Filarr 3.6: complete tasks, “To tidy”, a Folders page, and what comes next

Between 23 and 30 September, the desktop app shipped three releases: 3.5.9, 3.6.0 and 3.6.1. Together they make the biggest update since 3.0. Tasks become a real tool, Filarr learns to suggest a place for your files, and a long run of fixes closes cases where work could disappear without a word.

If the app is already installed, it checks on its own every four hours. To skip the wait: Settings › About › Check for updates. Otherwise, the latest version is on the download page. The line-by-line detail is in the changelog.

Tasks become a tool of their own

Until now, a Filarr task was a checkbox inside a note. Handy, but limited. Version 3.5.9 turns it into a real task manager, without taking tasks out of your notes.

A “Tasks” tab in the sidebar. It gathers the tasks from all your notes, with the tabs Evernote users know: My tasks, Notebooks, Notes, Today, Assigned. You can sort them by due date, priority or last change, and filter them (recurring, flagged, completed…). Three layouts: the list, a board by stage or by day, and a calendar by month or week. Drag a task onto another date to reschedule it, and “See in note” takes you to the task itself, not to the top of the note.

Complete tasks. Each task can have:

a due date, with a time and a duration;
a repetition (tick it and it moves to its next date);
up to five reminders, a flag, a priority and a stage;
a description and subtasks.

Quick entry understands plain language: “Call Léa tomorrow at 3pm !high #work” sets the date, the time, the priority and the tag.

The important choice is elsewhere: tasks stay inside their notes. There is no second database on the side, so nothing extra to encrypt separately or to sync another way. A task is encrypted like the rest of its note, on your device. Each one carries a stable identifier, the same on the desktop, the web and the phone.

Shared-vault tasks join the tab in 3.6.0, under their vault's name. “My tasks” and “Today” only show the ones assigned to you, so a team's backlog does not drown your days. You can tick, date and assign them without opening the note. The change goes through the shared note, exactly like a keystroke: a member who has the note open sees it arrive live, and nothing they are writing gets overwritten.

Filing without thinking about it: “To tidy” and the Folders page

Everyone has a “Downloads” folder that overflows. Version 3.6.0 tackles it with two pages.

“To tidy”

The page takes in your inbox and any folder called “To sort”, “Inbox” or “Downloads”. For each file it suggests a folder and says why: “the next one after invoice-0412.pdf”, “like the August and July statements”, a photo taken during the days of a trip.

What mattered to us is that it never gets things wrong silently:

Only the really safe placements are pre-ticked. Filarr measures its own accuracy against the files you have already filed yourself. When two folders compete for a file, you choose.
Nothing moves without your consent, and every action can be undone.
It also flags byte-identical duplicates, empty folders, folders asleep for more than six months, and the “New folder (2)” that need a name.

Everything is computed on your device. The server receives neither your files' content nor their names in the clear; it could not suggest anything even if it tried, and that is by design.

The “Folders” page

A new tab, right under Home, shows all your folders in three views:

Tree: each folder with its size (subfolders included), its last activity, its sync status, and one-click filters;
Columns: walk from folder to folder down to the file preview, by keyboard or mouse;
Space: a map where each block is sized by what it takes up. It is the fastest way to see where your storage goes.

“Import a folder…” brings in a whole tree from your computer, encrypted like any import. System files (.DS_Store, Thumbs.db, a .git folder) stay out.

What you do not see, and what matters most

A good part of 3.6.0 fixes defects that could lose work. We would rather name them.

A shared-vault note no longer overwrites what someone else saved. If someone had saved the note another way (an offline device, an older version of Filarr), the next person saw the old text, and their first keystroke saved over it. A banner now says so on opening, and a save made anyway opens the arbitration screen.
Opening a note no longer modifies it. A note ending in a list or a table received an empty paragraph on opening, changed date and went back to sync. In a shared vault, for every member.
“Forgot password” really reopens your files. Two paths left an account with a 24-word recovery phrase that reopened nothing. The wizard now applies the phrase it shows you.
A new local profile is born encrypted. It asks for a password and gives you its 12-word recovery phrase, as on first launch. Before, it stayed unencrypted until you thought about it.
Uninstalling on Windows keeps your profiles. Uninstalling erased the data folder, without warning.
Three content losses in the editor are fixed, including a Ctrl+Z that could replace a note's body with another note's.

On the comfort side: “Back” returns where you came from (each tab has its own history), and opening a note no longer makes you wait. With 2,000 notes, every opening froze the screen for a second; it now takes a few hundredths of a second.

Finally, a transparency point: error reports went out with no setting to turn them off. They can now be turned off in Settings › System, and each profile has its own anonymous code. What leaves the app, and how to turn it off, is described on the privacy page of the help.

3.6.1, an urgent fix

The “To tidy” page read every folder's name to recognise inboxes. A folder arriving from another device whose name was not readable yet then crashed the whole window. Version 3.6.1, released on 30 September, shows it without a name in the meantime. If you stayed on 3.6.0, this is the one to take.

What comes next: already on the web, soon on the desktop

The web app gets new features before the desktop. Everything below is already live there and will arrive in the next desktop release.

A gateway for bookkeeping

It is the request we hear most from freelancers: send invoices to the accountant and receive documents without trading attachments in the clear.

A permanent drop box. A link that never expires, where your accountant, clients or suppliers drop encrypted files for you alone. Filarr decrypts them on your device and files them in the folder you chose.
Send invoices by rule. An automation can send a folder's files to the collection address of your accounting software (Pennylane, Dext, Qonto, Xero…), and the desktop will be able to drop them straight into Qonto.
An encrypted keychain for those services' API keys, synced across your devices.

An honest caveat: email is the one exception to end-to-end encryption. An attachment sent by email passes through our server for the time of sending, without being kept, and the screen says so when you create the rule. A file dropped through the box's link, on the other hand, is encrypted in the depositor's browser, and only your key can open it.

Much more capable databases

Import a table from an Excel or LibreOffice workbook, a PDF, a Word document, or an image through text recognition. A bank statement in PDF is read from the position of its text. Everything happens on the device.
An engine built for Filarr stores large databases in columns. On 100,000 rows, a three-column sort goes from 354 to 12 milliseconds. The result is identical to the old one, row for row: the engine was checked against the old one on thousands of randomly generated databases.
Your database schema, Merise-style: the conceptual model, the logical model, and the SQL script for SQLite, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
A “Feedback & bugs” template, and a Date column that fills itself when a row moves to “Resolved”.

More safeguards in shared vaults

Emptying a vault note entirely now asks for confirmation, and a note too heavy for live editing (a database of more than a thousand rows, for instance) no longer loses changes: it leaves co-editing and says so.

Further out

One thing is ready in the apps but not active yet: sign-in with a derived key. The web and Android already know how to send, at sign-in, only a key derived from your password instead of the password itself; the desktop will at its next release. The server-side switch comes after that, and each account will migrate at its next sign-in. We will announce it as done once it is done.

And above all: Filarr is out on Android. How it works, what the app does and what it does not do yet: it is all in the dedicated post.

The full roadmap is on the roadmap page. Missing a feature? Let us know.