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Each week, we review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week, but this week we’re taking off for the US Labor Day holiday. So, instead, we’re covering notable productivity software releases over the past month as an introduction of a new segment we’ll be adding to the show called Release Notes.
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In this Cast | Introducing… Release Notes
Headlines & Show Notes | Introducing… Release Notes
Resources we mention, including links to them, will be provided here. Please listen to the episode for context.
TestFlight 3.2 beta – Aug 24
- Use the beta version of TestFlight for Mac to test your Mac apps. You can invite registered Apple developers to download this beta version and use it to test your apps on macOS Monterey beta 5. We’d also appreciate your feedback on TestFlight for Mac, which you can provide through Feedback Assistant.
Asana
- Company Goals tab: The Goals view now contains two tabs: Company Goals and Team Goals. View your company’s mission and goals, choose which team Goals you want to view, and filter by goal owner or status.
- Easy access to Do Not Disturb on Desktop: Stay in flow while working on Asana’s Desktop app by accessing Do Not Disturb settings from the upper righthand corner.
- Multi-select tasks on iOS: Multi-select tasks and perform bulk actions like updating due dates and custom fields from your My Tasks on iOS. Get Asana for iOS
- New Academy course: Asana for Admins: Our new course in the Asana Academy helps Asana Admins manage their organization’s account with more ease and control.
Drafts
- Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do Integration
- Extensive integration with two of the most popular task managers: Google Tasks and Microsoft To Do. This version adds new action steps which can create individual tasks, or add each line of draft as a task, to lists in either Google Tasks or Microsoft To Do.
Evernote
- Announcing the filtered notes widget – Aug 24
- A new widget that unlocks Home for many power users like you and a recap of the recent features we’ve rolled out that will help you do more of the things that matter most.
Zapier
- Timing Timing is an automatic time tracking app for macOS. With it, you can get a full overview of your productivity, see what you worked on and when, then review your time whenever you like. Learn more about using Zapier and Timing together.
Raw Text Transcript | Introducing… Release Notes
Raw, unedited and machine-produced text transcript so there may be substantial errors, but you can search for specific points in the episode to jump to, or to reference back to at a later date and time, by keywords or key phrases. The time coding is mm:ss (e.g., 0:04 starts at 4 seconds into the cast’s audio).
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Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:03
Hello personal productivity enthusiasts and community Welcome to Anything But Idle, the productivity news podcast. I’m Ray Sidney-Smith.
Augusto Pinaud 0:12
And I’m Augusto Pinaud.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 0:13
And we’re your hosts for Anything But Idle. This is Episode 78. And we’re recording this for September 6 2021. Introducing release notes. So of course each week, Augusto Pinaud, and I review and discuss the productivity and technology news headlines of the week. But this week, we’re taking off for the US Labor Day holiday. And so instead, we’re covering notable productivity software releases over the past month as an introduction to a new segment we’re going to be doing in our regular shows that we’re going to be calling release notes. So in essence, you know, we track all of the various productivity apps out there. And if we’re missing any, let us know, we’ll continue tracking those as well. And when they update them, we will produce a document. And that’s available to you inside of personal productivity club. And so if you join personal productivity club, you’ll see and find links to those documents with the show. So it’s gonna be a little bit different than our normal show notes, because those show notes will be only available within personal productivity club in the Anything But Idle channel. And so with that, let’s get into the release notes for this week. So what we’re what we’re going to do is just highlight some of the, the releases that various productivity technologies have put out each week. And so we’ve looked back for the entire month of August since we’ve not done this before. And we just wanted to highlight a few of the releases that have come out. And so we’ve got some releases from Apple with test flight to Asana, and other tools. So let’s start off with our first one. Augusto, what is our first release this week.
Augusto Pinaud 1:52
So our first release this week is test flight 3.2 beta. And for the first time that flight comes to the Mac, you don’t know what the flight is test flight allows developers to give access to software in a secure way to people who is willing to test and two people was willing to play with the betas or even their own team. But these are something that have existed on the iPad and the iPhones. I don’t know since when for a really long time, but never on the Mac. And it was announced in June that that’s like what’s going to be available in the Mac and finally, is out. So this allowed people to test software in a secure way for you get them feedback directly to the developer, but also to get the updates and really, really efficiently and it’s a really an incredible tool, if you are in the game of working and helping developers.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 2:50
Yeah, apples done a really great job with test flight on iOS. And so bringing this to the Mac OS platform just seems like a natural extension, I actually didn’t realize they didn’t have it before. So glad to see them. Go ahead and bring testflight to Mac OS and I’m looking forward to testing some software in it. Alright, so next up, we have some release notes from Asana and Asana has been busy. And so we’re just going to cover those items. Asana has put out something called a company goals tab. And literally reading the release notes. It says the goals view now contains two tabs, company goals and team goals. So you can view your company’s mission and goals. Choose which team goals you want to view and filter by goal or goal owner or status. So you can basically toggle between those two tabs. So you can see your your various companies missions and goals as well as the team’s goals as well, which is really nice. Asana has also added an easy to access Do Not Disturb feature on desktop sauna now has a desktop application. Again, like many other applications across the the ecosystem, they have adopted using the electron j s application framework. And so they’ve published an Asana app. And so you can have that on Mac OS and desktop and on Mac OS and Windows. And so now you can go ahead and check that little Do Not Disturb setting so that it doesn’t notify you while you’re, you know in flow, so to speak. Next, they have put out a multi select feature so that you can select multiple tasks on iOS. So to date, you’ve not been able to multi select tasks on on iOS, I have a sauna on my iPad. And it’s been quite frustrating because you know, you want to check off several things and make changes. Now you can do those bulk actions via iOS with the new update in my tasks. And then finally, I thought this was really interesting. They have launched a new Academy course. And this academy course is actually for Asana admins. So if you are the admin for your organization, there is now a new Asana Academy course that really walks through how to manage your organization’s accounts. And that’s really great that they’re putting together this learning material for folks to be able to, you know, get Asana admins up and running up to speed. What’s next on the release notes?
Augusto Pinaud 5:15
Next under the release notes is draft and draft announced that they are launching Google task and Microsoft to do integration draft is an incredible application in the iOS, and you can really integrate with a lot of things and the Mac as well as the iOS. But I think the extensive integration they are putting with Google tasks and Microsoft to do, it is going to be really, really fantastic for the heavy users.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 5:43
Yeah, I know several people who use drafts in there every day, it’s one of their everyday drivers for capturing and so on, so forth. And this is a great extension to be able to integrate your drafts with Google tasks and with Microsoft to do very, very excited to hear feedback when people start utilizing that. Alright, next up in the release notes is Evernote has released a new widget. If you don’t know what that is, Evernote has something called Evernote home home is now a new area within the Evernote application available both on desktop and mobile. And this is kind of like a dashboard where you can place different types of content into that dashboard. And so they have been putting out new types of widgets, which can show different types of information in the filtered notes widget. When I first saw it, I was I was confused, I really didn’t know why Evernote decided to do this thing. And then they provided it to me and said just try it, see what it’s all about. And I’ve fallen in love. This filtered notes widget allows you to be able to apply things like Saved Searches or other kinds of complex filtering so that you can actually see a dynamic list of a set of notes. And that means that now you can pay attention to all kinds of things. If you’re an Evernote personal, you can have one of those Evernote filtered widgets notes on your Evernote homescreen. If you are on Evernote professional, then you can have up to seven as I have learned. So you can have seven of those and filtered notes widgets, which means that if you have different parts of your life, and you want to pay attention to all of those things coming into your world, like I have several automations that send notes directly into Evernote. Well, now, it’s almost like a separate inbox where I can look at that. And when those notes are generated, I can now see them or I can do things that are the inverse, which is paying attention to when when some amount of time goes by, I want to be able to know that that time has gone by and those notes have had something done to them or have not had something done to them. And therefore I need to give them my attention. So really, really great way to be able to identify information. So that’s the filtered notes widget that is now in Evernote home. And that should be fully released out to everybody that has Evernote home on Evernote personal and professional and
Augusto Pinaud 8:04
is happier. And the integration with timing timing is an automatic time tracking app for Mac OS. And now you can get a full overview of your productivity, see when you’re working when. And not only that, integrate that with using Zapier with other applications inside pure timing together. Yeah, I’ve
Raymond Sidney-Smith 8:23
not seen many applications that do what timing purports to do, which is basically passively track your activity on Mac OS, and helps you keep time log so that you’re capable of understanding what you’re actually getting done on the Mac. And so I’ve seen many different applications that kind of do it. Of course, there’s rescue time, which is the primary, you know, one that I know everybody pretty much knows about. But having another one out there, that’s a good competitor to it is nice, it’s Mac focused. And so that’s always good to have and having it connect to Zapier means that, you know, as it tracks things, it can grab it and throw it into, say Google sheets or into other places or notify you if it sees you doing something and you want to be able to have some kind of behavioral intervention, you know, like have a little notification ping you those kinds of things. I’m really, really excited to see how timing goes and especially in its integration with Zapier. And so with that, that is kind of what we’re going to do in release notes in the segment that we’ve introduced to Anything But Idle starting next week. So each week, we’ll just run through the various products that are out there. And then once a month, we’ll collect them all together, put them in a document and then share them into the Anything But Idle group that lives inside of personal productivity club. So if you are not a member of personal productivity club, it behooves you to head on over to Anything But Idle comm forward slash community. I think there’s a button there click on that. If not, you can just go to WWW dot personal productivity club, go ahead and join the community there so that you can get access to that rundown each month. In the meantime, we are going to go enjoy our labor days with our families. And so Augusto, thanks so much for joining me on this special episode of Anything But Idle, and of course helping assemble these episodes every week.
Augusto Pinaud 10:23
Always. Thank you very much.
Raymond Sidney-Smith 10:26
Wonderful, okay over on Anything But Idle comm you’ll find our show notes with links to all the stories, tools of the week, extra stories that we didn’t cover, and so on and so forth. In our regular episodes. In this particular episode, you’re just going to find the few highlights that we made. And then the entire August release notes are going to be again in Anything But Idle, the group inside of personal productivity club so you can find that over there. If you have a productivity story or recent blog post you’d like us to discuss, head over to our contact page on Anything But Idle comm where you can tweet or dm us on Twitter at Anything But Idle. If a question or comment about anything we’ve discussed on this show or any of the shows, feel free to leave a comment on Anything But Idle on the episode page. So this is Episode 78. So you go to Anything But idle.com forward slash 078 for the episode number, and each of our episodes are numbered that way so you can jump to the particular one and ask your questions there. This is your first time watching the live stream. Feel free to ignore the video that is Feel free to subscribe to the YouTube channel so you can watch our live streams when we do go live weekly, since this one was pre recorded. If you are listening to the podcast after the fact Feel free to consider following us in your favorite podcast app subscribing to it is easy just head over to Anything But Idle comm click on the subscribe button in the menu and we have instructions for you to be able to go ahead and follow us and get episodes downloaded for free every week. And so with that we will see you all next time on Anything But Idle Here’s your productive life. Take care of your buddy
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Download a PDF of raw, text transcript of the interview here.