Bee v1.3 is out now in both the web site and the App Store, and I just wanted to give a short rundown on some of the exciting new features that have emerged in this release. This is the biggest release in a while in terms of new features, with the major feature being inline username autocompletion which a lot of users have asked for.

The current release cycle of Bee is 1-2 weeks which is evident when you look at the release notes. The advantage of shorter release cycles is that user feedback can be addressed immediately - a lot of the features mentioned below are a direct result of feedback.

Inline username autocompletion

When using Bee with JIRA and GitHub servers, you can now autocomplete usernames in comment boxes or description fields. Both JIRA and GitHub lists support using @ within your text to bring up the autocomplete menu, and JIRA additionally supports the JIRA text format of [~ to indicate the start of a linked username. This is all presented in a beautifully animated fashion.

JIRA Favourite Filters as lists

You can now add filters you define inside of JIRA to Bee. This is a great way to further customise Bee lists with your own JQL queries. Just make sure the filter is marked as a Favourite Filter inside of JIRA. When you add a new list inside of Bee, just scroll down to the last section which shows you all of your JIRA filters:

More animations when moving items around

This is particularly visible when using a JIRA Agile project. Now whenever someone makes changes on the site, they’re reflected immediately in an animated fashion once you get back to Bee. And when you bump issues from column to column or backlog to sprint, you get to see your issues rearrange themselves. Here’s a quick clip:

FogBugz email attachments

Bee now displays your email image attachments inside of your emails, similar to the web site. Bee also lets you use QuickLook to easily view the images and open them in Preview.

JIRA linked issues

When you click on a link inside of Bee that leads to another issue, that issue is opened inside of Bee rather than taking you to the web site. This behaviour has also been available to GitHub users for some time, but has now been made available to JIRA users as well.

Always visible fields

You can now indicate which fields you want to remain always visible. This was built as a result of feedback for people heavily relying on labels inside of GitHub and wanting to always have that field quickly accessible. To toggle fields to be always visible, you can go to the item menu and navigate to the ‘Always Visible Fields’ submenu.

Hand grab cursor for web popover

This is a small feature but I thought it would be worth mentioning because it helps indicate a separate feature that a lot of people weren’t aware of. When viewing content inside of a web popover inside of Bee, you can just tear off the popover from the bottom bar and have it pop out into its own little window you can keep around for reference. Here it is in action:

Remaining Items group visibility

When you group items inside of Bee, sometimes there are items leftover which don’t fit into the grouping option you’ve chosen. E.g. you want to group by labels but not all your items have been labelled. These leftover items are displaying in a ‘Remaining Items’ group at the end of your list. Now there’s an option for you to toggle this on and off. Handy if you don’t want the extra visual noise and are not concerned about remaining items. Also useful for JIRA Agile projects when grouping by Column or Sprint.

These are just some of the features which have surfaced in the latest version of Bee. You can read about the rest of the features and fixes on the release notes page which are always kept in tune with app updates.

Wednesday January 29, 2014