Now that Smart Add is out of the super secret test program, I'd like to request support of german language as soon as possible for this feature.

It would feel more natural to me to write tasks and due dates in the same language. Thanks for RTM, keep up the good work (and bring an Android App ASAP.. ;) )

Greetings from Germany,
Trav

Like it ? Love it !!!

How about a mobile page (similar to m.rememberthemilk.com) with the smart add bar ? I tried the twitter interface, but would prefer to just type it straight into a web input bar, in all honesty.

Like the new features, but would still like to see new tasks auto-selected after adding them. Otherwise, if I forget to add a property "in-line", I have to find my task in the (potentially very large) list again and click it.

I disabled it for now, since the old keyboard shortcuts are drilled far into my brain. I'll try and switch one day if I'm feeling ambitious.

I love it. Really.

I was pondering if I'd try using Gtasks and Gcalendar instead of RTM.
Well, this is a huge strike against it. Both the Quick Add and the removal of the quirky selection. (Small note, it should probably be deleted from te settings menu. It still works the old way, and may be confusing to new users, since the rest of the interface doesnt).

Great addition.

It would be great if there were an option to keep the just added task selected. Typing N is so much simpler than finding it back in the list after save. I often just add tasks that I just did and close them to keep them for reference for what I did yesterday.

Emily, Omar, Bob, et al. - I am thrilled to see today's additions. I think they will be immensely popular. I am especially glad to see this response to the previous multiple task selection issues, which was always a booby trap hanging over the old method, especially new users. I think this will quickly become so intuitive that we'll all wonder how we ever lived without it. Many, many thanks for all of the hard work that contributed to this release.

Smart add is very cool. It'd be great if also the Quick add bookmarklet will be upgraded to use it!

I came here to echo what zod2002 said.

SmartAdd is great! But the fact that it does not auto-select tasks kind of breaks it, and it breaks the workflow I used to have which was convenient and fast. Please put the auto-selecting back!

Will have to run without SmartAdd until it's added as an option at least...

It would be perfect. But is there any way to change the shortcuts? The Czech keyboard is completely missing the most important one "^" for the date. Do I really need to reprogram my keyboard layout or do I need to use the "Alt+0094"???

One "quirk" is still in place that has irked me for some time: If I today set the due date as the 7th, it automatically assume I mean the current month, as opposed to the next 7th. Why would it default to having the date in the past?

Aside from that though, I love the SmartAdd.

For a format that normally includes spaces, do I enter the words together as one, or double quote the format? For example, if I want to add "Pay mortgage" on the 1st of each month at 12:30 p.m., would the Smart Add look something like

Pay mortgage. ^10/1@12:30p *everymonth

or

Pay mortgage ^"10/1 @ 12:30p" *"every month"

Thanks!

Never mind. Looks like RTM is smart enough to recognize a multi-word property following one of those symbols (i.e. *every month ^10/1 @ 12:30p).

I'm loving this new feature. It speeds up entering a new task quite a bit.

Majkaz you can also use "due" instead of ^, I find that more natural for me.

Great stuff guys.

Smart add is great! One issue I have is smart lists - I'd lie to see some way of having the properties associated with a smart list (tags etc) added to a task without having to add each of them via smart add.

Kind of like in the old system when I was in a smart list and added a task, it inherited all the attributes of that list.

I love smart add, and I love that it no longer auto-selects.
Thank you!!

For me this feature works great. It's really useful. Great job

I, too, like the new smart add feature. I, too, also do NOT like the change to the "auto-select new task" characteristic. There are a couple of reasons for this:

a. By not autoselecting new tasks, you are forcing the entry of the due date in the new task line, because otherwise the darn thing just falls way to the bottom. This will be particularly problematical if this new interface makes its way to the iPhone interface, where typing as little as possible is desirable.

b. When one wants to add notes, those are often more extensive than entering anything else. By not autoselecting, the addition of notes takes extra keystrokes and search time to enter the task, find the task somewhere in the list (if the due date is far in the future, that may require some hunting!), select the task, enter the note. This is really tedious!

Am I missing something here?

Now, I presume that there is a reason the good RTM folks decided to eliminate "auto task selection." A desire to annoy me is probably NOT high up on their list of reasons! So, while my initial reaction is negative, I'd love to hear their rationale!

Neat feature...but you know what would be really cool? If you could somehow parse the task for keywords and automatically assign it to a list or tags based on them....

What a pleasant surprise when I logged in. I love Smart Add with one exception...

As several others mentioned, it would still be very useful to have the new tasks auto-selected. My fingers often move faster than my brain so I'm sure I will hit enter just as I thought of another property I want to add. Too late, now I have to search for the task and select it. (I don't have to search for it to de-select it because I can just use keyboard shortcut to de-select all tasks.)

Thanks to krschultz for the tip in his post about using "due" instead of ^. ^ is in an awkward place on the keyboard. This will help a lot.

I like this new feature and look forward to seeing it implemented in plugins for Quicksilver and/or Google Quick Search Box.

But what happened to the enter key? I used to be able to use it to select tasks. I know I can use I, but since it's not being used for anything else while navigating tasks, I'd prefer to have enter still available.

very good!very useful!

The new Smart Add (which I LOVE!) has highlighted a small problem for me that I didn't realise I had. Turns out I have both a Personal list, as well as a 'personal' tag (because sometimes 'personal' tag items fit better in another list).

When I use Smart Add, because of the way it works with the #, if I want to have a TAG as 'personal' I have to edit the item after it's been created.

Any suggestions?

Like the new feature a lot.. it reminds me of Hiveminder's "braindump feature", so well done!

I agree with a lot of people here though about selecting the task after it is added. I often want to add a note to the task I have just added, and with the new interface, I can't do that without searching for it.

It would be cool if you could somehow use another character which indicates a note to be added, with the remaining text being a note. You'd have to change the text field to a text area though for this to work once the magic note character is entered.

I love smart add; I love the changes to the task selection! Thanks Emily, thanks Bob, thanks to all the others at RTM!

I love the new interface. It's so much easier to add tasks to multiple lists, and the new selection method is better, as well.

One small issue: I accidentally mistyped a tag name when entering a task. I've since deleted the tag, but now the mistyped tag shows up every time in the drop-down list when I type #. This is rather annoying, esp. as the mistyped tag name is similar to the correct tag name.

Still, great improvement to the tool. Thanks for the continued improvements, and I hope we'll see some additions to the mobile web interface soon, too!

An option to auto select would be handy as then priority and due date can be set with slightly less typing and without reaching for the shift keys.

And it's not entirely unknown for me to make the odd error so if I realise my mistake with the old method I can just re-enter without having to search for the task.

Smart Add seems mostly pretty good, and I think I'll end up adding from my inbox rather than going to an individual list and adding there. Especially if I've got a bunch of tasks to add to different lists.

I am a bit anoyed that the prefix symbol for lista and tags is the same. I've had to rename a couple of tags that had the same name as lists. Wouldn't it have been easier just to have two?

Also the @ symbol used as a prefix for locations is a bit annoying for GTD types that use tags with @ at the start for contexts, @calls @PC etc, which aren't quite the same thing as locations. I might have to change my context tags now too.

I wish to congratulate and thank you for the new features implemented.

You guys rock!

Very cool. I send most new entries from twitter, and using tags with Smart Add eliminates a daily clean-up of my RTM inbox.

Could there be a shortcut to indicate the added task has already been completed? Thanks, -S.

While I definitely like the new singel/multi task selection feature, I have mixed feelings about the new task entry method.

I think it's now more a mindful process to multi-select, and that was exactly what many of us wanted. Will take some adjusting, but any new release of frequently used software requires adjusting.

I'm not as enthusiastic about the new way of entering new tasks. I'd gotten so used to just going to the Inbox and hitting the "t" key. I usually entered new tasks in the Inbox because I kept it empty, except for new tasks, for that purpose. But the other nice thing about doing it that way is I could just hit "t", enter a task, hit enter, hit "t", name the task, and just keep going. After I'd entered all the new tasks that would have the same tags and priorities, I could hit "m", go to multiple edit mode, and add whatever characteristics I wanted using shortcut keys. Worked pretty well, and I have almost learned all of the shortcut keys.

Now, I have to enter each one, then go back and select them all, and then add priorities and tags. Or do them one at a time using a new set of codes to enter each kind of attribute. Certainly not as efficient for me.

I understand that you didn't do this new release with just me in mind (what were you thinking?! :), that you have to cater to a lot of users, each of whom has his/her own way of using RTM. We're also on some uncharted ground here, as web apps are still relatively new and there aren't, as far as I know, standards and rules and best practices as there are, say, for OOP. Can I suggest one?

It seems that as I use more and more different programs, that we've come full circle with shortcut keys. I was around during the early days, actually all the days, of DOS and shortcut keys. With this new release, you've added a whole new list of shortcuts for use in the task entry box. Yes, you've made them handy to lookup, kudos for that. But nonetheless, there are more shortcuts to remember. I don't know if you thought about this when you planned this new release. If not, I'd like to suggest you do in the future. And if you did consider it, I'd suggest you give it more weight in the future.

Thanks as always for a great app.

As someone who has criticized what I perceive as a slow development cycle, I must give credit where credit is due. This is an excellent addition to the utility of the application, and was well worth the wait. Nicely done.

I like it a lot, thanks guys. Typing ^ is just a pain in the ass on my Azerty keyboard but i should be used to it really soon

Wonderful! Extremely useful features.

I was trying adding the tasks then writing tod but it didn't work in the past. Now it works and better than I would ever imagine.

Thank you SO MUCH.

I agree with the others here that Smart Add is great with the exception of the disappearance of the auto-select-new-task feature. I used to be able to add and completely annotate an entire task without ever touching my mouse. In fact, this is the biggest reason I used RTM. Now, after hitting "enter" I have to navigate to the task and select it again to do things for which I don't know the Smart Add code or for which a Smart Add code does not exist.

Thank you very much for this Smart Add !

But is it impossible to select more than one task now ?

Another vote for autoselecting - this was an essential feature!! Thanks for continuing to develop it guys - this is a killer app..

Hi Folks!
Indeed the "Smart Add" improvment do provide cool features!
All the shortcuts implemented are helpful :-)
Nevertheless, I beleive these functionalitues could be available *after* the task is created.
Let's imagine a modify shortcut that would reopen the selected task in the same bar (on the top).
The task should be re-writen by the system with the shortcuts already declared ("clean fridge !3 =15min" for instance).
Then the user could have the possibility to declare other properties by using again the shorcuts.
Instead of giving the name "add a new task" to the new bar, the name would be "add a new task or modify the selected task" or something similar.
Again, I do thank a lot the RTM dev team to all the improvements provided by the Smart Add stuff :-)
Patrick (France)

Hey guys, Just noticed Smart Add doesn't fully work with Opera. As the guys behind the browser doesn't allow "Contextual right click" (sorry i'm french, don't know the technical term), when I type any Smart Add symbol, i don't have any choice displayed. For sure it's work, it's just not as easy as with any other browser. Damn Opera ! It's my browser of choice but that thing pisses me off as my main Back office at work uses a lot of those menus.

I like it. But how about assigning a special symbol or a keyword for keeping the new task selected after entering?

"But is it impossible to select more than one task now ?"

Sorry ! in fact it is possible but I must click on the button and not on the name of the task.

Is there a setting to prevent # from adding tags? I use # in my list items, and it seems that I need to add a character beforehand with every item...

I must add my thanks to those above for the new features. They are much appreciated.

And to the people that have an issue with not having the auto select new task feature anymore, here are a couple of tips that may help:

1) After adding a new task, it will be listed as a potential undo in the orange bar at the top of the page. Simply select the task name in that orange bar and the task is selected. No need to hunt throughout the list.

2) I long ago set-up a "New" smart list with the search: addedWithin:"1 day of today" . This provides a quick way to reference any tasks that you have created in the last day which I find is about 75% of the tasks that I want to modify.

Brian

I'd have to agree with the majority of comments here, for adding a task with all of the information this is a great addition.

However, if you are just filing a task in the inbox until ready for processing then all of the excellence is lost. I'd love to see a new shortcut key to let me bring the selected task back into the new task box so I can add due date, tags, etc.

I also think that auto-select was good for when you wanted to add notes immediately after creating a task - I agree that having a way to leave the new task selected would be great.

"I like this new feature and look forward to seeing it implemented in plugins for Quicksilver and/or Google Quick Search Box."

Funny that I said this. From my experimenting, it turns out that Brian Moore's Remember The Milk Quicksilver plugin (see the Services section of this site) is already able to utilize Smart Add's functionality without any need for updating or modification. Thank you so much RTM for fulfilling one of my few remaining feature requests!

satisam,

Have you tried putting your task name in quotation marks? Doing that keeps a date which is part of the task name (not the due date) from being seen as the due date.

Hope this helps,
Leah

I really like the new feature.

One thing I just tried to do that I couldn't is add a note from the smart add box. I thought I could enter in everything, then hit tab, and it would let me hit (h) or (y) to get to the notes part to add a note.

Also, if I have multiple tags, it's sort of annoying to have to do #tag1 #tag 2 #tag3. Can I just do something like #(tag1, tag2, tag3)?

Other than that, looks awesome.

"Have you tried putting your task name in quotation marks? Doing that keeps a date which is part of the task name (not the due date) from being seen as the due date"

I needed this. Yesterday I reserved a rental van for a church trip. I also set up a task to "order a 2nd van if necessary" two weeks before the trip, depending on how many sign up.

In my list it populated as "order a van if necessary" due Oct 2

The quotes would have prevented that syntax error. I'll remember that next time, thanks!

apgordon,

I like your idea about multiple tags. Many (if not most) of my tasks have multiple tags, so I too would find this helpful.

While I find Smart Add very useful for entering some kinds of tasks, it has actually made my job more difficult for others. I often enter multiple related tasks at the same time. For these, the disappearance of autoselect has added steps rather than simplifying the process.

Another feature that I used heavily (before the multi/single-edit changes) was selecting multiple tasks in single-edit mode. Although several tasks could be selected, only one could be edited at a time. After I edited the "active" one, I would deselect it and another one was already selected and ready to edit. I used this same process when I make a change that affects several Smart Lists. I identify and select all the lists that needed to be updated, then update them one by one.

Here's how my process used to work:
First add descriptions of all the related tasks.
- they were all autoselected
Next add parameters that are common to all the tasks (ex: tags, location)
- switch to multi-edit
- enter parameters
- all the tasks were updated
- turn multi-edit off
Finally, add parameters that are unique to each task (due date, etc)
- note: all the tasks were still selected but it is now single-edit mode
- look to the right to see which task is "active" and add parameters that are unique to that task
- unselect that task and repeat for each task
- when there are no more selected tasks, I'm done


Thanks to bwicks34 for the workarounds. They do help some but it still involves more steps than it used to and it is more prone to error by forgetting to select all the relevant tasks. (I really like your "New" list and have added it to "task management" lists.)

Smart add is great, but also I would still like to see new tasks auto-selected after adding them. Otherwise, if I forget to add a property "in-line", I have to find my task in the (potentially very large) list again and click it. This happens to me regularly! (I'd rather not say "happens", as it's more part of my regular workflow.

I'd also like to have the same shortcuts (in addition to the existing ones) for adding due date, tags, etc. in an existing tag, i.e.

- d AND ^ for editing the "due date" field
- s AND # for editing the tags field.

Great service, keep going on! :-)
David

Thanks everyone for your feedback! For those wondering, I just thought I'd explain a little bit how these updates came to be. :)

A common complaint

We've received a ton of feedback from RTM users over the last (almost!) four years. One of the most common complaints we received was about the confusing way that tasks were selected and manipulated. Due to the "way things worked", some users even found themselves making accidental task edits and losing data, which made us sad. :(

While we were never happy to hear that folks were frustrated by the interface, we weren't sure what we could do. The "way things worked" was extremely dangerous (it was waaay too easy to edit things you didn't mean to!), but it was also extremely powerful. We knew that many users had grown used to the interface with its extreme power, its myriad of keyboard shortcuts, and all its quirks. We also knew that some of those folks might not wish to change their workflows if we made any changes to the "way things worked".

We have to do something!

In the end though, we decided that an interface that was frustrating significant numbers of people wasn't something that we wanted in RTM. The key things we needed to do were:

(1) Make it easier to set task properties at the time of adding the task (thus Smart Add).

(2) Make it clearer which task/s you're working with and reduce the likelihood of accidental changes (thus the row for single task selection, checkbox for multi-task selection).

(3) Make editing multiple tasks more consistent (thus any actions in 'More Actions' as well as any changes to the task properties on the right will apply to all tasks selected; no more multi-edit mode).

With Smart Add, the main reason that tasks needed to remain selected after adding (to quickly edit additional task properties like due date using the keyboard shortcuts) no longer existed. After adding a task, the status box at the top now contains a link to the just-added task -- clicking this takes you to the task and selects it, so you can add notes or make further changes if you forgot any task properties. This is especially handy if you added the task to a list other than the one you're viewing (as clicking on the link will also automatically switch lists); auto-selection after adding never let you do this.

No more auto-selection after adding?

Some folks in this thread were wondering why we removed auto-selection after adding. There are two reasons (a desire to annoy rcamner isn't on this list ;):

(1) As mentioned above, in the majority of cases it's no longer necessary when task properties are set through Smart Add (and the feedback we received indicated that folks found it confusing when tasks were auto-selected).

(2) Unfortunately auto-selection combined with the above three key things we changed makes for a pretty dangerous combination. :( Think adding five tasks and having them all auto-select one after the other (the old way). With the change to multi-edit (multiple tasks selected = editing all selected tasks), hitting 'R' would no longer change the name of the just-added task -- it'd change the name of five tasks. (In most cases that's probably not what you want, and fairly dangerous behaviour to default to!)

Still not a fan?

I know that not everyone will be a fan of the changes (if you've been using RTM for a long time, I know it can be hard to unlearn years worth of keyboard typing patterns :). If you find that the old way works better for you, that's fine too. I'd recommend giving the Smart Add edition a try first (as the longest user of RTM, I had to adjust too :), but you're more than welcome to turn off Smart Add (in Settings) and everything will work just the way that it used to.

I hope this helps clear things up! :)

Thanks for your detailled answer to all this posts!
I'd suggest that auto-selection adds only *the last added task*. So the described problme of accidentially editing more task would not occur.
And, it would be nice to have an option in the settings for this.

A very common workflow for me is to add a task, enter due date and tags (I do this with smart ad now) and -- important -- then start writing notes.

As far as I see, smart add does not support notes (which is good, because the one-line input field is not appropriate for this, I wouldn't like to add notes there).

So, my workflow now is:
1. Add a task with smart add
2. Enter "smart" infos (and I like it!)
3. Optional: Forget some smart infos
4. Search for the task in a lengthy list or have to perfom a search
5. Add notes
6. Add the tag, due dates, etc which I have forgotten entering

(4) is what I don't like about this workflow.
David

Hello all,

First of all, I really like this feature and it's saved me time already. However, now that I'm growing used to it I notice I try to use the same syntax when editing an already existent task. It goes something like this:

(1) I spot a task that I need to change and hit some shortcut key - let's say d (due date)
(2) I end up typing something like "monday #tag_i_forgot_at_first" and the tag doesn't get added.

It would be really useful if some shortcut would put a selected task in the smart add "edit-mode".

Just an idea and some feedback.

Cheers,
Tomé Duarte

Thanks for smart add! It is a huge improvement to a great program.

One comment to echarles and others who use @ at the start of their tags to denote contexts. I solved that particular problem by adding the following lines in my AutoHotkey configuration script:

#IfWinActive Remember The Milk
:*b0:##::{bs 1}@
#IfWinActive

This replaces ## with #@ whenever I'm on the RTM web site.

This lets me hit # once to choose a list, and twice to choose a tag. Very convenient in my opinion. Of course, you need to install AutoHotkey, but it is a great piece of open-source software that is useful for many other things as well.

I, for one, am a huge fan of this implementation of Smart Add, much love to the RTM crew for an outstanding addition to this wonderful project <3

Smart Add suggestion: When I type # to see a list of tags, I should be able to use the up arrow to get to the bottom of my list.

i love these new features. they rock. they make me feel giddy, which is good, because the initial novelty giddiness of rtm was wearing off :) :)

question 1:

if i want one of the special chars in the task name itself, can i get that? i can do \# or '# but the \ or ' char shows up in the task name.

leah.shalom suggested putting the whole task name in "double quotes" and i can report that doing so does NOT change its alphabetical sorting order in lists--woo hoo! So that's a pretty good solution.

suggestion 2:

it would be nice if smart lists could be part of the #list feature, thus inheriting the unconditional properties of that smart list.

suggestion 3:

Personally i prefer the absence of auto-select. But i can see others' points.

Seem like u guys could add 1 more char to mean "keep selected", maybe '>' with mnemonic something like "continues" or even "..." same mnemonic

eg:

do something tomorrow #personal !1 >

means smart add as usual and keep selected.


Comment 4:

once again, thanks!!!

I would like the option to add notes via Smart Add. With deselection, as already pointed out here, you have to manually find the last to-do and select/add the note that way. Slow and not efficient.

I still want to use Smart Add. I just want it to let me add notes. What can I say, I'm a needy guy.

Thanks for continuing all the great work w/ RTM!

I think nah.why's suggestion 2 would be awesome. I suspect it would confuse plenty of people, but ignoring its practicality, what a powerful suggestion.

I think nay.why's suggestion 3 is a great idea to address the oft-stated desire to 'hold on' to the last task while benefiting from the new smart add features. I think this bears serious thought.

Well, I'm certainly relieved to have confirmed by Emily that annoying me was not the primary reason for setting up SmartAdd the way they did! :)

I hadn't noticed that RTM "logs" in the yellow box at the top that a task was added via smart add, and clicking on the just-added task name selects the task. That's good.

It still is not quite as good, in my view, as autoselect, because it takes an extra mouse click.

How about a shortcut key that one could hit right after adding a task in SmartAdd that would select the task? I could easily live with having to make another keystroke?

@rcamner
"Well, I'm certainly relieved to have confirmed by Emily that annoying me was not the primary reason for setting up SmartAdd the way they did! :) "

Actually, Emily told me on the sly that they did do it just to annoy you, they just didn't want you to know. :)

rcoilliot: I'm using Opera 10 and the contextual popups seem to work fine. I upgraded to v10 a few days ago and did not try Smart Add on v9. I also haven't tried all the variations -- I don't add tasks often. There is a preference for "Allow scripts to detect context menu events" (under Preferences, Advanced, Content, JavaScript Options), but I have it unchecked and this feature still works.

All: while I can understand the desire of some to keep autoselect on add, I'm one of those it hurt more than helped. Understand that the RTM folks have to think about the vast majority of users who don't post here -- this is a highly selected minority. And when I first used RTM, I either lost data or almost did (I think I was able to Undo in time) -- and as a computer user in general, I'm technical and highly experienced. They HAD to make this change.

The reselect link after adding should be very helpful to most, and I'm glad I found out about it (here) -- I probably won't remember all the shortcut syntax, so I'll probably use the reselect link. I could see a hot key meaning "keep selected" -- a special character which popped up a menu whose options were "deselect after entry (normal)" and "select after entry for modification". It needs to be something visible, not just a special character which blindly does a "keep selected" -- that would be even more confusing than the old behavior, even if the damage were far less common.

I actually came here trying to figure out when sometimes when selecting several items, suddenly all but the last become deselected. Now I realize that it's part of the multi-edit changes -- I was accustomed to being able to click anywhere on the line, and now I have to be careful to click on the box to select multiple events. I'll get used to it. ;-)

Edward

I would like to second batman697's suggestion, even though I haven't come across any instances in RTM where it'd make a difference in my workflow. For whatever reason, it always annoys me that apps like Facebook's search won't enable such unobtrusive, seemingly easy-to-implement functionality.

I also like nah.why's third suggestion. Personally, I'd like to see a character that could be used to tell Smart Add to jump to the "new note" text field.

Is it possible to integrate smart-add into MilkSync somehow? Adding tasks on the blackberry interface is a bit of a pain. Actually an RTM tasks application for blackberry would rock. You guys are useability pro's.

Good stuff!

Love smart add.

Would love it more if it was available on the "sidebar" / igoogle version of RTM - i.e. http://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/modules/googleig/

Any chance this could be done?

Thanks RTM guys.

How about just a "SMART ADD" box that can be used at the desktop for quickly adding things.
Yes email a task works, but now with the "SMART ADD" we should be able to get a small gadget or app that will allow this

Clancy

http://www.thirderror.com/your-remember-the-milk-to-do-list-on-the-desktop/

mehardin Your suggestion is close, but I was thinking of something that was JUST the SMART ADD box. Not a listing and not stuck to the desktop.
something that I can hot key to bring up in front of the current app and enter a item. This box should also "suggest" tags and list as it does now when logged in to the full website.

Please, oh, please RTM: I have one change requested in SmartAdd:

After adding a task, please don't put the cursor focus in the new Task box!!!

Why? It (essentially) 'breaks' all the shortcuts, as they now are entered as straight text in a new 'task.'

Having to hit ESC (or use the mouse) to get out of the box totally breaks the flow.

I don't want to just switch SmartAdd off for the other benefits it provides, but this behavior is killer.

Why? After adding a task, and seeing it in full form on the list, I often end up revising it right away (e.g. left something out, don't like the wording), so having to hit ESC everytime (and also not having the arrow cursor on the new task) make a simple change much more complicated.

Here's what I suggest: after adding a task, have focus in the main window, deselect the task (as is currently done), but keep the arrow selector (the '>') on the newly-added task. From there, one is free to choose the new task (spacebar), or press 't' to add a new task (really not a burden, even when adding many tasks).

Ok, that's 2 changes, but well-thought out I think.

Alternatively, +1 to rcamner's suggestion for a shortcut to select the newly-added task. Note this still requires the focus be on the main window (or else the new-task box 'eats' the shortcut!).

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh!
I was SO MAD when I went to add tasks and, as soon as I hit enter, they weren't selected any more! Now I'm supposed to find that task in my list so I can tag it and locate it and recur it? Grrrr. Guess I should read the blog more often - now that I know what to do with it, that smart add box is the best new RtM toy ever! Well, maybe not ever, there's a lot of good ones, but I LOVE this one. I didn't even know I needed it but now I can't believe I went without it for years! Thank you thank you!

The way the Smart Add works, make me feel like I'm coding. For me, adding a task -> hitting D -> typing "today, tomorrow, etc." -> hitting 1, 2 or 3 is still way faster than Smart Add.

It's a cool feature but I just liked the way it was before better. :)

But hey:
"you're more than welcome to turn off Smart Add (in Settings) and everything will work just the way that it used to"
I didn't know that. Thanks for the giving us the right to choose. ;)

@novil,

If I did all my data entry in the web application I would agree. But I'm not always in front of my computer when I think of a task I need to add. I've really enjoyed being able to send a text via twitter that includes all my meta data. Before I was just able to send the naked task to my inbox, then had to tag it and bag it when I got to the 'puter. Now it's already in the right list/smart list because I can enter everything with smart add.

I understand what you are saying about feeling like you are coding, but I've actually found it easier to remember ^ # * = than d, s, f, and g for date, tag, repeat and estimate. And you couldn't even assign the task to a different list before without using the mouse. It is a little bothersome to have to type out "http://" instead of just a "u" for a URL.

If you would like to access a task you have just created in the Smart Add box, you can click the task in the orange area which appears near the top of the page showing your most recent action. Clicking the task there will select it.

I usually don't need the task selected and like this aspect of Smart Add, but I used the last task orange bubble last week and found it helpful.

Love SmartAdd, but if I add a task like:

"Look up Smart Add features tonight #list-1 #tag-1 @Home"

It does not recognize tonight. I've missed several tasks that way.

Can that be fixed?

When can I expect to be able to set due dates with german words - when will it be localized?

Greetings
and keep up the great work,
Trav

trav, ^morgen and ^Montag and so on already works. :-)

The suggestion to click on the task name after it appears in the notification area is a pretty good workaround. However, I think it would be more useful if the notification area were moved so that the user doesn't have to scroll to the top of the page as suggest in a different thread.

I should have said that is a pretty good workaround for the the removal of auto-selection from smart add. (My reply above doesn't make much sense without that context. Sorry.)

Just an idea

"Ctrl + Enter" - create a task with auto-select
"Enter" - create a task w/out auto-select

RTM can't recognize some string as location in the Smart Add feature.

I have 3 locations in my setting; home, work and hamamatsu.
@home or @work in the "Add task" text box become the location, but not for @hamamatsu.
Is it a bug?

Hi,

Are there plans to add the smart add function tot the iGoogle module? I'll use this module a lot, every day. So it would be a huge time saver for me.

Thanks!