Laying the foundations for the future: Tasktic 1.5

Later today Tasktic 1.5 will be available for download on the App Store as a free update for all our Users.

We have no revolutionary features to announce today, but this is a good release: under the hood we’ve worked long and hard to adopt new technologies (a new version of Swift, iOS 9 and watchOS 2 capabilities, updated libraries and a crash reporting and analytics system that’s respectful of our Users’ privacy, as we’ll describe in detail later) and to lay the foundations for the future development of Tasktic.

Here’s a quick recap of what’s new and what is improved in Tasktic 1.5, plus a few details about our thought process on important questions like analytics and App Store reviews:

• Tasktic now works with iPad multitasking modes (of course, only on devices that support them), so you can be even more productive. We’ll look forward to your feedback on this much requested feature.

• Tasktic for Apple Watch has been rewritten for watchOS 2 and now it is much faster!

• While the free version of Tasktic is powerful enough for many Users, we’ve made Tasktic Pro more affordable for students, veterans and unemployed people: the new Tasktic Pro Value Edition offers everything (every. single. feature.) Tasktic Pro does, but for an even lower price. This is purely based on trust: if you’re a student (from first grade to college / university, age doesn’t count, it never does), a veteran or you are currently looking for a job, and you’re interested in the advanced features of Tasktic Pro (recurring tasks, multiple tags, statistics and achievements, export to file, overdue tasks in Tasktic Today and Tasktic for Apple Watch, etc.), you can get Tasktic Pro Value Edition - as usual, buy once and use forever on every iOS device you own - and enjoy those features for an exceptionally low price. If you’re not part of those categories, please purchase Tasktic Pro or, if you feel like it, show us your love and buy Tasktic Pro Big Supporter (as over a quarter of our customers do)!

• Starting from this release, Tasktic requires iOS 9 and watchOS 2; we’ve supported iOS 8 and watchOS 1 for as long as possible, but with less than two months to the introduction of iOS 10 and watchOS 3, and with so many interesting features that were precluded to us by our legacy support, it is time to move to the current versions of Apple operating systems.

• We’ve squashed some bugs: one prevented the task selected in Tasktic Today, inside Notification Center, from being opened by the main app; another, in Tasktic Share, caused both buttons to show the same “Cancel” label instead of “Save to Inbox”… and we’ve also made other minor bug fixes (some rare issues caused by iOS 8) and improvements.

• Adopting the latest versions of iOS and watchOS is part of our continuous effort to get rid of every single bug and, Heaven forbid, crash. To accomplish this goal for our Users and move Tasktic forward, we’ve realized we need a little more knowledge about crashes and what happens within the app (meaning, which features and sections are most popular and which need more work, but not of course the content you save in Tasktic). As we’ve always said, and we’re proud to repeat today, we’re committed to completely avoid being creepy with your data; not only we don’t have access to what you save inside Tasktic by design, we don’t even want to know who you are: you purchase Tasktic directly from Apple on the App Store and you don’t need to create an account, nor provide personal details such as name, payment informations or email, to use Tasktic. Having said that, we think we’ve found a great balance between getting useful, anonymous and aggregated statistics and respect our Users’ privacy by implementing Fabric, Twitter’s well respected and secure developer service for analytics and crash reporting that has been an essential part of many popular apps (Spotify, Foursquare, Pinterest, Evernote, Overcast… it’s a long list!) for years. Let us be clear at risk of repeating ourselves: starting with Tasktic 1.5, we’ll use Fabric only to collect anonymous and aggregated crash and usage informations; no personal details about the content of your tasks (task names, notes), project names, tag names, etc. is collected with Fabric or in any other way. We can’t connect any information with a specific user, nor we want to. Most apps need this kind of generic informations, and we believe we’ve found a way to improve Tasktic and feel good about ourselves at the same time; if you’d like more informations about this change, please take a look at our updated privacy policy and don’t hesitate to contact us for clarifications!

• We get a significant amount of positive feedback (and many great suggestions / feature requests, all of them really precious to us) from our Users, especially via email, but honestly the number of reviews in the App Store has constantly been a bit low. We know the process of leaving a review for an app is slightly painful, we’ve written about it before, but Users’ feedback really makes or breaks a product in today’s App Store… so we’ve decided to be a little more proactive (hopefully not annoying) asking for reviews inside Tasktic. As anybody else, we don’t like to be prompted for reviews whenever an app starts and then again every two minutes, so that’s not what we have done before, nor it is what we’ll do from now on: up to Tasktic 1.4, we showed you a subtle reminder for the review only inside the first view, on the background of Tasktic Today, and only after you completed at least 3 tasks in one session and had no more tasks left for the day… so many conditions, chances are most of you never even saw that request. Starting with Tasktic 1.5, we’ll show you a quick prompt for review after you complete 3 tasks in a session and you haven’t been asked about it for the current release (it is important that users review new versions of the apps they love, since the App Store resets the “stars” for every new release, almost punishing updates) or you chose to be reminded about it later. If you agree to review Tasktic, you’re our new best friend; if you tap “No”, we’re still friends, but you won’t be asked to leave a review again until the next version. But seriously, we need your reviews! As mentioned before, you can also tap “later” to dismiss the alert without refusing to review the current version and you’ll be asked again the next time you open the app and complete 3 tasks in a row.

So, as we said earlier, this isn’t a feature-packed release, but it opens the way for a lot of features and improvements we plan to introduce in the next months. And since you’ve read so much, a sneak peak is in order: when Tasktic 1.6 ships in a few weeks, you’ll love to work with Tasktic at night.

As usual, thanks for your time! Please subscribe to our RSS feed to never miss an update and, if you have any question, please contact us at tasktic@cdf1982.com or send us a tweet at @TaskticApp, we love hearing from you!