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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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