit”.
- An explicit explanation of how-it-works, particularly in terms of how parent’s properties impact children, what legend is actually “showing” and what it is “auto expanding” (or not). It’s easy to get into the weeds with Filters and troubleshooting or explaining mystifying results is impossible when we don’t really know how they’re supposed to work. I can point to a ridiculous thread that illustrates this pretty well.
- Maybe a tweak or new setting for the auto-expand / show-children-of-matches behavior.
Clear and explicit terminology
Would make it much easier for us all to ask and respond to questions. It’s not actually “bad” right now – mostly it’s under-documented. Fleshing out the tooltips – to what some may call a ridiculous degree – would address that, then the community can put together more friendly guides or references. Such verbose tooltips would need a way to disable.
The forgotten Board Builder
I think this little gem is extremely under-utilized. Right now you can only even see it when creating a new Board, and it’s quite useless. It basically just adds a click to the process for no reason; it’s incapable of fully setting up anything but the simplest Boards. There’s so much more that could be done with it! I wouldn’t put this on the same level of importance as any of the others…but it fits into the theme of half-completed features. In fact, it’s less than half, as it doesn’t do much good as-is; you can’t even fully define a Pane (zoom and filter are missing). I suggest hiding it until it’s better fleshed-out, to prevent giving a poor impression of the app.
- Add the filter box to the Builder (plenty of room, above the Pane config)
- Add a dropdown to control zoom of each Pane (also needed when setting up a new board)
- Close Pane, Clone pane
- Set (and lock) numeric Pane widths
- Re-invoke at any time to edit an existing Board – great if you have broad changes that involve multiple Panes
- …Like bulk pane-renaming; not currently doable in the Builder but an easy add
- …Or bulk pane re-zooming
- Rearrange Panes (faster and easier than doing it in the Board)
- Get link for opening that Board directly via a desktop shortcut (new feature)
- Delete whole board
- “Zoom all Panes on this Board together” (new feature)
- “Filter all Panes on this Board together” (new feature)
- Access advanced or more-detailed Pane options to avoid cluttering the primary display – such as show/hide breadcrumbs or right-margin event-times, as mentioned above. Maybe pro.
- (later) set/manage per-board sharing
- (later) set/manage templates
LauraH Do you still have a running list of all the mirror bugs and inconsistencies?
I have a list, since 2019, for every thought I have about the app. Everything from pie-in-the-sky ideas, down to edge-case nitpicks. 219 “bugs” and 347 “requests”. 165 of those (29%) are tagged “UX issues” (maybe that’s the wrong term) – behaviors that aren’t “real” bugs but are just inefficient or infuriating and make you hate the app a little every time. I see some sprinkled in LauraH’s list above. The whole list needs to be cleaned, repro’d, updated. There are definitely already-fixed items. There are definitely what-was-I-thinking items.
I need to commit to processing maybe 20 a night…it’d take a month. Then, using GBPanes, I’ll be able to quickly put together ‘suites’ of same-area bugs/requests that are both efficient and impactful for Jay to work on. Kinda like we did with mirrors (but better). This has been my dream for a Long Time. It’s…hard to get around to 😔
I could do some of that manually right now – the GBPanes, popups, filters, UX. I’d be sad to not use it “right” but sometimes you just gotta git er done.
