A field from anywhere

Version 1.6 is on the App Store. On the Mac there was no way to jot something down without first hunting for the Hobba window. Now there is: ⌃Space, from anywhere. Getting there took one dead end, a week with no icon in the menu bar, and a bug you only notice if you test in the evening.

The field

⌃Space opens a small input field, whatever app you’re in: title, note, subtasks and a project. While you type, it shows what Hobba has read from the title — a date, a time, a deadline or a repeat. Hobba itself stays in the background the whole time.

The dead end: the real sheet

The obvious version was to put the app’s own input sheet into a small window of its own. Everything was already there: the same fields, the same project picker, the same title parsing. Except that to type into a window like that, the app has to come to the front — and every single time, the main window came with it.

Quick capture that brings the whole app forward isn’t quick capture. If something occurs to you halfway through an email, you want to get it out of your head and keep writing, not land in front of a task list. So the field is its own plain panel that brings nothing forward. Hobba still reads the title exactly as the input sheet does, and creates the task in the background.

A week without an icon

In the test builds, the menu bar icon simply wasn’t there for a week. No error, no crash, just nothing. The first guess was a platform limit — a Mac app built from the iPad version isn’t allowed everything a native Mac app is.

It was far more mundane. The object holding the icon and the shortcut lived in a variable that disappeared at the end of a function, and macOS doesn’t hold on to such an icon by itself. The log showed it plainly: the icon was created, and 260 milliseconds later it was gone again, shortcut and all. One line of code. The lesson is older than Hobba and somehow new every time: whatever needs to stay alive has to be held on to by someone.

Tested in the morning

As soon as the field started showing what it had read, “jeden Samstag 9 Uhr” — every Saturday at nine — came out as 21:00. The system’s date reader takes a bare 9, once it’s past nine in the morning, as the next 9 on the clock, and that’s in the evening. Hobba had only corrected this for forms like “9:30”. It hit “heute 7 Uhr” as well, and every repeat with a time.

The bug was older than the field. It had simply never shown up, because this kind of thing gets tried out in the morning. Now “9 Uhr”, “um 9” and the French “9h” stay nine o’clock at any time of day. And times now get tried out in the evening too.

A task becomes a subtask

Pick up a task and hold it for a moment over the middle of another: it slides in as a subtask. The top and bottom edges of a row still reorder, as before. And it works the other way round: drag a subtask out of its card and it becomes a task of its own again, right below, in the same project, section and day. This works in the list and on the board.

It doesn’t work in tiles, on purpose. There, tiles swap places as soon as the one you’re dragging crosses the gap to the next — which is exactly what makes reordering there feel so light. Nesting needs a tile that stays put until you reach its middle. One attempt added a short pause before every swap, and the verdict was: “Now nothing works properly any more.” It came straight back out.

Also

On the Mac, every task now has a context menu without expanding it first. The Apple Watch gets three new complications, among them “At a Place”, which on watchOS 26 comes to the front of the Smart Stack by itself when you arrive. And switching between list, board and tiles now builds each view up visibly — faster or not at all under Settings › Appearance › Motion. Everything else is in the changelog.