OpenTodoList 3.47.0 Has Been Released

Hello everyone,

it is finally here: The last day of the year! So, while many of us gather with family and friends to waive goodby to the old year and welcome 2024, what else can we do to make the start into the new year even better? 🤔

You guessed it: A new version of OpenTodoList 🎉 And what to say… while we had planned for even more changes then we were able to get in, this release is packed with some exciting new features - next to the usual set of bug fixes 😉

Enough words for the introduction, let’s dive into the changes that come with v3.47:

Changelog

Toolbar Refactoring

It is not uncommon that we do some refactoring here and there, including the result within another, larger, change. However, this refactoring is worth being mentioned here:

We completely changed the design of the toolbar in the app! 🎉

Why that? Before, we had a lot of individual tool buttons in and dynamically showed them depending on how much space was available on the screen. While this worked, it was not very convenient, especially since there was no way to know what a concrete button did (except by trying it out). To improve here, we switched to a layout that more or less resembles a menu structure: You get four tool buttons, each of them making the various groups of actions available to you.

Another nice thing: On some supported platforms (namely, macOS, Windows and Linux systems which have a global app menu), the app also will provide a “normal” menu - this is great, as you can see the shortcuts connected to the various actions there.

rpdev/opentodolist#554: Deep Links to Libraries and Items

Links - they are a useful and widely used concept in the depths of the world wide web. And guess what? Your favorite Todo List and Note Taking app now also supports them 😉 Okay okay, actually, links per se are nothing new, you can add them to notes and item titles since long. But, what is new is that you can now generate links to libraries or items and use them within the app.

This way, you can easily cross link from one item to another. But it doesn’t stop there: On some platforms, the app also will be called if another app tries to open such a opentodolist:// link. For example, if you have a shared library with a friend, you can create a new item and then send a link to them via chat - they can then open that link which should immediately get them to that freshly created item. Currently, opening the app with such links from other apps works on Android and iOS, but other platforms will follow in the future 😉

rpdev/opentodolist#637: Automate upload To The Google Play Store

Automation is a key think to get more time for the really valuable things in life (such as, hacking on new features for OpenTodoList 😎). So, besides development work, we sometimes also invest into how to automate further parts of our regular workflows. This is another important step: We now can upload releases of the app to the Google Play Store from within out CI/CD pipelines.

rpdev/opentodolist#642: Exclude Libraries From Backup On iOS

OpenTodoList makes one promise: If you create a local library (i.e. which is not synced with a storage server), no data belonging to that library ever leaves the device. This is true on nearly all platforms - but iOS. Until now, if you’d include the app in iCloud backup, also libraries would be backed up.

While not all users might find this a bad thing, it somehow is, because that also interferes with synced libraries - if a library which is actually synced via a storage server is brought back by a backup, the app would try to re-upload the entire library 🤯 So, over time to exclude libraries from the backup.

rpdev/opentodolist#648: Support for Android 14

Another minor fix, but good for users of brand new Android devices (and devices which get updates early): The app now also runs on Android 14 🎉

rpdev/opentodolist#545: Add Some Screenshots To The README

The README.md file is an important part of many projects - it literally is the first thing users see when they land on GitLab or GitHub and want to learn something about the app.

Until now, that file was pretty much only text - it was up to the user to find some other way to learn more about how the app would actually look like. Over time to change this and add some images to the README, so when visiting our landing page on either code hosting platform, users now get a better impression about what they’ll get if they install the app.

rpdev/opentodolist#561: Update Images In App Store and Play Store

Nearly the same story applies for our app page in Apple’s App Store and Google’s Play Store. The images of the app where kind of outdated - especially in the Play Store, the screenshots dated back even before our migration to the Material theme 😱

We changed this, so potential users will not get an up-to-date impression on how the app looks like on the respective platforms.

rpdev/opentodolist#647: Fix A Bug Which Prevented Changing The Due Date Of An Item

Another nasty bug 🪲 we fixed here… in some cases, when you set a due date with recurrence on an item, you were not able to change the due date ot that item again. This is fixed now ✅

rpdev/opentodolist#636: Update To Qt 6.6.1

We updated the Qt framework, which powers the app, to the new 6.6.1 release. Qt is the basis that allows us to serve all major platforms from a single code base - and having new versions of it available also means: Pulling in a lot of fixes and new features we will make use of in future versions of the app 🙌

rpdev/opentodolist#646: Show The Current Due Date In The Date Picker

In the past, when you set a due date on an item and a recurrence pattern, if you wanted to change the due date, the date picker would initially show the original due date. Especially for a long running sequence item, this means that the current date and the one that the date picker would show could be weeks or months apart!

We changed this, so now, the date picker will show the next effective due date of the item by default.

rpdev/opentodolist#645: Fix Misalignment Of The Header Of The Date Picker

A little layout fix here: On some platforms, the header of the date picker was offset by one pixel or so. Well, no longer 😉

rpdev/opentodolist#644: Update To Latest Qt/KDE Flatpak Runtime

Similarly important as the Qt update: For the Flatpak version of the app, we updated to a more recent version of the KDE/Qt 6 runtime. This also pulls in Qt 6.6, plus, ensures that the runtime is still maintained and receives bug fixes.

rpdev/opentodolist#502: Allow Opening Items In A New Window

Another interesting new feature: You can now open items in a new window! This works on all desktop systems, i.e. macOS, Linux and Windows. This feature can be quite interesting and useful. For example, consider the following:

If you maintain one “todo list” to plan what you want to make for dinner each evening and another one for your grocery shopping. Then, if you’d want to fill up the grocery list with the stuff you need for the meals you put in the other list, you would have to jump between the two of them all the time 🦘

With the new feature, you can first make your planning in one list, open it in a separate window and in the main window, change to the grocery shopping list, where you can easily fill in the ingredients you need to get. Handy, isn’t it?

rpdev/opentodolist#643: Fix A Bug Where Wrong Todos Would Be Shown On App Startup

Back to bug squashing 🦟

There was a nasty little bug which, if you would e.g. re-open a todo list when restarting the app, show wrong todos in that list! 😱

This was due to a race condition - you could sometimes even see the correct list of entries first showing up before the list would then get filled by random items. Now, this is fixed ✅

rpdev/opentodolist#639: Allow Marking All Todos Or Tasks As Done or Undone

Sometimes it is all or nothing! Yes, even when handling todos. For this reason, we added options to mark all entries within a todo list (or within a todo) as either done or undone.

rpdev/opentodolist#641: Fix A Bug Where The Dropbox Sync Would Stop After A While

Last but not least: There was some bug which - under certain circumstances - could cause the background sync of a Dropbox backed library to stop. You had to kill the app and restart it for the sync to get back to a working state.

We fixes this, so now the sync should continue seamlessly in the background as expected 😉

Downloads

• Please find the download links for major platforms on GitHub.
• For Android, the release is available via Google Play.
• For iOS, the release is available via the App Store.
• If you use snap, you can install the app from the snapcraft.io.
• If you use flatpak, you can install the app from Flathub.
• For Arch based Linux distributions, you can install the app from AUR.

Known Issues

There is a minor known regression with the Qt6 based build of the app when running on Linux with Wayland. Reordering items via drag and drop works, but you sometimes have to click somewhere (e.g. the tool bar) to re-enable hover for the items after such a drag and drop operation. This has been reported as a bug against Qt in their bugtracker. Usually, you can start the app passing it the -platform xcb option to force using X11/XWayland (which does not show the same symptoms).