I have been reading all the discussions about the use of colour in Agenda, it seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment, no doubt in part due to the increased flexibility provided in the latest Agenda 18 update
I was wondering if there is any way to assign a colour to a Project so that any notes contained within that project shared the Project colour? I would find this useful in the ‘On the Agenda’ view as a quick reference to which projects were still in need of attention.
I understand I can get a similar result by setting up and using a Template, but obviously this means I have remember to use the appropriate Template each time I create a note, with my request the colour would be added automatically to any note in the chosen Project…
I know this is probably an edge case but I can’t see it mentioned anywhere on the forum, or in the excellent videos we get from Alex from time to time.
Thanks for the suggestion, it’s indeed something that would make sense to make a project default setting, similar to how we would also want to make it possible to assign a template per project that would be used for new notes. We hope to make this possible in a future update.
I don’t see it as an edge case at all. It’s a natural progression of the possibilities of color as an identifier. I would still like to see note colors as a left side vertical bar as is in the timeline. Let’s keep that just between us though. I hesitate to use the word option with @mekentosj so I’ll suggest it as a choice.
I like the idea of coloured left side vertical bars in notes, the whole concept of using colours in Agenda does seem to help provide focus to my work it seems, and this would certainly provide a clean way of using colours if they are needed.
One thing I am noticing now in the ‘On the Agenda’ view is that coloured notes are giving me a kind of faux heat map effect by showing me which projects need the most attention. This, however, is a bit misleading as it is governed by the size of a note - a short note doesn’t occupy much space, whereas a long one can be more than a whole page and needs to be scrolled though.
My notes that are password protected naturally only take up one line and this got me thinking how useful it would be if notes in the ‘On the Agenda’ view could have the option of being collapsed to show just their title, and then expand to their full size when the title was tapped (I haven’t searched, but this idea may well be covered by others on the forum).
If this was the case, then the ‘On the Agenda’ view could show many more notes per page, and give an easy to read heat map of where my attention should be directed. I know this is going out on a limb from the initial colour discussion, but the one thing seems to naturally lead to the other, at least for me.
Hmm, I see there is an option to collapse a note, but it needs to be done manually for each note. I can see why this would be the case, but an Auto Collapse (as first mentioned in 2018) would in my opinion be a great option for the ‘On the Agenda’ view.
I can see though, that it might be difficult to implement.
It sounds that all you need is to use the Table of Contents at the top of the overview/project, which gives you a “just titles + background color” view. Ignore the bogus example titles, but you get the idea:
This in fact is what I have been doing and it mostly works - with one small caveat.
I work mainly away from my desk and as such use my iPad with a keyboard and trackpad. When I scroll through the Table of Contents using my trackpad whenever I hover on a note then it assumes the accent colour of the system that I have set in preferences, instead of the colour of the note that was previously set. If I move away and rest on another note then that takes on the system accent colour and the colour of the original note that was hovered or rested on returns to it’s set colour. This slightly breaks the notion of all the same coloured notes being together, albeit only temporarily.
Reading the above paragraph back sounds really confusing but I can’t really describe it in a clearer way - sorry!
What I am tending to do now is use the On the Agenda view and then use key combinations to collapse all notes, then on an individual note that needs attention I just expand it as required.
None of this is a big deal, the system is perfectly workable, but if there is an easy way for you to code an auto collapse for the On the Agenda view (as an option) then it might be useful to some people. Or not, it might just be me
