Give Your Checklists a Fresh Look

A Fresh Look for Your Checklists

Have you ever noticed the phenomenon that checklists tend to grow over time and hardly ever get shorter? I don’t know about you, but for me, long lists get overwhelming. Splitting lists up into multiple shorter ones makes them more manageable, but the amount of work remains the same. Today I want to introduce a small tweak. It won’t reduce the amount of work, either, but giving your lists a fresh look may help take a fresh look at your lists.

So what is this about? You know the Notebooks’ Default Document Theme which renders checklists as light blue squares with rounded corners. That is fine and perfectly integrates with the overall color scheme, but all checklists look the same. Wouldn’t it be nice to make the lists stand out a bit more, have them draw your attention?

That is why we created a custom document style. Based on the Default Theme it renders checkboxes as circles and paints them orange, so they do draw your attention. To take customization a bit further, this style uses the System Font by default. You can view this theme as an example of how easy it is to change the look and feel for your documents.

If you got curious, download the new theme and install it in Notebooks, as documented in a dedicated article. For quick reference, here is a summary:

• On an iPad or iPhone, open Settings > Write & Edit > Document Style and tap Add Your Own at the bottom of the list. Paste the contents of the new style that you just downloaded and tap Save. Now you can start assigning that new style to books and documents.
  Alternatively, you can search for the book NBResources from Notebooks’ top level, open the book and create the folder CSS if it does not yet exist. Then in CSS, create a new document, paste the theme you just downloaded, give it a meaningful title and you are done.
• On a Mac, open Notebooks‘ root in Finder (just type CMD-R to open the current document in a Finder window, and from here navigate further up, if necessary.). Now look for the folder NBResources/CSS; that folder may be hidden, so if you don’t see it, type CMD-SHIFT-. and it may show up. If the does not yet exist, you can add it as a regular folder. Now save the custom style in that folder, and you are ready to use it.
  (By the way: we will provide an easier way to install custom styles in Notebooks/Mac very soon).

We will add this and similar styles to the next major update, so if you don’t want to install right away, you can look forward to finding it in Notebooks soon.

This article refers to checklists which are part of a formatted or Markdown document. It does not refer to Notebooks’ task lists, which are a variation of a book.