I often have similar problems and that slows me down. I have time to see what’s wrong, but most Agenda users don’t have time to find a solution. I think the solution has to be suggested directly in the app and, if possible, during editing and not somewhere in the chat or hidden help. I know this is not easy to implement, but the new and experienced users will be very grateful for it. I think such improvements are more important than new functions in Agenda. Thanks!
The issue is that no matter what kind of alternatives we would offer, there would always be kind of a discovery issue so we don’t feel that’s the answer here, what you’d find logical others would never think of.
So instead we went with an autocompletion system that allows discovery by just starting to type. If you type \ you get a list of all options, if you then type “da” for either day or date you see that you probably want the “date” option, if you type an open bracket after the command you get the sub options etc etc.
If you use certain commands frequently you probably won’t need it anymore and just type the command straightaway. And if you use it very frequently you can always use text replacements or a tool like textexpander to build your own shortcuts.
In the end of the day, we still consider this a power user feature for people who really go deep with Agenda, for a lot of users this stuff is not something they’d dig into unless they have really started using Agenda in depth.
For me, that’s fine, but the autocomplete offerings, at least under ‘date’, are don’t cover all the options - ie there’s no indication how to insert the day as text into the note.
No, he is correct. The feature is currently hidden and not easily accessible. It is important for good customer service to make these functions more readily available, even to power users. After all, if they can’t find it, what’s the point of implementing such a feature in the first place?
Your product has excellent features, but the easier they are to access, the more customers will understand their value. While the word-completion function is a good start, you should also consider the point made by the other commenter, as well as the original questioner’s perspective. This post alone may not fully answer their question.
Here I have an example on the iPhone. At the beginning with autocompletion and later with text replacement. I use text replacement very often because it’s faster without having to search and select. Autocomplete is a good thing, but simple entries (date tomorrow) are a bit too complicated. Agenda is still great. I just want to help make Agenda a little bit better.
We’ll always listen and in this case will try to make it support the simple cases like \date(tomorrow), but in the end of the day it’s also a balance between how useful some things are versus the complexity of the system. It’s easy to add more options and more combinations to cater what seems intuitive to each, but as this thread already shows, the different options can easily lead to more confusion and a feel of it becoming too complex.
To put it simply, at some point it’s just easier to type “18/2/2023” manually than remembering the syntax for the text action.
Where this balance between the two is differs for everybody, just like how each of us uses keyboard shortcuts (cmd-A, etc) to a different extent, and each of uses a different set.
It can be a bit of a rabbit hole to go down in trying to optimise all the specific cases while in practice they would be used by very few or very infrequently.
Thanks for the explanation @mekentosj I quite understand you can’t please everyone all of the time!
Being able to quickly add the dates for yesterday and tomorrow without checking what those dates actually are, and breaking my flow of thought, would be great.
I would love to have an editable date holder. Something similar as in a Google doc. It would be faster for me at times to pick the date from a calendar than remembering syntax. I also would love to easily tap a date to modify it.
