Bringing Preparation Closer to Reality

In September we wrote that preparation is where fecit touches the real world: the five kinds of preparation items — materials, tools, venue, personnel, paper — are where fecit points at real things, places, and people.

But real preparation doesn’t stop at “packed / not packed.” Equipment gets rented, venues get booked by the hour, and papers stop being valid after a date. Over the past three weeks we moved those shapes of reality into preparation.

1. Things you rent — rental period

Tools, venue, and personnel now take a rental period: a number and a unit (hour, day, week, month) together. For personnel, the same field is called the contract period.

If you enter the cost as a unit price, the total is the unit price times the period. For tools, it’s also multiplied by the quantity. Two lights at $30 a day, rented for three days, total $180.

2. Things that expire — expiry date

Paper (qualifications, certificates, documents) now takes an expiry date. If it falls before the task’s date, the expiry date turns to a warning color.

• The task’s date is its start date, or its due date if there’s no start, or today if there’s neither.
• A paper counts as valid through its expiry date.

Attach a passport to a business trip or a safety training certificate to on-site work, and you’ll notice a paper that has already expired before the day comes.

3. Both ways between tasks and the catalog

The catalog is where you register the materials, tools, and venues you have; a task’s preparation is what to bring that day. Until now things flowed one way, from the catalog to the task. Now they flow back too.

• Apply to catalog — when you edited a preparation item attached from the catalog, the new value stayed only in that task. Now, when values differ, “Apply to catalog” appears in the item’s menu. You review each changed field (name, quantity, cost, link, description, and so on) and write only the ones you pick to the catalog original. The catalog is always yours, so it applies directly, with no suggestion step. Photos are not applied.
• Save to catalog — a preparation item you wrote directly in a task, without going through the catalog, becomes a new catalog item with “Save to catalog” in its menu. Its photo comes along. If the same kind already has an item with the same name, the menu doesn’t appear, so tasks made from the same template don’t pile up duplicates.
• Save from another app (iOS, Android) — share from a shop or a blog and pick fecit, and the task creation screen shows “Save to catalog as preparation” on top. Pick a kind and you move on to creating a catalog item; the shared link goes into the link field, and if only a link arrived, the page’s title becomes the name. No task is created.
• The assistant starts from the catalog too — ask the assistant to attach a preparation item and it looks in your catalog first. If it isn’t there, it asks whether to add it, and if you agree, it creates the catalog item and attaches that.

“Apply to catalog” appears only on items that recorded where in the catalog they came from. Items attached before that record existed don’t show the menu.

4. No more rewriting

• Move to another kind — if you wrote a tool down as a material, you don’t have to delete it and write it again. “Move to another kind” in the item’s menu carries the name, description, and link along. If a field the other kind doesn’t have holds a value, you’re told before the move.
• Name from the link — paste a link while the name is empty and the page’s title fills the name.
• Open links directly — items with an address get a button at the right end of their row that opens it, without going into the details.
• Check from the details — you can check an item off from its details screen too. The checkbox and the name now sit at the top like a title.

5. Currencies and units

• Currency — instead of typing a currency, you pick from 155 standard currencies. The one you picked, your country’s currency, your default currency, recently used ones, and major currencies come first; the rest follow by name. Amounts show in the form people know for each currency, like “$12” or “¥4,800”. Set a default currency and new items start with it; otherwise they start with your device region’s currency.
• Units — the quantity unit that only materials had now comes to tools and paper too, shown as “2 sets” or “2 copies.” Tap the ? next to the unit and currency fields to see what goes there and how it appears in the list.

6. Checks belong to each run

A check on a preparation item means you actually packed it that day. So we kept checks from leaking out of the run.

• Templates have no checkboxes. A template is the blueprint for the next run, so it shows only the count.
• A copied task starts with an empty checklist. Until now, tasks made by duplicating, creating from a template, a routine, or taking from the library inherited the last run’s checks. Duplicating a task you had fully packed for gave you a new task that was already all packed. Now you pack fresh every time.
• Packed items turn gray. No strikethrough.

Also

• The public library web pages, which showed only materials and tools, now show all five kinds of preparation.
• When AI makes a template, it used to make only materials and tools; now it adds venue, personnel, and paper when they’re needed.

In short

Preparation now knows how long you rented something and when a paper expires, and moves both ways between tasks and the catalog. If the five kinds of preparation are where fecit points at reality, they now look a little more like it.