Pick it up, put it down

Version 1.5 is on the App Store. Until now, dragging a task meant reordering it. Now it also means putting it somewhere else. The bar that makes this possible arrived late — and nearly missed this release.

A bar that only exists while you drag

Pick up a task and a bar opens along the bottom edge: “Date”, “Project”, “Focus”, “Tags”, “Delete”. Move onto a field and whatever is behind it grows upwards. Behind “Upcoming” you get five weeks in one go, with a dot under each date that already has something on it. Let go and you’re done.

Before, every one of these went through the expanded card: open it, open the drawer, pick, close. The bar isn’t a new place to set things — it’s the same destinations, brought to where your hand already is. On iPad in landscape it sits on the right, on the Mac it stands upright beside the list.

Almost a 1.6 feature

When the bar came together, 1.5 was essentially done. The objection wrote itself: a new gesture on the most-used handle in the app, days before submission. It went in anyway, with a way back: a finished build without the bar was ready and could have been submitted at any moment.

It wasn’t needed. What the work did turn up was something else: six bugs older than the bar, already shipping in 1.4. In landscape the drop under your finger hung 62 points to the side — eleven places computed the same point, and only one of them got it right. And dragging a selection didn’t scroll the list along as long as the list had no sections.

The pattern behind them is always the same: one rule living in several places. Change it in one and the others stay behind. A new gesture runs straight through all of those places and finds every one of them.

The one that keeps moving

Some tasks sit in “Today” every morning and leave again every evening. Push the same task away from today for the fourth time and the expanded card shows a line: “Postponed 4 times already. Break it up, or set it aside?” Next to it, two handles: “Break It Into Steps” and “Someday”.

No sound, no sheet, no shake. If you’re pushing something away for the fourth time, you’re busy with something else — a nag at that moment would just be one more thing to dismiss. The line waits where you’ll look anyway, once you finally sit down with the task. And it asks rather than scolds: what gets left lying around is usually too big or too vague.

Only real moves away from today count. Pulling a task forward doesn’t, neither does giving it its first date. And “Someday” is a decision, not a postponement.

Hobba speaks Japanese

The fourth language, and the title parser comes with it: date, time, deadline and repeat are read in Japanese just as they are in English or German. It’s built on a glossary of 253 terms whose first rule is simple: where Japanese iOS already has a word for the same thing, Apple’s word wins. If you use Hobba next to Calendar and Reminders, you shouldn’t have to learn two vocabularies for the same things.

And the informal “you” Hobba uses in German and English simply drops out in Japanese. Where English says “Your week”, Japanese just says “this week”. Adding a word for “you” would be literally correct and still sound wrong.

Also

Settings › Appearance has been rebuilt, with more backgrounds and accent colours, and the accent colour now reaches into the widgets and onto the watch face. On iOS 27 there are widgets that fill a whole page — how the large ones first came out cut off at the top is told in Fixed numbers. Everything else is in the changelog.