A task's activity and files

Keep a running record on a task — your comments, the files that belong to it, and what happened to it and when.

Open a task's activity

The activity is the Activity section of the task's panel; the chevron on the task's card opens it too. When you open the task's page, the activity is beside the task.

On the task's full-screen page, tap Activity at the top.

The activity reads like a conversation: the oldest entry at the top and the field for writing at the bottom.

Add a comment

Type in the field at the bottom of the activity.
File the comment:

Press Return. To start a new line in the comment instead, press ⇧Return.

Tap Return, or the ⊕ beside the field.

Each comment shows your name and when you wrote it. To edit or delete a comment, use its context menu.

Tip: Type @ and a name in a comment to name a person. See People.

Name a note in a comment

Click or tap the note button beside the comment field (Mention a Note).
Pick a note from the list. Type to narrow it — tag:work works here too.

The note's name goes into your sentence as a link: click or tap it to open the note. If you rename the note later, the comment keeps the words you wrote and the link still opens the right note.

What the app records for you

Besides your comments, the activity records some things by itself, in gray with a symbol beside them: ticking a task off, putting it back to work, and making a task from an e-mail. These entries are a record of what happened, so they cannot be edited or deleted.

A task made from an e-mail starts with the entry Made from an e-mail and the message's subject, so you can always tell when it became a task.

The app's entries appear in the language the app is in, whatever language they were recorded in. A task ticked off on a phone set to Czech reads Marked done when your app is in English.

Attach files to a task

A file can belong to the task itself rather than to its note.

Click or tap the paperclip beside the comment field, or drop a file onto the field.
Add a comment if you like, and file it.

The file appears in the activity as a card you can look at — a picture, the first page of a PDF, or the opening of a Word document or spreadsheet. It also appears in the list of files beside the task, so you can find it without reading through the activity. On the Mac, that list shows each file, when it arrived and when it last changed.

Open a file by clicking or tapping it. Pictures and PDFs open in NotaBene, so you can mark them up. On the Mac, other files open in their own app, and what you save there is saved on the task.
Rename or remove a file from its menu in the list. A removed file's entry stays in the activity, grayed out, as a record that it was there.
A second file with the same name is kept beside the first as, for example, contract 2.pdf.

A task's files travel with its note — through sync, the Trash and a duplicate — and go when the task goes. They are not listed among the note's own attachments.