We’ve Temporarily Pulled WorkFlowy from the iOS App Store

Update: WorkFlowy is back in the App Store. Huzzah!!!

The WorkFlowy iPhone and iPad app is not currently available in the iOS app store. We have a new version of the app awaiting approval, and it’ll be back in the store as soon as it is approved.

The reason we pulled the app is this: on Sunday night, we accidentally released a new version of the WorkFlowy iOS app. We hadn’t intended to release that version, because we had found a bug in it. Apple unfortunately has no way of undoing a release, so we had to choose between a buggy app in the app store, and no app in the app store. Not an easy choice, but we chose to remove the app.

We have a fixed app awaiting approval from Apple, and hopefully it will be approved quickly. We were sadly rejected when we asked for expedited review. However, they’ve been really quick about reviewing our app releases lately, so hopefully it will be back in the app store in a matter of days.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Moving on WorkFlowy Mobile

Yep, the rumors are true. You’ve been waiting for this longer than the next Game of Thrones book. The day is finally here: you can move stuff on WorkFlowy mobile.

I know, I know. You are probably crying with joy. You’re having trouble reading this through the tears. Puddles are welling up on your keyboard. You feel a surge of joy and universal love that makes you want to throw your hands toward the sky and scream, “WORLD, I LOVE YOU!!!”.

Well, enough of that. Get it together. You’re embarrassing everybody. Here’s how it works:

1. Tap and hold an item.
2. It will pop out
3. Drag it up and down.

P.S. Android users must use the Chrome browser if you want to move things in WorkFlowy. The regular Android browser is too crappy to make stuff like this work. In fact, if you want to be happier, more satisfied and better looking, we recommend you start using Chrome on Android as your default browser for everything.

We Put These Flyers Up

This flyer was put up all around University of Arizona a few weeks ago, by Joe, a WorkFlowy user who is a sophomore there.

Joe had emailed us and said, “How about I put up some flyers for you on my campus?” We liked his enthusiasm, so we made up the flyer and he put it up all over the place. The flyer lead to some new users, which was great, but overall it was just a fun experience for us.

I also did an interview with Joe, because I like doing interviews and thought he sounded like an interesting guy. Parts of it are pretty entertaining, I think. I have him tell a bunch of random stories about his life, and also explain why he wanted to put flyers up for WorkFlowy.

How to Make Reusable Checklists in WorkFlowy

WorkFlowy makes it easy to create a checklist for a repetitive process. Here’s how: 

1. Create a list to use as a template
2. Duplicate the list
3. That’s it. There’s no step three.

Here’s a 30 second video demonstrating how simple it is:

At WorkFlowy, we use this internally all the time. Every time we do a major release, we do a manual run-through of the app, to make sure all the major features are working as expected. We manage this process with a simple, checklist. We have a template, and we create a new copy for every major release. In that copy we record the status and issues particular to that release. Here’s the template we use. All the duplicates are under the list “Testing Notes”.

The Ugly Puppy

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Improvements for iPhone 5 and iPad apps

If you’re using the iOS app on an iPhone 5 or iPad, you should download the new WorkFlowy update. The improvements: it fills the whole screen of the iPhone 5; it can go into landscape mode on iPad.

WorkFlowy App for iPhone and iPad

You can now download WorkFlowy from the iOS App Store. Yay! Here’s the link.

We’re super happy that we’ve finally gotten something in the app store for you. We’re working on a bunch of improvements like offline support, bringing all the features of desktop to mobile and so on. Please check it out and share the love.

P.S. For all you Android users, we’re super sorry that we aren’t able to release an Android app at the same time as an iPhone app. We haven’t forgotten about you, and we love you very much.

P.P.S The WorkFlowy iOS app uses the same interface as the mobile web version. The benefits of having this in an app are that startup is much faster (after you’ve loaded it once), and it lets us implement useful features you can’t in a web browser. It’s also a necessary precursor to offline, which we’re working on.

Hidden Search Operators

Want to search through your WorkFlowy account like a pirate ninja? There are a number of “secret” search operators that you can use to get a lot more power out of the search feature.

These operators are unofficial features because we plan to add nice interfaces for (most of) them, but for now you power users (you know who you are) will find these useful.

So, without further ado, here they are. Note that we just added a couple of these, so don’t feel too bad if you don’t know about all of them already.

- (NOT)

Add a “-” before a search term if you’d like to exclude items that contain that term.

For example, if you’re using the tags @jesse and #current to assign items to Jesse and mark what he’s currently working on, you can search for “@jesse -#current” to find all the items that Jesse is assigned to that he’s NOT currently working on.

If you search for just negated terms, we’ll filter your current view, removing all items containing those terms. So if you’re looking at a list of tasks that are assigned to @jesse and @mike, you can search for “-@jesse” to show just the ones assigned to @mike.

OR

Add an all-caps “OR” between search terms to search for items that contain either of those terms.

For example, search for “@jesse OR @mike” to show all items assigned to either Jesse or Mike.

“quoted string”

Use double-quotes to find items that contain the exact string between the quotes.

This lets you search for multiple words in sequence (e.g., “”the quick brown fox”“) or search for part of a word or number (e.g., search for “”203”” to find an item containing “123203456”).

is:

We support a GMail-style “is:” operator to search for items that match the category specified. We support three categories right now: “complete”, “shared”, and “embedded”.

For example, you can use the “is:complete” operator to search for completed items. (Note that you’ll need to toggle completed items to be visible to have them show up.) “is:shared” will search for items you’ve shared, and “is:embedded” will search for items you’ve embedded in your account that others have shared.

last-changed:

We remember when each item was last changed. You can see this date by hovering the mouse cursor over an item’s bullet for a second or two.

You can search for items last changed within a time period with the “last-changed:” operator.

For example, search for “last-changed:1d” to search for items changed within the last day. Search for “last-changed:4h” to search for items changed within the last 4 hours. (Days and hours are the time units we support right now.)

One more thing:

You can combine all of these operators in combination with each other. So, for example, you can search for completed items assigned to Jesse that were changed in the last week by searching for “is:complete @jesse last-changed:7d”.

Hope you find these useful.

How Big Can a WorkFlowy Account Get?

We get asked pretty often how big a WorkFlowy account can get before starting to slow down.

The short answer is: really big. I’ll give more detail in a second, but first, a digression…

We’ve insisted on keeping every WorkFlowy account to a single “document” because of the elegance of this approach. When everything’s in the same “document,” you never have to decide when to create a new document or when to merge documents, and there doesn’t need to be a special interface for managing documents (like the document list in Google Docs) or moving items between them. It’s all one simple interface.

When you think about it, though, a WorkFlowy account is actually composed of many documents. Each item is its own document if you click the bullet to zoom in. Because there’s no difference between an item and a document, you never need to wonder about whether something should be “just an item” or a new document unto itself.

Now, back to the original question. Because everything in WorkFlowy is stored on a single virtual page, people often wonder what the limit is on the amount that can be stored on that page.

We’ve done a lot - and continue to do a lot - to keep WorkFlowy fast for large accounts. I’ve been using WorkFlowy for over two years now, and my WorkFlowy account has grown to almost 20,000 items. There is no noticeable slowdown. We have users with account sizes more than double mine, as well. These are large accounts, containing novels’ worth of text.

So the answer is: You are highly unlikely to run into any slowness. There are always bottlenecks, though, and we’re committed to continuing to eliminate these as our users’ accounts continue to grow in size.