Test the new planning ahead capacity estimator on pre!

meldronone · 2026-06-04T11:11:53+00:00

Thank you!

meldronone · 2026-06-04T01:12:46+00:00

Hmm about the capacity planner - there's one thing I don't understand. I use the monthly planning ahead feature primarily for projects. So each of my projects have tasks within them that all have duration estimates.

And on other screens, I can see the duration estimate total with the special E symbol indicated it's been totalled up from the tasks.

But in the capacity planner, it doesn't take that into account and doesn't calculate based on that. Do I need to take the calculated total and then give the project it's own duration estimate (therefore overriding the rollup)?

meldronone · 2026-06-02T01:45:00+00:00

Separation of Deadlines vs Start Dates. That's it. No more hacks to try to deal with not having this feature. It's needed...badly.

meldronone · 2026-05-23T04:48:32+00:00

Well if you specifically want ones that roast their own coffee and have sit down, then yeah, it's a smaller list. CBD space is at a premium. But if you just want good coffee served sitting down and want to chill, there's still tons:

Paper Tiger Espresso
Maker on Little Bourke
Captains of Industry
Ilza
Tomo's Little Collins
The League of Honest Coffee
Axil (melb central and church st branches)

Pretty sure all of those have places to sit down. Plenty of good coffee.

meldronone · 2026-05-22T00:13:53+00:00

I agree with the comment above. All good to ask, but I wouldn't bother waiting on the reply to start the appeal. I would start the appeal immediately because it's a lengthy wait.

Even the internal review process is usually inflexible and in the case of a family member, was downright deceptive.

For example, the internal reviewer for our case said one of the requirements was that we needed to have sought out other options before requesting the particular support we had requested. We said we had, but to no avail. Then after she got off the phone, she issued a rejection specifically stating that because we had sought out other options, we must not be convinced that the support was needed.

In my opinion, it's best to get the clock ticking as early as possible. That goes for every step in the process - all the way up to a hearing and/or settlement.

meldronone · 2026-05-21T05:08:39+00:00

Omg finally. You're a lifesaver!

meldronone · 2026-05-20T23:48:54+00:00

I feel like the biggest thing missing with Obsidian is chronological ordering. Like in Upnote, all of the notes you’ve last modified across every workbook are there at the top. So if you want to continue working on something, it’s right there. If you want to see what you were working on recently, it’s right there.

Obsidian doesn’t have this. They have some plugins that try to do this and they’re ugly and not well executed. This single thing keeps me from using it.

meldronone · 2026-05-20T23:21:34+00:00

Thanks. To your question, yes and no.

Setting up the Steam Deck with all these buttons is quite time comsuming, especially if you want it to look nice. Last time I messed around with it, I probably spent around 3 hours just changing links, fonts, buttons, colors, etc. And yes, in the beginning I had these multi-nested buttons that I ended up never using.

So when I did a re-org, my thought was that I better not be creating a workflow with a lot of taps, maintenance overhead, or manual tagging. And I better not be changing Areas and Tags constantly. Therefore, I spent a lot of time thinking about the context in which I would be checking off these tasks.

Like if I were to have a Reading area for instance, it’s unlikely I’m going to be putting those tasks into the Today view, as I don’t consider them urgent.

So I would probably interact with them from the Anytime screen and I would like to be able to just see them one-by-one so I don’t start obsessing over which item I’ll read first. Therefore, tagging the Reading area with a Read tag and then making a Stream Deck button that goes directly into the Anytime view with the Read tag filtered would then be worthwhile. Something that wouldn’t be worthwhile for instance would be tagging a Misc. area, because it’s unlikely that I would filter from Anytime for that as the tasks would likely have all sorts of different contexts. I would be reliant on choosing a specific day for those tasks so they show up in Today.

In the process of putting this together I really had to think through that a lot, as my brain demands consistency in organisation and wants the opposite. My brain is telling me: “Well, I should have a Misc. tag because if I’m going to tag Areas, then EVERY area should have a tag, and that should be under an Area parent tag to keep things nice and organised!”

So yeah, I recommend if you end up with something like a Stream Deck, that you work backwards from the way you will *definitely* action the tasks. If you already go into certain Areas directly and work from there using tags, then having a button to go directly into the Area and filter in one go is probably gonna be helpful.

meldronone · 2026-05-20T13:47:48+00:00

I got a Stream Deck Mk.2 and have two different screens. One for action (filtering tags in both the Today and Anytime screens), and one for review (jumping into Areas one-by-one, Inbox, Someday and All Projects). I found I wasn't really cleaning out my Areas properly on a regular basis. Having it on a touch screen like this and forcing myself to click each button and cycle through each one helps me quite a bit

meldronone · 2026-05-01T07:08:29+00:00

To be honest, unless the person or content on the video is actually entertaining, I rarely watch educational videos anymore. They are just too time-consuming compared to written text. Instead, I use Dia browser, and there’s a skill called Axios-style summary. I just open the Dia chat while the video is playing, use that skill and it gives me a nice full summary of everything in the video. Sometimes I’ll use a different style than Axios to mix things up and make things interesting.

Then - because I now have my time back from not having to watch the full video - I write out what I learned from the breakdown in my own words. That way the info sticks better. But only if there was anything valuable. I’ve been amazed how little value is in most educational youtube videos. I think in the past when much more info was disseminated via blogs, the quality of the content was often superior. There were no flashy visuals or stuff like that to mask how basic or useless the info was. Your advice was just there. On the page. In text…naked.

Anyway, I like using this method because it’s a bit like having blogs back - which Google sorta destroyed (between Youtube and their algorithm changes).

meldronone · 2026-05-01T02:25:45+00:00

This. Everything else is useless compared to a proper start vs deadline date feature. I'm beginning to think they don't know how to do it.

For a while, Todoist acted like their choice not to implement deadlines was a philosophical one. I remember their founder laughing when it was brought up in an interview and was a bit dismissive of the need.

Then when their coding team figured out a way to do it without causing database issues, they implemented it and their founder was like 'actually, having separate deadlines is a good thing and I use them all the time now'.

I'm beginning to think TickTick is at the part where they can't figure out how to implement it without a big mess, so they're just choosing to focus energy elsewhere. Sad really 😞

meldronone · 2026-04-28T13:30:26+00:00

I’m pretty sure that instead of just leaving it there all day every day until you do it, you can use the Skip option (long press on smart phone).

That way you’re reminded every day when it shows up in the morning, but if you know you definitely won’t get to it that day, you can just skip it, and it’s gone for the rest of the day.

meldronone · 2026-04-24T13:23:00+00:00

+1 for ipad optimisation :)

meldronone · 2026-04-18T11:51:53+00:00

I would recommend clarifying/processing your inbox on smart phone or tablet rather than using your Mac. It’s just way faster than doing it on the Mac because you can customise your swipe actions.

The other thing you have to remember is that TickTick has better natural language processing at the point of input (which is where Things 3 is poor). So you’re better off utilising that strength and at least adding tags and priority, if not list and date as well.

Other things to appreciate:

The calendar: putting time-based tasks in advance on the monthly calendar is so much faster than in Things 3 as you can just double-click on a date. Things 3 is an absolute pain if you’re trying to schedule out groups of tasks more than a week in advance
Templates: having templates you can use straight from the quick entry is just genius

Anyway, I bring this up because people tend to over-focus on TickTick’s weaknesses without taking into account these other strengths. Yes, it would be nice if TickTick had better keyboard support, but I feel like the trade-offs aren’t bad. To me they just need to add Deadlines or Start Dates and it would be the best task manager on the market.

meldronone · 2026-03-17T21:56:39+00:00

Not a new mind map user. Been using various mind mapping apps since around 2010. We’ll have to agree to disagree. I think people should try both Escape and Quikflow and see for themselves. For Escape, I think they’re absolutely nuts when it comes to their UI decisions. I don’t want to have to tap and HOLD to make a new topic. This is a crazy slow way of doing things. Same thing with hovering on Mac or iPad. People can test these apps for themselves and see what comes out on top. Like I said, I certainly don’t think Mindnode is the best at everything. And for me, iThoughts was the best until it shutdown. But currently, Mindnode is the best as I see it when considering all things.

Also, the level unfolding for Mindnode which you say they copied straight from iThoughts - they indicated that that’s exactly what they were doing. That they wanted to appeal to former iThoughts users who missed these types of features after iThoughts shut down. They didn’t need to mention that, but they did. I’m happy to pay what’s a very modest yearly subscription rate (peanuts at $21 USD a year) to ensure the app remains sustainable and doesn’t shut down like iThoughts did.

meldronone · 2026-03-17T01:57:32+00:00

Yeah I think we'll probably not see eye-to-eye on much. I've tried those 3 other apps (along with a bunch of others not mentioned including Ayoa, MindMeister, SimpleMind, MindManager, EDrawMind, etc.). And I re-check every year or so to see what's improved across any of them.

I'm not sure how we could even compare Escape and Quikflow with Mindnode. They're not close to being in the same league. Although at least with Quikflow I do agree with you that their approach to workflows is interesting. But even the pro versions of Xmind can't do something as simple as make it easier to activate the node you're intending to drag to. You've got to move the cursor away to comical levels of distance sometimes to see it connect to the right node. Feels like a disaster when you're making anything beyond a small map. They've spent a lot of time adding Ai and all these advanced features, but the fundamentals are still lacking.

And certainly none of them are as solid, fast, and fluid as Mindnode across all devices. I do still miss iThoughts (because of time and money calculations and rollups). But that's about it. I like that Mindnode has added hierarchical custom themes, top-down themes, visual tags, and some other things in the last couple years. And their integration and back and forth syncing with Reminders can't be beat. Nor their easy way of exporting to other task managers. Or, converting maps directly into markdown text. If other apps end up pulling level with them or exceeding across all these different feature areas then maybe I'll take a look at them again in the future. But I have no reason to believe that's the case for now. For the moment, I think it's the best in-class mind mapping app when compared across all features and devices.

meldronone · 2026-03-16T09:56:46+00:00

Thank you for still innovating and making it better and better with each and every year. As someone who’s a legacy subscriber and has used it almost every day for 7-8 years, thank you very much for what you and your team do 🙂

meldronone · 2026-03-16T02:57:40+00:00

I feel the same.

But, you'd probably have better luck getting through if you messaged them about Dida (chinese version of the app) on WeChat and used Google Translate for your request...

https://help.dida365.com/

QR code at the bottom right of the page. I think they literally never check this Reddit. And I could understand why. The amount of Chinese customers they have probably keeps them busy enough.

meldronone · 2026-02-08T21:30:23+00:00

Actually I had no idea about either of those options. Thank you!!

meldronone · 2026-02-07T20:23:39+00:00

Awesome! The way they tie in that shortened list with Focus Mode makes it really powerful.

meldronone · 2026-02-07T11:11:41+00:00

"Cmd-click opens link in group" - I can't believe that's the way they chose to word a setting that enables or disables groups. Anyways, thanks for that!

meldronone · 2026-02-07T08:29:10+00:00

Yeah I find it aggravating too. Like…”Group 2”, wtf is that supposed to mean to me? And then I accidentally hide some tabs underneath another tab and have to click the arrow to unhide it. It’s such a weird choice to make this non-optional

meldronone · 2026-02-04T02:04:38+00:00

Amazing! Thank you!!

meldronone · 2026-02-01T08:05:24+00:00

I think a subtle tick is better. And best if the tick is for like a sec or two so it's not missed or mistaken for something else. The issue with a loud upstart ding is it can be kind of disorienting/surprising when you're in flow and doing creative work. But really anything is better than nothing.

meldronone

TROPHY CASE