A few months back I did some research on how people were understanding Sofa. I learned a lot during that research, but two things stood out in particular:
That’s when I focused on improving the organization features of Sofa.
You can now group lists together into Sections. For example, create a section called “Movies” to group all movie lists. You can do the same for books, podcasts, and tv shows.
The number of lists people have in Sofa ranges wildy, from a few to dozens. Once you hit around 20–30 lists, it became painful to manage.
Grouping lists into Sections improves two common tasks:
For those of you with a lot of lists, I think you’re going to like Sections 🙂
Siri Shortcuts are the new hotness in iOS 12. From Apple, Shortcuts are good for “immediately performing useful actions, or for opening the app to specific screens so the user can quickly initiate tasks”. Sofa’s implementation focuses on the latter.
Siri Shortcuts for Sofa focuses on speeding up the process of adding to your lists. Now you can say “Hey Siri, add a book”, and Sofa will open to the book search screen. This allows you to bypass multiple taps just by talking to Siri.
Before you start chatting with Siri, you have to do a few things first.
Even though Siri Shortcuts give developers more power, there are still limitations. Ideally you would say “Hey Siri, Add the book ‘Sapiens’” and Sofa would open to the book search screen, fill in the title, perform the search, and show you the results. All triggered by your voice. From what I understand, this isn’t possible out of the box. Hopefully in future versions of iOS Apple adds the ability to do this.
This will most likely be the last release of this year, but I have a lot in the pipeline for 2019.
This list is no guarantee that the feature will be developed, it’s more what I think will be worked on next year. Seriously though, plans change all the time.
If there is anything you’d like to add to our list, shoot us an email at feedback@sofahq.com.