What’s Recollectr 3.10 all about?
Getting ready for mobile! “What do a bunch of these features have to do with mobile?,” you might ask. Well, actually a lot. Recollectr 3.10 is a mish-mash of features we felt made sense to get out the door before mobile support to save ourselves dozens of hours of work in the coming months.
Are all of these features related to mobile though?
No way! Recollectr’s approach remains desktop-first, as that’s where most work is still done. Throw in a pinch of mission creep and you can see how things like an option for colored inline code and a restyle of the settings screen made the cut for this release.
Note Management Improvements
Now you can archive and pin notes, and count on your trashed notes to be removed automatically after spending at least 7 days in the trash.
Additionally it’s easier than ever to create a new, untitled note by simply pressing Enter in the Omnibox. We’ve never allowed this before as it would make accidentally creating a bunch of blank notes too easy, but now we actively prevent that by enforcing a maximum of one untouched note. If you already have an untouched note available, now Recollectr will automatically re-use that note to prevent blank note clutter.
Improved Note View
The note list is now faster, shows more notes, and supports more hotkeys and functionality than ever before. As always, every effort has been made to add functionality without adding complexity or bloat. It took a good bit of thought for us to finally decide on how this should all work, but we couldn’t be happier with the results.
The Omnibox and Notelist now support the new hotkeys, PgUp, PgDn, Home, and End to move between section headings in the Notelist, in addition to all the previous keyboard functionality. These headings can be expanded or contracted using Enter or Spacebar.
In addition to the new functionality, we’ve also re-worked the keyboard shortcut handling to be more fluid and less processor intensive.
Notification Overhaul
Recollectr’s built-in notifications have been a bit behind the rest of the application, but not anymore! In 3.10 we expand and overhaul the foundational work we first rolled out in 3.7, nearly 9 months ago. All the functionality of the browser-based notification system available since then is now built into Recollectr (although browser-based notifications are, of course, still available and even recommended.)
So what’s changed? Notifications now show a context menu when clicked that allows you to quickly snooze, reschedule or dismiss the reminder. Right now the menu might seem like overkill, but bear with us! As always, there’s a long term vision at play here, but Rome wasn’t built in a day, as they say.
Styling improvements
Recollectr’s styling has long been minimalist, sometimes to a fault. While this update doesn’t overhaul the styling application-wide, it fills in a lot of cracks left open in previous versions, and, if nothing else, really spruces up the settings screen!
This version also brings a new Note Information Tray that has some basic info about your note and provides a cleaner interface for copying or exporting a note.
We’ve also standardized tooltips across platforms and improved the built-in toast messages,
Other Cool Stuff
- F5 or Ctrl+; to insert the current date and time
- Optional colored inline code
- Display usage statistics for your local installation
Bug Fixes
Recollectr has staked out a lot of territory and a mainstay of our updates has been bug fixes. This update is no different (although future ones should be!)
Fortunately after months of work expanding the infrastructure of Recollectr, we’re finally turn our focus away from general application bugs and towards the editor. With 3.10, we’re now at a stage where most of the remaining bugs are minor or trivial, and reside within the editor. This update really starts hacking away at them, with over a quarter of the bugs fixed in 3.10 being editor-related.
We expect things to continue in this direction, with the exception of the inevitable spike in bugs that will come from the release of Recollectr Mobile.
The First Hints of Recollectr Mobile
Recollectr Mobile is almost ready for its first public release! When it comes, it won’t be pretty, and it won’t be fast. It will be an alpha version, so pretty much exactly where Recollectr on desktop was just 14 months ago.
To prepare for the public alpha of Recollectr Mobile we’ve been clearing up the worst of the performance bottlenecks. This process started in 3.9 and is finally completed.
That’s not to say anyone should expect anything remotely resembling good performance or user experience from our first version. If you’ve been using Recollectr, you know that we’ve been quick to stake out territory and fervent about improving once our work is out in the hands of the public.
We’ll have more information on Recollectr Mobile Alpha, and hopefully an installer for registered users around the middle of July!
For a full list of changes, check out the changelog for Recollectr 3.10.