What’s New In TimeTune 4.5

TimeTune 4.5 doesn’t contain many changes regarding the user interface 🤔

However, it contains important changes on the inside. Changes that improve the behavior of the app and increase its robustness and flexibility 💪

Let’s see the changes in detail:

SORTING TAGS BY COLOR OR NAME

Starting version 4.5, you will be able to sort your tags by name or color:

Sorting tags by color will allow you to visually group related tags. For example, if you have a ‘Sleep’ tag and a ‘Nap’ tag with the same color, those tags will appear one after another on the list:

The selected sort mode will be respected when choosing a tag for your blocks:

That will allow you to locate your tags quickly by color instead of looking for them alphabetically 🔎

SEARCHING BLOCKS BY DESCRIPTION

Now you will be able to search on the ‘Blocks’ section by description, besides name or tag:

That may come in handy to users who add comments or other data to their individual blocks.

ANDROID 13 AND MONOCHROME ICON

Android 13 launched recently, and we took the opportunity to optimize and adapt the app to the new version of the operating system.

Along with these changes, we included the new monochrome icon for Android 13 users:

NOTIFICATION SOUNDS

Prior to TimeTune 4.5, the app played notification sounds like a media player instead of using the built-in notification categories. Our dynamic notification categories were basically silent, and we used a foreground service to play the sound.

We originally used that approach to offer maximum customization while avoiding the need to create too many notification categories. But unfortunately, the approach presented several problems:

• Unlike ordinary notifications, the sound didn’t stop when opening the notification shade, only when swiping the notification away (this was -understandably- very confusing to many users).
• It needed a foreground service, which in turn needed an additional ‘playback’ notification. Apart from that, foreground services could be blocked or killed by the operating system unexpectedly.
• When mirroring notifications to a wearable device, our notifications were always silent.

Therefore, in TimeTune 4.5 we’ll use our dynamic notification categories to play the sounds 🎵

That means the app may create a few more dynamic notification categories now. But taking into account that notification categories use a very small amount of space and can still be reused, it’s not really a problem.

Therefore, in the new version:

• Notification sounds will stop when opening the notification shade.
• There’s more reliability when playing the sounds, as there’s no need for a foreground service.
• Notifications mirrored to wearable devices won’t be silent anymore.

👉 This change affects notifications that play normal sounds or songs, but not voice notifications. Voice notifications are still played through a foreground service like before (there’s no technical alternative for that yet).

OVERRIDING ‘DO NOT DISTURB’

Before version 4.5, TimeTune included a setting to override the ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode. Unfortunately, that setting didn’t always work correctly, as it could clash with the device’s settings.

So in the new version, we removed that setting and added an informative message:

As explained in the message, the best way to override the ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode is to select ‘Alarm volume’ as the output channel for your notifications (and of course, allow alarms to go through when the ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode is enabled on your device).

👉 Keep in mind that adding TimeTune in your device settings as an app that can interrupt the ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode won’t work. That only works when an app has already created all its notification categories, but not when those categories are created on the fly, like we do.

SINGLE ACTIVITY ARCHITECTURE

Although this change is just internal (and may be of interest to developers only), it’s the most important change in TimeTune 4.5. We basically restructured the whole app to work with a single activity architecture.

Changes like that require a lot of care and testing, but the benefits are worth it.

The app is now:

• More robust.
• Prepared for future changes.
• More fluid in some screens.

This new architecture is kinder to advertising as well, as it doesn’t force the app to reload the ad banner when changing screens in the app 📱

MINOR CHANGES

As always, there are other minor changes included in this version:

• New Ukrainian translation.
• Solved a bug related to the calculation of empty time in statistics.
• The persistent notification now properly informs about next empty time.
• Settings / Notifications / Default configuration is full-screen now.
• Multiple optimizations.

Thanks a lot for your support and stay tuned for more updates! 🧡😀

(Top illustration by @storyset, on Freepik)