beorg news - April 2022

This is the third edition of beorg news. Last month was largely taken up with a family trip to London 🎡, followed by a couple of weeks of COVID 🦠🤒 and then playing catch up on all the work that had piled up 📥. I’m getting back on track and want to let you know a few things I’ve been working on recently and what’s in the pipeline.

Dates

I’ve been looking at a redesign of the beorg date picker 📅. As beorg has a heavy focus on task management the date picker is kind of important. In the current version of beorg the date picker allows you to:

• Pick a date from the calendar
• Toggle whether or not there is also a time
• Use text entry to go quickly to a specific date or perform some simple date arithmetic
• Tap buttons to move dates back and forth by either 1 day or 7 days
• Remove the date
• Set up a repeat and whether that repeat will set the date on completion to the assigned day + the repeat interval, the assigned day + at least the repeat interval and ensure its in the future or today + the repeat interval

Org mode however supports much more functionality, for example:

• Specifying an end date and time
• Support for habits with minimum and maximum ranges
• Warning and delay periods for deadlines and scheduled tasks respectively

Many of you have been asking for support for the above for quite some time. I’m still relatively early on in my quest to improve the beorg date picker but I’m committed to finishing the design and implementation in the near future.

Paused projects ⏳

There are a number of beorg features I’ve started in the past which are still not finished:

• Subfolder/recursive sync. This is pretty much done for Dropbox, WebDAV and iCloud. However before this feature can be enabled by default I need to add support for Box and the “Choose Folder” sync methods.
• Using a database to help beorg better support large numbers of files and improvements to performance.
• Better support for notes and Org roam. This is partly tied up with the above two. I use Org roam every day when taking notes and planning projects so I’ve a pretty big incentive to ensuring I can access all of that information when away from my computer.

I’m going to try and be disciplined 🧘‍♀️ and not starting anything new until the date picker and these are finished and in your hands 🤞.

Optimising syncing

The default for beorg is to perform a sync whenever a file gets modified. If you are using iCloud you probably won’t notice this, however if you use Dropbox, WebDAV or Box then you’ll frequently see the sync banner appear and notice you can’t do certain actions until the sync is complete.

I personally have beorg set only to sync when the app gets backgrounded. The main advantage is that you can make lots of rapid changes to many different files without having to wait for beorg to sync your information. If you haven’t tried this to see if it works for you turn off the “Auto sync on modify” switch on the beorg Settings tabs.

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If anything you’ve read here sparks any questions or thoughts please post on the beorg forum. Thanks for reading! 👋