It’s okay. You guys are really passionate about this product and philosophy, which I respect. It really is a great concept, and I know the team is constantly working on upgrades/fixes. There really isn’t anything like this, and I will likely continue using the app for managing personal notes where I don’t have to link between notes nearly as much as I have to do for work.
It is great to hear about the link fix coming in version 9.0, and I look forward to its release.
That’s really kind of you to say, thank you!
Looking forward to ensured (automatically updated) links on 9.0, @mekentosj and @drewmccormack.
Three ways to do this:
Ensured across all notes within the app, regardless of category or project of origin/destination. I guess this is what you’re aiming for and everyone expects.
Ensured across a single category: if the note escapes category then the link is broken; if the note escapes a project but remains within a category, the link is ensured.
Code Agenda for it to support binders for categories (a new top level organisational hierarchy). Links are ensured, so long as notes don’t leave the binders, regardless of category origin/destination.
I’m fine with option 2 or 3. I don’t ask for option 1. That’s what GTD’s “organise“ and “weekly review” are for.
By the way, in RE option 3, I tweeted to Bear Notes this a while back:
https://twitter.com/payencidh/status/1056125706378379264?s=21
I’m not subscribed to Bear cuz Agenda and it’s community rocks; it’s not even installed on my devices, but I’m happy for them and their users they are now ensuring links with so-called “Live Notes”.
Anyways, looking forward to Agenda 9.0.
It will be the first:
- Ensured across all notes within the app, regardless of category or project of origin/destination. I guess this is what you’re aiming for and everyone expects.
Please do note that we don’t do the live notes that Bear advertises, i.e. if you change the project name it won’t update the actual text of the Agenda link in notes that point to it. We feel that while sometimes this can be desired, sometimes it’s not (for example if you changed the text of the link to something else), and therefore prefer to keep the old name.
I also use Things 3. This is my system after trying a lot of apps.
I honestly like the agenda and sorted^3 combo using reminders as the go between. Has been great for me. I don’t know if any one else has used this combo.
I’m reluctant to try another app, but… “do this thing on this day” has been my single biggest frustration with OmniFocus for years. So, I’m interested.
How do you “use reminders as to go between”?
FYI I did try Sorted and have been really enjoying it. It quickly displaced OmniFocus on my iPhone quick-launch bar, which was a big surprise to me. I’ve been using OmniFocus for many, many years.
I don’t find Reminders particularly effective as a go-between at this point yet… Agenda requires a date & time on reminders, which I don’t really know until I actually schedule it. And Sorted marks reminders as complete when they’re imported, which marks them as complete in Agenda.
It’ll take a bit of time to find a good balance / interaction between Agenda and Sorted. But I’m finding Sorted really effective at actually scheduling the things I want to do, while still remaining flexible. At this point, Agenda is working really well for high-level strategic planning, and Sorted for tactical planning.
This!
I’m out too. I really loved Agenda at first, but the bugs are just stupifying at this point. At random intervals, I will be typing in the middle of a note and then find my cursor will jump unexpectedly to the end of the note as I’m typing which of course mangles whatever it was and breaks my focus to boot. I duly reported that bug, of course, but was told "I’ve seen this a few times myself, but it is difficult to track down…” So, in other words, it’s a known issue but they don’t know how to fix it. That’s pretty disappointing and doesn’t inspire confidence.
That’s on top of issues like corrupted undo/redo behavior (which is I think better now but was an issue for a long time), and weird display glitches. For example, a couple days ago as I was navigating my projects the entire window of Agenda started disappearing, blinking in and out of existence as I clicked, over and over. I reported that too, and was told that it’s a known issue. And sure, it went away after I quit and reopened Agenda, but… come on. That’s absurd.
Sorry, but I paid for Agenda. Two years running. I loved the features and the concept. But the more I use it, the more I get the feeling that I’m paying for the privilege of beta testing or doing QA. Every time my focus gets broken by some stupid thing like my cursor jumping around, that’s a loss of time, a loss of my attention, and ultimately a loss of my trust in this tool.
I use lots of indie software (Things, MindNode, Ulysses among others) and sure, they all have their share of bugs. But only with Agenda do I get the feeling that underneath the surface, the whole thing is held together with scotch tape and paperclips. “But” the developers plead, “none of those apps are doing what Agenda is doing! This is hard.” And to that I say: figure it out. Good luck.
Ah…BYE!
@d_chadwick … I think you are too pessimistic on Agenda, which have bugs but even great advantages in term of organising the workflow. Sometimes I have the same problem of the jumping the cursor but I believe that it will be fix in the future.
Well, hard words but not entirely untrue. I’m pissed by the edit behaviour sometimes too. But I will not give up hope.
You’re more tolerant than I. I think the TWO developers have done an amazing job with this app in a relatively short period of time. Can’t argue with the fact that the app may not do what EVERYONE wants. Can’t argue that there are ‘things’ that need to be corrected. But if someone wants to leave the party, don’t dump on the hosts on the way out the door. Just saying.
It’s just very frustating if you do serious work or things that are important to you and your tools are not reliable. I think that is what he meant.
Despite of that, Agenda is great, the purchase system is outstanding and the devs are doing a great job and support. I believe in this project.
I get it. I look at Agenda like I look at an Apple Beta release. Maybe neither should be used for mission critical work (just yet)! Agenda is a journey for me. I’ll leave it at that.
It obviously hurts to see people go, I don’t think there’s a need to write it up in this way but I do understand the frustrations. I personally believe part of what you write is unfair, many bugs were dumped upon us with the iOS13 release that we can only work around. That this gives a temporary feeling the app has become a lot less reliable is unavoidable. And yes it’s true that we need to figure it out, but when confronted with bugs that are introduced by Apple, and with aspects that make it really hard to replicate what we do on macOS successfully on iOS because of missing APIs etc, this takes time. Apple shipped iOS13 in October and we’re already on 13.2, we are about to ship our third major update in two months time as well. That’s as fast as we can go to fix these issues I’m afraid.
Same thing with the display glitches, the code has been identical since day one in that area, and then suddenly after some random macOS update, it appears. That’s just the way this sometimes happens. It does take time however for us to pick it up, diagnose and fix (if possible). Again version 9 will have code to try and prevent the issues, but the whole process takes time.
Fair enough, you don’t care, that’s your good right. And by all means, if you feel you need to move on, I think our business model is friendly towards that, you can continue to use the app to extract your notes, and will keep what you have. We hope it invites you to keep an eye on what we do and that it makes you return as a happy user again one day.
I’m attempting to do the same thing. I like the fact that I can keep all my project notes in one app with a calendar event reference.
In my project notes I created a sub-heading for emails. You can drag and drop the email and it will create a link back to the message. Much easier that attempting to search for it in mail.
I’m having a hard time pulling away from Things though. I have that application so ingrained into my workflow, I haven’t quite figured out how to break that tie.
It’s a bit buried in the thread - but I’ve pulled back from complete extraction (at least for the moment). Got some good shortcuts that have Things and Agenda talking/linking to each other and that works nicely for me.
I still create reminders in Agenda but import them into Things which embeds the Agenda link.
I also am not trying to replace OmniFocus with Agenda. I find Agenda great for planning and keeping track of the stuff that’s meaningful to me, and I can feed that information into OmniFocus. But there’s also a bunch of recurring stuff – take out the trash, feed the dogs, etc – that I don’t need to keep in Agenda.
