Finally! Four years after the first release of the 0.2 series, we are now happy to announce the immediate availability of Zanshin 0.3.0!
This release brings a lot of changes coming from our own dog-fooding of 0.2.x, discussions with designers and users feedback. It is also based on a completely reworked core which should serve us well for the years to come.
One of the main changes in the organization of your tasks is coming from the fact that now projects and contexts are in flat lists and not hierarchical anymore. Also, we got rid of the two application modes (contexts vs projects) which meant you had two inboxes to deal with, it was painful to sort your data on all dimensions.
Those sound like radical changes, but we paid attention to not gratuitously change everything, we have also been fairly conservative with the overall GUI and workflow and feel at home quite quickly.
Of course, we introduced quite a few new features in Zanshin 0.3:
- tasks can be hierarchical now (which nicely compensate the new flat organization of projects and contexts);
- all views can be filtered and we have a couple of sort criteria already;
- a full editor is provided where you can set start and due date;
- a new workday page is available to see all the tasks you should act on now in a single place;
- ability to choose which collections are used to retrieve the data, so now you can hide the shared calendars you're not interested in.
All that while not compromising on some of the things we like: completely driveable using your keyboard and the ability to quickly enter new tasks.
And last but not least, this marks our first attempt at also dealing with notes and not just tasks. That's why this release also provides a small companion app which we named Renku. It is not our main focus, but a nice addition nonetheless.
It has been a long journey but we're happy we got there. We have been running around conferences presenting our plans for the reworked core and the testing strategy, it is now paying off with a very clean and modular code base. It also carries hundreds of automated tests. Of course it's no silver bullet against bugs, but for sure it helps us react faster to change and avoid regressions. It seems very likely that the number of defect per line of code in Zanshin 0.3 is much lower than 0.2.
We would like to thank Adriaan de Groot, David Faure and Matija Šuklje who helped us find quirks, provided feedback and supported us during the beta phase. Thanks guys, it is really appreciated!
As usual, grab it while it is fresh! You can download the sources obviously, which is the best way to have something up to date but a bit more involving. Right now, packages are available only for openSUSE from the home:ervin repository, but I'm sure others will catch up soon.
Of course, this is just a start and we're already busy with the future. The port to Qt5 and KDEPIM5 already started thanks to Laurent Montel's involvement. We also have further features on our roadmap and a team of students will join us for the first quarter of 2016.
We hope to see more promotion effort around Zanshin as well (if you're not technical and willing to help its your chance). That's why we also revamped the website in honor of the new release with a fresher responsive look.
In other words: we're starting this new year on strong footing. We wish you a lot of good things for the coming year and hope that Zanshin will support your efforts at getting your mind like water!