An everyday notebook. A crafted, native, local-first app for collecting your notes, your thoughts and inspiration. For Mac, iPad and iPhone.
Toronto
Joined March 2023
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Gather retweeted
got busy, but working on @gather_do again after a little hiatus
Gather retweeted
J'ai rarement était autant hype par le design d'une app ! L'interface est tellement pure et elle vient servir la fonction avec élégance et simplicité.
Même leur site web est cool et dans cette même démarche.
gather.do
Gather 1.8.1 is now available
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In addition to general bug fixes and improvements, in this release you can now open your Notes in a new window on Mac.
Multi-tasking for Notes
- For Gather on Mac, you can now open your notes in a window. This is useful if you have multiple notes that you want to work on at the same time. Just right-click on any note and select 'Open in a New Window'.
Move Tasks to Previous or Next Day
- We've added a couple quick actions so that when you right-click or long-press on a Task, you can move it to the previous or next day.
General fixes and improvements:
- Improved visibility of menus in dark mode (Mac)
- Sorting options for your Collections should be more legible and easier to understand
- Fixed: writing a note for a media item should feel snappier now
- Fixed: sometimes you were able to create a Collection with no name
- Fixed: sometimes you weren't able to select a tag from the suggested list of tags on iOS
Gather retweeted
in the latest version of @gather_do you can finally have notes, images, links, thoughts in the same Collection.
Gather 1.8 is now available
Release 1.8.0 is one of our most important updates to date, containing many new features, significant behind-the-scenes architectural changes, and general improvements.
Architectural overhaul
Under the hood, we’ve completely revamped major parts of the app’s architecture to lay the groundwork for many exciting upcoming features. You will begin to see the fruits of our labour in upcoming releases.
Collections with mixed content
Collections now support all kinds of content. You can add media items, notes, and thoughts to any collection. Simply create a new collection to get started, and feel free to add content as you go. You can add any item to a collection by long-pressing (iOS) or right-clicking (Mac) any item, and then choosing the collection you want to associate that item with. Notes may only be added to one collection, whereas media and thoughts may be added to multiple collections.
Collection Layouts
There are multiple ways to see any given collection. You can view your collection as a grid (often useful for photos & media), as a list (often useful for notes), or as a reader view (often useful for website bookmarking). All layouts work for all content types (media, thoughts, notes), including for collections with mixed content types. You can change the layout of a collection anytime by long-pressing (iOS) or right-clicking (Mac) any Collection row and choosing your preferred layout.
Import & Export
We have made it easier to import & export content in Gather. Now you can export all your data with one bundled export as a zip file. This bundle can also be imported, allowing you to quickly export and import data quickly. In addition, backups are automatically created for you locally on your device each time a significant Gather upgrade occurs. These auto-backups can be viewed and saved anytime by navigating to Settings → Backups.
Improvements & Fixes
A large number of improvements, fixes and performance enhancements have been made to Gather. In particular, many updates have been made to Collections, Library, and Preview Mode.
Gather retweeted
thoughts on the go
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i have alot of random thoughts while i’m on the go that i want to save. i wanted a way to enter my thoughts into my phone and be able to just put my phone away as quickly as possible. so i set up back tap on my phone to trigger a @gather_do app intent. i just tap on the back of my phone twice, enter my thought and put my phone away. no need to unlock my phone, open the app and futz around.
The 1.8.0 release is taking more time than we would have liked. We’ve made some pretty dramatic foundational and architectural changes that lay the groundwork for a lot of the features we want to do in upcoming releases. We hope to push out this release very soon. Thanks again to everyone that has supported us so far and your patience.
Gather retweeted
Gather
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We've added an App Intent for Tasks. This means you can now ask Siri to add thoughts, notes and tasks to Gather. It also means you can easily build your own custom “shortcuts” and workflows that tie into Gather, and you can add controls to your Lock Screen and Control Center to quickly add thoughts, notes, and tasks.
Behind the scenes, we've been working on a couple massive releases that will finally bring all the different parts of Gather together. Release 1.8.0 is going to be a huuuuge release (hopefully in a couple weeks). We'll be releasing 1.7.3 this week. We are also continuing to send large batches of invites weekly. Stay tuned.
Gather 1.7.2 is now available
This release contains a ton of fixes and improvements related to the Gather Library and how we handle saving Media. Overall improved performance and responsiveness of the Library, including a significant reduction in initial load times. These improvements should be especially noticeable if you have thousands of items in your Library.
Other improvements and fixes:
• iPad experience improvements, particularly when using with keyboard and mouse
• Fixed: Media item processing thread safety issues that would cause crashes. Media item processing now executes in the background, which also addresses issues where batch processing of many items would cause the app to freeze. You can now drag and drop (macOS) or batch import (iOS) a myriad of media items while being able to use the app normally.
• Fixed: Media item files would often be overeagerly downloaded from your iCloud account even if not needed because a local cached representation exists. This would sometimes cause the app to hang if the app was trying to display files currently being downloaded by iCloud.
• Fixed: Media cards that had issues with processing could not be right-clicked (macOS) or long-pressed (iOS) to access card options.
• Fixed: Importing media from Photos library on iOS would fail
• Fixed: Orientation of imported media items was sometimes ignored, leading to cases where photos taken from your iPhone camera had inverted dimensions
• Fixed: Processing of Pinterest links would often fail
• Fixed: 1x1 Open Graph thumbnails are no longer used for media item card photos
• Fixed: Some media items would not display in the Library
• Fixed: Share extension would sometimes duplicate main app logic when processing media items
• Fixed: Global search results would sometimes be outdated when typing into the search entry fast
Gather retweeted
Sorry for the delayed release on this one. Usually we like to push out a release every week or two, but 1.7 was a notable exception; it took us 3 months to ship. Some details for anyone who’s curious.
Sometimes big underlying architecture changes need to be made in order to introduce new features and improvements.
For example, with this 1.7 release and the introduction of our Bloom Engine, we overhauled our media item processing pipeline in order to allow for features like text recognition.
If there’s no existing user data, making and pushing out changes can be done more easily. But if there’s user data, then extra thought needs to be put in to figure out how to roll out these changes gracefully. Therefore each new big change that carries promise comes with a significant time/energy tax (sometimes 200% / 2x the amount of time it takes to implement the major changes!). As a result, we’re naturally disincentivized from pushing out such major changes frequently. This is not good, so we wanted to spend some time figuring out how to remove this friction.
Migrating data on an app that uses a centralized database (eg. a web app, which is the world we come from) would more predictable because we can run a migration script on a central server. But Gather is local-first, and user data is privately stored in their own iCloud accounts (we have no access/visibility to user data), so migrations need to run decentralized-ly, piecemeal, one device at a time. There are unique scenarios that we have to contemplate when a migration script runs this way:
- The device turns off, or the network cuts out, or the battery dies during migration
- User upgrades Gather on multiple devices simultaneously, or a long stretch of time apart (each of which causes their own issues)
- User skips upgrading a version of the app on one or all devices
So over the course of a couple months, we built a reusable migration harness. This harness takes care of some of these above details in a recyclable way, while the specifics of the migration are isolated to a less-complex script. Our migration harness, as of right now performs the following steps:
1. Initialize, checks if migration is needed
2. If the migration is major, then we block access to the main app UI until the migration is completed. This is rare though (1.7 being our first exception), and most of the time, the migration can run in the background while the user is using the app.
3. Ensure network connection is available
4. Check if migration was run on this device previously but was interrupted, creates a resume state if so
5. Check if an active migration is running on one of the users’ other devices, and if so waits for that to finish
6. Wait for current iCloud/CloudKit import/export operations to finish
7. Device turns on a “migration lock”, so that other devices don’t try to migrate while this device has the migration lock
8. Run the version-specific migration script. (eg. in 1.7 we update the media item data schema and perform text recognition retroactively on existing media items). Migration scripts emit their progress (and errors) to the migration harness.
9. Wait for iCloud/CloudKit export operations to complete
10. Turn off migration lock, set the migration status for this device to “complete”
11. If necessary, unblock access to the main app UI
We also created a bunch of mock migration scripts that allowed us to build and test this harness extensively, which is what you see in this lil video below.
So far, this work seems to be working fairly well. When @steven_yuen ran the prod version of 1.7 on his Mac, the app crashed once mid-migration, but c’mon, the man has thousands of media items. Still, when he restarted the app, the migration picked up where it left off, and the migration completed gracefully. No doubt there are improvements that can be made (eg. would love to eliminate our dependence on a network connection for migrations given Gather is local-first), but for now, this drastically reduces the “big change tax” that we previously felt.
Tldr; How fast we can push out major changes/features is limited by how easily we can perform data migrations. So we spent a bunch of time creating a migration framework that allows us to hopefully make and push out big changes faster and more reliably.
Gather 1.7 is now available
This release introduces what we’re calling Gather’s Bloom Engine. The Bloom Engine is Gather’s brain - it’s designed to make your content more useful, more organized, and more powerful. We think of what you’ve added to Gather as seeds that grow over time - that become something bigger and more meaningful. Over time, the Bloom Engine will learn and understand your context, create connections, make suggestions, and enrich everything you’ve saved and created in Gather. It works invisibly in the background, offline, locally, and privately on your device. Much more to come in future releases.
Bloom Engine: Text Recognition
The first feature of the Bloom Engine that we are releasing is automatic text recognition on your Library media items. All existing photos in your Library will be automatically scanned for text and indexed so that you can search for photos based on the detected text.
Task Improvements
We’ve added a few small features to make working with tasks easier. You can now postpone tasks through the right-click (macOS) or long tap (iOS) menu. You can also edit tasks easily and inline by simply clicking/tapping on the task text. Finally, if you’re using macOS, you’re now able to select multiple tasks (using the Option key) and deleting or postponing the selected tasks in one go.
General fixes and improvements:
- You can now convert a task to a thought (and vice versa) through the right-click (macOS) or long tap (iOS) menu in the Journal
- Search now prioritizes note title matches higher than body searches
- Text entered into Create text field is now automatically backed up and restored in case of accidental dismissal
- You can now search for text within the current note body using Cmd+F (macOS)
- Reliability improvements to the Tag field in the Share Extension
- Fixed: Media Library built-in web browser can now follow links that would ordinarily open a new tab/window
- Fixed: Web browser in Media Library would sometimes crash when opening a link or browsing
Gather 1.7.1 is now available
We’ve added a bunch of little updates in this release to make organizing and managing your Tasks a little easier on your iPhone, iPad and Mac. More details below.
Task organization:
• You can now easily reorder tasks in your Journal by dragging them and dropping them in any order you like.
• (iOS) When you are in the Journal, press the action menu (…) button to see a new option called “Select Tasks”. Pressing this button will toggle a new mode that will allow you to select and take action on multiple tasks.
• (Mac) Select multiple tasks: Press and hold the Command (⌘) key, and click the tasks you want to select (they don’t need to be next to each other).
• (Mac) Select multiple items that are adjacent: Click the first task, then press the Shift key and click the last task. All tasks in between are included in the selection.
General fixes and improvements:
• When you save something from the share extension or add a Collection to an item in your Library, you can now create a new Collection in-place. No need to go to a different part of the app anymore to create a new Collection.
• Now when you add a new Task or Thought, we’ll keep you where you are in the app rather than always redirecting you to the Journal, so you can keep doing what you’re doing.
Gather retweeted
for the upcoming release of Gather, we’ve added a bunch of little updates to make organizing and managing your Tasks a little easier on your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Gather 1.7 is now available
This release introduces what we’re calling Gather’s Bloom Engine. The Bloom Engine is Gather’s brain - it’s designed to make your content more useful, more organized, and more powerful. We think of what you’ve added to Gather as seeds that grow over time - that become something bigger and more meaningful. Over time, the Bloom Engine will learn and understand your context, create connections, make suggestions, and enrich everything you’ve saved and created in Gather. It works invisibly in the background, offline, locally, and privately on your device. Much more to come in future releases.
Bloom Engine: Text Recognition
The first feature of the Bloom Engine that we are releasing is automatic text recognition on your Library media items. All existing photos in your Library will be automatically scanned for text and indexed so that you can search for photos based on the detected text.
Task Improvements
We’ve added a few small features to make working with tasks easier. You can now postpone tasks through the right-click (macOS) or long tap (iOS) menu. You can also edit tasks easily and inline by simply clicking/tapping on the task text. Finally, if you’re using macOS, you’re now able to select multiple tasks (using the Option key) and deleting or postponing the selected tasks in one go.
General fixes and improvements:
- You can now convert a task to a thought (and vice versa) through the right-click (macOS) or long tap (iOS) menu in the Journal
- Search now prioritizes note title matches higher than body searches
- Text entered into Create text field is now automatically backed up and restored in case of accidental dismissal
- You can now search for text within the current note body using Cmd+F (macOS)
- Reliability improvements to the Tag field in the Share Extension
- Fixed: Media Library built-in web browser can now follow links that would ordinarily open a new tab/window
- Fixed: Web browser in Media Library would sometimes crash when opening a link or browsing