Plainva 0.8.4: capture your day
Plainva 0.8.4 brings together the changes since 0.8.3 for desktop and mobile. The focus is capturing a day: a journal in your daily note, a task planner, widgets and voice notes. The fixes at the end include one that matters to everyone with a synced vault.
A journal for your day
The journal is the quick way to write something down without opening a note. Each entry is an ordinary list line with a time — - 14:05 Router is in the basement — in today’s daily note, readable in any editor. Ctrl/Cmd+Shift+J, the ＋ menu, the tray or a long press on the app icon open the Journal entry field, and Into the journal in the phone’s share sheet turns what you share into an entry. On the desktop, an optional system-wide shortcut captures even while another app is in front; it is off by default.
Open journal shows every day as a Stream or as Cards, and the day heading can carry your mood. The day ends at lets a day run as late as 06:00, so a late entry still belongs to the day before. Two devices writing to the same day no longer create a conflict copy: Plainva merges the entries by time.
Plan your tasks
The tasks view opens on Today, next to Upcoming, Inbox, All and Done. Type Send offer tomorrow 14:30 !!! and Plainva sets the date, the time and a high priority, showing each recognised part before it saves. A task with a time reminds you — on the desktop while Plainva is running, on the phone with In 1 hour and Tomorrow morning. - [/] means In progress, - [-] Cancelled. New task is also in the desktop tray, the Android launcher and, as Create as a task, the share sheet.
Widgets on Android and iPhone
Today shows what is overdue and the day’s appointments and tasks; Quick capture opens a task or the journal in one tap. The iPhone adds two lock-screen widgets. A widget never holds the text of a note or a path, and a locked encrypted workspace leaves it empty. What you tick off is applied the next time you open Plainva (iOS 17 or later on the iPhone).
Voice notes and location (experimental)
The microphone in the journal field records a voice memo into your attachments folder; embedded audio plays in the editor, in reading mode, on pinboard cards and in the journal. The place stamp stays off until you switch on Allow adding a place to journal entries. Then one press adds your coordinates, precise to about eleven metres, without history or background tracking.
Databases and pinboards
Every database view has a search field, Search this database…. Rating is an input type of its own, stored as a plain number. file.day places daily notes in calendars and timelines by their file name. Pinboard entries are written in the full editor, and kanban cards carry the note’s colour.
Every script, every direction
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and other right-to-left scripts run from right to left automatically, paragraph by paragraph; the interface keeps its layout (#111). Search, graph mentions and Link find Japanese, Chinese and Thai words in the middle of a sentence. Tags appear as pills that open their notes, Colour tags can tint them, search results and backlinks can be sorted, and a callout is drawn as one card.
Reliable mail and accounts
Setting up a new mail account on the desktop works again, and saving an account again keeps its calendar and task lists. Events with an online meeting show Join; meeting notes can start from a template of your own.
Fixes that matter
In 0.8.3, moving or renaming a synced note inside Plainva could delete it at the next sync — with WebDAV and S3 every time, with Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive now and then — and a later cycle removed it on the server too. 0.8.4 fixes this on desktop and phone (#113). Before it deletes anything here, the sync now checks a sample of the missing files one by one with the cloud.
Please update every device that works with the same vault. A device still on 0.8.3 keeps deleting synced notes that are moved or renamed there, and it mirrors deletions without asking. If a note went missing, it still exists in up to three places: as a snapshot under .plainva/backups/, which Restore deleted files… lists under its new path (desktop: right-click the vault name; phone: Settings → Maintenance); in the system trash on the desktop; and in your server’s trash if it was deleted there too. The FAQ has the details.
Accented names count as one name in both Unicode spellings, so a folder with accents, made in Finder for example, no longer turns up twice (#112). Open notes follow files moved outside Plainva (#110). A new note on the phone is named in the app’s language instead of “Notiz 1” (#105), and on the iPhone the rows in Bars & areas respond and the folder screen tells loading, unreadable and empty apart (#104). Text patterns in the editor, import and sync now run in linear time, and code scanning reports no open findings. These are specific improvements, not an independent security review.
Update together
As described above, update every device that works with the same vault. At the first start after the update, Plainva updates its record of path spellings and the search index once; no file is renamed, and only notes with characters such as Japanese, Chinese or Thai are read again. On the phone, microphone and location access are requested only when you first use voice notes or the place stamp. Both are experimental, as are encrypted workspaces and the device calendars (On this device).
Plainva 0.8.4 is available for desktop, Android and iOS TestFlight. On iOS, the native marketing version remains 1.0; the TestFlight build number identifies the new delivery. Update each device that works with the same vault to receive the shared improvements throughout.
iOS TestFlight: 1.0 (125).