Nice app, simple and easy to use (once you’ve found the hidden back button!!).
But, what I really dislike is the lack of consistency in font sizes and font padding between pages. Why is it not consistent? Surely that would be easy to achieve?
Also, why is the font padding seemingly not related to the font size, e.g., If you choose a ‘tiny’ font size the padding is relatively large. Why? Surely that too would be easy to achieve?
So, my suggestion is:
A ‘slider’ where you can change font size that effects all of the pages on the app uniformly.
A ‘slider’ where you can change font padding that effects all of the pages on the app uniformly.
The scaling tied to hierarchy in the app is a design decision so you just instantly/subconsciously have a sense of how ‘deep’ you are in the app as you navigate between levels, even if say using a color theme that skins every level of the app the same pink color you like, etc.
But we do plan on a pass where we will probably tighten the padding scaling per level for tiny/small settings. I can understand that the people picking those are probably looking in general to up the info density on-screen.
Aaah, I see, so the reducing font size is designed to give you an indication of where (how ‘deep’) you are in the app. I think the very fact that I hadn’t noticed that means that it doesn’t achieve that goal! Sorry!
i suppose a person may want the start/‘main menu a different font size or type, to differentiate it, but from my perspective, and for the sake of a cleaner design, I’d just have the font size the same all the way through. There are only three pages ‘deep’ all the same, it’s not that you can really get lost!
Others may differ in opinion but that would be my preference.
Maybe you could offer the option? Reducing font size or uniform font size?
Tightening up the padding in the smaller fonts is definitely welcome though. There is a lot of wasted space otherwise.
There is also pressure to not ship too many settings for Clear because of its minimalism But yes we will start with looking at the small/tiny settings and their row hierarchy scaling tunings, either for 2.1 or 2.1.1.
I also hope some consideration is given to how font sizes and padding are managed. I’ve chosen the Tiny font size because otherwise there’s just too much scrolling to look at whole lists.
But Tiny still has two problems:
(1) The fonts scale up too quickly when moving up the hierarchy, so the top levels are too big. And yet, at the same time, the list count (thanks for restoring that) is minuscule. (Didn’t it used to be the same size as the list name? What was wrong with that?)
(2) The padding within a list item is too much so that items are too spread out and there’s still more scrolling than there needs to be.
My only other complaints are transitions: “Backing out” of a list up the hierarchy is too slow. And I miss being able to swipe directly between lists. Having to move and then down is a minor pain.
Otherwise, great job on v2. It’s obvious you’ve put a lot of work into it, and I also appreciate your responsiveness to user feedback.
Thank you, I’m relieved we’re starting to get signals that we indeed at least got the bones of this right.
Font size scaling hierarchically and list row padding is all in theory adjustable per font setting etc. So yeah will start there.
Backing out… we did try tuning it quicker, and it felt pretty good on my 120 fps phone. But I noticed on older/non pro models there is noticeable straining of the animation when sped up at 60 fps where the display rate is not able to keep up with the amount of motion and you notice the frames of it vs. it feeling super smooth. A little hard to describe but it felt problematic. Might be something we can look into selectively tuning for 120 fps devices in an update.
This post has some bg on the margin for list count question: Gesture to edit list title - #4 by phillryu I think we will look into addressing this but too early to promise.
I agree that the different font sizes for the different levels is not obvious enough to help me understand which “level” I’m in. I never noticed it, other than a vague feeling that the fonts are not consistent.
I use ‘tiny’ font btw. The reason for this choice is that otherwise the font size on the top level page becomes HUGE. But tiny font is just a bit too small at the deepest level.
I’d be happy with a single font size across the whole app (I’d choose ‘small’ throughout) and if the padding were reduced. An awful lot of space is wasted by the padding, so I feel that reducing the padding and having a consistent font size is something that needs to be prioritised.To me that is also truer to the design principle of the app being simplistic and minimalistic.
As it is, it doesn’t make the app unusable but it does make it awkward imho, so the jury is out whether I will keep using it or go back to using ioS Notes.
Understandable, but honestly, the three different scaling hierarchies make the feel of the app less minimalistic (which is just an observation and by no means a form of criticism).
To me, it looks like using 3 different resolutions throughout the app, alternating between 720, 1080, 4K pixels (when compared to a monitor).
So moving down (opening a list) has a noticeable delay, like a spaceship going into hyperspeed moves slowly a bit at first, then zooms off. Whereas moving back out is more direct.
For context: I have about 20 lists, some of the biggest are just shy of 100 elements. iPhone 13 Pro.
I could see this being our current not-so-optimized list opening, at the least it’s making this not a consistently timed animation for people. And yeah I would expect the delay it introduces to be at the start of the list opening animation that matches your description.
(Lol this just flashed me back to Metroid Prime, shooting the doors and sometimes waiting for them to open while it’s loading the next scene.)
We were mostly testing it in 2.0.1 hot fix in the context of ‘oh crap new Clear is crashing when trying to open a list with thousands of items’ but we also noticed list opening time will straight up scale and get more sluggish based on # of items. On newest phones and lists with a couple hundred etc. it’s subtle, but we have to do a pass there.
Let me know if you’re able to quickly test making a fresh list and compare opening that vs. the list with 100. (Also do any of the longer lists have extra items that are crossed off and you never cleared by chance?)
Oh! I just remembered another thing… possible the 2.0.1 fix we put in is flagged to kick in only for lists with 500+. Because we were rushing out an urgent fix for the people crashing trying to load into a giant list, we wanted to be safer and only turn on the fix changes for these more extreme cases.
Anyways, not 100% sure this definitely affects that animation delay but will check into it for the next update, to extend it to all lists if it would improve performance subtly for everyone.
But yes we will start with looking at the small/tiny settings and their row hierarchy scaling tunings, either for 2.1 or 2.1.1.