Where you start

Version 1.7 is on the App Store. Hobba has helped you tidy up in the evening for a while now: the Evening Wrap-Up asks what’s left and where it should go. What was missing was the other half. Evenings are for sorting, mornings are for deciding.

A question, not a list

Open Hobba in the morning and Today asks once: “What are your top 3 today?” Underneath, it doesn’t repeat everything — only what has changed since yesterday: new in the Inbox and in shared projects, overdue since yesterday. The three you tap move to a pane of their own at the top. The question only comes with four or more open tasks; with three there’s nothing to choose.

The rest stays in Today. That’s the difference from “Too much for today?”, where three stay and the rest moves to tomorrow. In the morning the point isn’t what to drop. It’s what to start with.

New, without knowing when it arrived

“What has changed since yesterday” sounds simpler than it is: tasks in Hobba don’t carry the date they were created. Rather than add a new field, Hobba remembers which open tasks it knew about in the Inbox and in shared projects when you last answered or left the app. Anything that turned up after that is new.

With one exception: while the question is waiting, nothing gets remembered. Otherwise a quick detour into another app would use up the news before you’d seen it.

Or the night before

If you already know in the evening how tomorrow should start, you pick tomorrow’s top 3 right in the Evening Wrap-Up. In the morning they’re at the top, and the card doesn’t ask again. It only shows up if something new arrived overnight — and then it confirms what you picked instead of asking all over.

Pick them on your iPhone and the Mac won’t ask again. Your top 3 lead the Today widgets and your Apple Watch, and Siri reads them out when you ask “What are my top 3 in Hobba?”.

“Your three” became “Top 3”

Until shortly before release, they were called “your three”. In the app that worked, because the question they answer sits right above them. A widget has no question, and there “your three” were just three tasks among others, with nothing to say why these were on top. Now the widgets give them a heading of their own, “Your top 3”, and the small ones draw a hairline to the rest. A name that only works in context doesn’t work where the context is missing.

When did I last?

When you check off a repeating task, Hobba creates a new round instead of moving the date. That’s deliberate: it’s the only way the Log shows that you really did take the bins out every week. The price was that nothing linked the rounds together. Each one only knew about itself.

Now they share an identifier, and the card says something like “last done 19 days ago · done 14× · on average every 9 days”. So the history doesn’t start on the day of the update, older completed rounds with the same title in the same project join in once. That’s why the line appears as soon as you’ve checked the task off once after updating.

If your rhythm clearly differs from the one you set, the card offers to adjust it — in the same unit. “Every Tuesday” becomes “every 2 weeks”, not “every 14 days”; otherwise the weekday would get lost.

Also

The foot of a project now shows how many tasks in it are done, and a tap reveals them. And Hobba is ready for iPhone Duo: folded, the column beside the screen becomes a glass tile holding “+”, the gear and Back; unfolded, Hobba splits like it does on iPad. Everything else is in the changelog.