There is a threshold, somewhere around two seconds, past which people stop writing things down. Above it, capturing the thought costs more attention than just trying to remember it — and so the thought goes unrecorded, and the system quietly becomes a partial record, and a partial record is one you stop trusting.
Everything below is a few hundred milliseconds shaved off that threshold. None of it is a feature. Together they are the difference between a list you use and a list you used to use.
The task appears when you press Enter
It used to wait for the write to complete before showing you anything. Correct, and wrong: the pause is short but it lands exactly where your attention is about to leave, and a list that doesn’t visibly react makes you look twice to check it took.
Now the task appears in the list almost immediately on Enter, and the write happens behind it.
The calendar is just there
Setting a date used to mean tapping a calendar icon to summon a picker. One tap, but on the most-used field in the app.
The start and end date panels now show an always-visible inline calendar. You open the panel, the month is already there, you tap the day. It’s optional, for people who preferred it compact — but it’s the right default, because the reason you opened that panel was to pick a date.
Send to top
The quick-edit panel gained a Send to top button: select tasks, one tap, they move to the top of the list. “This is now the most important thing” is a move you make several times a day and it should not require a scroll-and-drag across half a screen.
Gestures that stopped being fiddly
Three fixes, all in the category of things that were subtly annoying and hard to name:
Multi-touch no longer breaks the freeze. The list freeze now tracks individual pointer IDs, so lifting one finger while another is still down doesn’t end the gesture prematurely.
Taps stopped landing on the wrong thing on Android. Dismissing the keyboard reflows the screen; if that happened mid-gesture, the button you were aiming at had already moved. The tap now goes where you aimed.
The caret sits in the middle of the new-task input. On Android and on the web, the text cursor was vertically off-centre in the new-todo box. Purely cosmetic, visible every single time you added a task, now correct.
The unglamorous half of the work
None of this shows up in a feature comparison. It shows up in whether the app still holds a complete picture of your work in March.
Fast capture is not a nicety on top of a task manager. Everything else — dependencies, workflow states, offline sync — operates on data that only exists because writing it down was easier than not.