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2007-04-10 17:55

What's the best thing you could be working on?

And why aren’t you?

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2007-03-05 22:34

SyncTogether syncs Macs without .Mac

Mark/Space has released SyncTogether, which syncs Address Books, Mail settings, iCal and other SyncServices data between multiple Macs.

Personally I’m on three different Macs all the time: Work, G5 at home and iBook G4 on the road/rails. But I’ve never used iCal, Mail, Address Book or Safari to any sort of extent, because I use Entourage (work email), Thunderbird (private email) and Firefox (for almost everything).

SyncTogether looks like such a promising concept that I’m seriously considering switching to Sync Services enabled application. There are several problems with this, however.

Safari won’t ever take over for Firefox on any of my Macs, but then again, there’s Foxmarks, which works flawlessly for me. And I don’t use bookmarks for much other than the Personal Toolbar Folder. For other bookmarks I use del.icio.us.

For work email, with their huge attachments, Entourage really is the best available Mac email client. Thunderbird sucks when it comes to emails with big attachments, but I like it in most other respects, especially because its good junk mail filtering (props to my workplace’s firewall — I never get junk at work), so I use that for private email accounts. At least I like it better than Mail, which never hit home with me.

Might it be worth switching from Entourage and Thunderbird to a one-stop solution in Mail, which would sync across all my Macs? How does Mail handle big attachments? From what I understand, Mail’s junk filters should also be pretty good. And then there are interesting Mail plugins like MailTags, integration with applications like Actiontastic and so on (for Getting Things Done).

The other day I just realized that all my three Macs were running Thunderbird 1.0.something, and that I hadn’t been wondering why I hadn’t seen any automatic updates happening with it. So I had to upgrade all three copies. And just yesterday I spent some time reordering of my email accounts by manually editing Thunderbird’s prefs.js file on my G5, a task that was not very easy and not something I want to repeat two more times.

And so I come to realize that Thunderbird, even at version 1.5, isn’t a very streamlined application yet, and that I might be better off running Mail. I’m running Imap exclusively anyhow, so it’s not like it’s a big problem switching back if it shouldn’t work out.

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2007-02-28 10:28

GTD application Actiontastic updated

Mac OS X GTD application Actiontastic is at version 0.9.2 as of today.

I have yet to try it, because of—among other things—its lack of online access. It still lacks that, but as today’s post says, the next release will be version 1.0, and will include syncing with Actionatr, which I mentioned in a recent blog post. At that point I will be willing to give it a try.

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2007-02-21 16:45

GTD application Actiontastic gets online companion: Actionatr

Jon Crosby, developer of GTD application Actiontastic has just announced an upcoming online version: Actionatr

As far as I know, this makes Actiontastic the first Mac GTD application to take its business online.

Of course, things will sync between the two versions. And Crosby apparently thought the same thing I did when the iPhone’s web browser capabilities were announced: This would be perfect for using GTD web applications, as opposed to writing native iPhone applications (which wouldn’t be allowed by Apple anyway).

I have tested Actiontastic just a few minutes, but I didn’t really put my heart into it because of the lack of online access. I can’t use a GTD app on one computer only. But when it goes online at some point in the future, I will definitely try it out.

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2007-02-20 23:31

Online GTD Application: Vitalist

Vitalist is an online GTD application I haven’t mentioned yet. Which is a shame, because the little I’ve tested it so far, it’s great, and beats Nozbe (which I recently blogged about and which effectively priced itself out of my GTD application horizon) in several respects.

I know I’ve seen Vitalist before, but that was quite a while back, in its infancy. Right then it was dismissed as just not ready for prime time yet.

But now it looks like it’s matured quite well, and the last few days it’s been cropping up in my Technorati GTD feed with positive mentions, so I thought I’d try it again, especially since I couldn’t get Tracks up and running as I planned to.

It’s now good enough that it has replaced Nozbe—and before that, Tracks—in the collection of Firefox tabs that I use for my home page, and I expect I’ll stop looking for alternatives for a while and actually Get Things Done …

Some things I like about Vitalist

Dumping stuff in there is easy. There’s an Inbox, where you can input a stream of actions. Hitting enter posts the action and lets you enter a new one right away. And today they added the ability to add actions by sending emails to a special address (username-NNNN@vitalist.com, where NNNN is a 4–6 digit personal code). Which means I can also use MMS messages to enter actions.

You don’t need to assign actions to a particular project. This means you can enter one-off things (“Buy cat food”, “Return lawn mower to neighbor” etc.)

Daily email reminders. You can get your ‘Dashboard’ mailed to you every day. The Dashboard displays current pressing issues — that is, items associated with a point in time, like ticklers and overdue and upcoming actions.

Export any view to print, feed, iCal and more. This way you can get your Actions page, Contexts page or any other Vitalist page that has a row of icons and links in the top right in your preferred format. Well, among the available ones, of course.

Mobile access. I can log in to Vitalist with my new Treo 680, with its limited browser, to check out the actions or enter new ones. This seriously reduces the need for an offline version or for printing lists, as I almost always have my phone when I’m away from a computer with Internet access.

Reasonable pricing. Free with ads, or $5/mo for file attachments (don’t need them, at least not yet), sharing (spouse not into this kind of thing), SSL (not that paranoid) and no ads (not that bothered by them.)

Some things I don’t like about Vitalist

Reminders don’t arrive at the correct time. I think they’re six hours behind, but I’ll need to test more to find out.

Keyboard shortcuts are flaky. One can optionally use unmodified keystrokes to navigate and do things in Vitalist, but this clashes with Quick Find in Firefox.

Submitting forms with errors resets the forms. If you enter a reminder date without a due date, for example, the New Action form is displayed again with an error message pointing this out at the top, and with a new, empty form below. Using the browser’s Back button doesn’t work, either. Very annoying.

Conclusion

I feel like I’m running around in the GTD application landscape like, well, something running from place to place in fast succession. But right now it feels like I’ve settled down a bit, since I think I’m pretty pleased with most aspects of Vitalist as a GTD solution.

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2007-02-17 14:41

Finally signs of life from GTD developers

Just a few weeks after GTD application Nozbe launches, Scrybe developers realize they should probably blog more often. And the day after that, Propel’r developers realize the same thing.

And their progress reports state the same thing: It’s taking us longer than we initially thought. Scrybe developers don’t want to give a date, but I’m guessing they’ll be out of beta way before Propel’rs announced push back of the release date to some time this summer.

Now, it would be too cheap and obvious to point out the fact that developers of GTD applications aren’t Getting Things Done as fast as they thought.

But I think there’s an obvious lesson to be had here: Don’t announce your product prematurely. I don’t know why people do — I can’t really see any benefits. It’s just going to generate (over)hype, high expectations, lots of emails that need answering, and in general a lot of extra work that takes focus and energy away from developing.

In the case of Scrybe, I can see the point of getting lots of beta testers. But Propel’r developers aren’t doing that, so their extremely premature announcement doesn’t make much sense at all. And as they write in the blog post linked to above, they’ll soon release the initial release’s feature list. That’s only going to generate another flood of blog comments and emails from people who want more or other (often obscure) features.

I’m wondering if they shouldn’t at least make recommendations for other web applications people can use in the mean time, maybe along with statements like: “This setup won’t give you feature X or feature Y, but that’s why you’re going to need our product.”

Speaking of which, later today I think I’ll have a go at updating Tracks.

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2007-02-14 23:12

Nozbe ups the project limits -- and prices

Here’s an update to the article I wrote yesterday about online “Getting Things Done” (GTD) application Nozbe.

Good news first: In honor of Valentine’s day, they introduced two paid plans, that are to be free until mid march. You can get 30 or 100 projects, along with some other perks (custom contexts, file storage, email support, no ads and also SSL security for the more expensive plan.

And then the bad news: Talk about expensive! There’s absolutely no way I’m going to pay $12.25 a month for any online service. That gets me more than half a year of flickr’s pro service, with unlimited everything. I might consider paying $4.95 a month, but even that is a bit much, especially when there’s a limit of 30 projects, which I have a high risk of hitting.

Back on Tracks?

It’s been a while since I’ve used Tracks — for a few good reasons: It didn’t work very well (at the time), and it was way too much hassle to upgrade (lots of detailed instructions). To me it’s kind of obvious that an application like that should be easy as pie to upgrade — that it could be done with a few simple clicks in the browser, for example. You shouldn’t be shaving yaks when you should be Getting Things Done.

But it’s now so long ago since the last time I’ve used it that I’m ready to give it another try and not care if I lose all my data in the process.

I guess my article on installing Tracks on Textdrive could use some help catching up with time, too.

Heaven knows unlimited projects for free is a lot better than 30  projects for $4.95/mo.

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2007-02-13 23:42

Nozbe: Quite a few more thoughts

I’ve been using Nozbe for a few small projects, and somehow it manages to get out of my way and let me just dive right in and plan and do stuff in a way that few of the other apps have been able to do.

In other words, I dig Nozbe so far.

Nozbe’s five projects limit

It’s a bit hard knowing how it’ll scale if all my projects and next actions are dumped in there. And it looks like the big dump won’t happen tonight, at least, even though the voices begging for more projects are many (ten at the time of writing this). There’s been no word on that from developer Michael Sliwinski, which I suspect might mean one of several things:

• He’s busy working on it and won’t address that thread until he can say “here ya go”.
• It’s something he’s unable to do right now but he doesn’t want to admit to that fact.
• He’s got a weighty argument for keeping one’s GTD project list to a maximum of five at a time.

I can’t think of any reason why it should be the second of those two, and if it was the last one, I can’t think of a reason why he hasn’t replied to the thread of ten people saying the same thing.

Here comes the crowd, or: “Oh no, not again”

With the launch of any application for Getting Things Done, there comes an onslaught of people requiring all sorts of obscure features that them and five others might find a use for.

“Make your app do this, and I’ll dump every other application in favor of yours.” Hah! More likely it’s going to be: “Make your app do this, and I’ll be well on my way through the third app after yours, requesting even more obscure features.”

Nozbe is not an exception. There’s one, for example, in the same forum thread I linked to above, with this idea:

“Would love to see an ability to enter the amount of time taken on a task, so that we could see if our time estimates are accurate, and then show a percentage over or under. Better yet, include a timer.”

All right, it’s just an idea, but as such it would belong in another thread, not in a “this is a serious showstopper for us” thread. And I’m using this just as an example of the myriad requests of the same kind. So it’s not that I don’t think it would be nifty, and it’s not a personal attack on the contributer in any way.

But somehow, with all the other features already in the works, and also trying to minimize feature creep and keeping things simple, I don’t think these kinds of features are the first to be implemented. And if it were to be implemented at some point, I have a suspicion it would be one of those features that got in the way and made you fiddle with the application instead of Getting Things Done.

Helping developers out

I think what developers in general, and in case of Nozbe, Michael Sliwinski, first and foremost could use would be feedback about what is and isn’t working with the current feature set and design.

How does it work for you, as it is now? What’s easy? What’s hard? What’s intuitive, and what’s incomprehensible?

There are a number of things I have noted just after using Nozbe a little bit the past couple of days, which I hereby present to you.

And yes, I will be suggesting a few features along the way, but they will be things that will make Nozbe get more out of my way in favor of — I suspect you guessed it — Getting Things Done.

Front page

I have 3 next actions! But what are they? I expect to Nozbe to give me something I can do immediately, not make me click one extra time.

Even better: Make me select different contexts for different computers (a la TaskToy). I have one at work, one at home and a laptop, and some contexts are irrelevant at some of them.

I don’t need the Nozbe blog stuff to the right. Lose that, and put my active projects there instead, like on the Projects and Next Actions pages.

I want one-click access to creating new projects or new next actions in existing projects. Make getting things off your brain as fast and hassle free as possible.

All in all, as it is now, the front page isn’t utilized at all, while I would expect it to give me a very useful overview.

Projects page

The same is true for the Projects page — the front page isn’t really used for anything. Why not give me a list of projects and their next actions, and let me add actions directly to projects from there?

Next Actions page

This page is pretty okay, actually, so I’ll use this space to say a bit more about Nozbe’s design and layout.

I think it’s a bit space consuming vertically. List items are too tall, and the icons along the top could just as well be down along the left side, which isn’t used for anything at all anyway. That would allow for more visible list items at a time. Most monitors are wider than they are tall …

Other things

As a personal preference and a minor detail, I don’t like the buttons for creating new things. Or, rather, I don’t like their placement/spacing. They look slapped on haphazardly the way they’re placed. Maybe they could be placed to the right in the heading (on the green stripe)?

Also, what’s up with the popup Javascript warning at some point during the night? All it does is block my window. I’ll reload it myself, thank you. Or at least wait with the popup until I return to my machine in the morning and try to do something in Nozbe for the first time. I have never, ever encountered a web application that does this, and I think there’s a good reason why.

Conclusion

Fix these things, and I’m yours, Michael.

Oh, and let me add more projects!

Seriously, though, keep up the good work, and implement the important stuff first. As I said in my first post about Nozbe, you have done something right that few others have managed, although I’m still not able to put my finger on exactly what that is ...

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2007-02-11 14:40

A New Online GTD Application: Nozbe

Nozbe is another new contender in the online GTD (Getting Things Done) application race, and it starts off by actually being usable! This one I will test. Of course, it’s in beta and therefore lacking stuff I’d like, but the stuff it does it actually does now instead of sometime soon.

What I like about Nozbe is the fine balance between manual and automatic. I think if you want software to figure out the order in which you want to — or have to — do things, they immediately become bloated and unusable.

I think, after checking out a lot of different options, that what I would want from an online application is the same functionality and speed as I’d get from pen and paper, but with the benefit of being able to move stuff around and easily seeing stuff either as projects or contexts.

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2007-01-07 14:10

Online GTD application: iCommit

In the string of online GTD applications approaching beta there’s another contender.

iCommit is an online GTD application. When I found it, I instantly registered, tried it out for about two minutes, and then dismissed it. Any GTD application that requires me to click to open a popup menu, navigate to a submenu and click again to create a new project or next action clearly doesn’t get it.

A couple of days ago I got an email notifying me of a new teaser video of iCommit v3. While I don’t think it reveals very much, it looks a lot more interesting than the current version. So I’ve signed up for beta testing this one too.

The downside to iCommit is, as someone else has experienced, is that there’s no guarantee that it will be available tomorrow. And GTD is all about putting everything into a system you can trust.

It looks like I’m going to have to write a series of articles with reviews of all these applications at some point. But first I have to gain beta access to them … And I guess beta testers might be under some kind of confidentiality agreement until the applications are out of beta too, so it might be a while.

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