The Productive Organizer

WebOS is an OS that i have least experience in and a search on softwares that tailors to Getting Things Done yields very little results other than our dear Evernote.

That is why its refreshing to see Outline Tracker for WebOS. I did not give this a spin since i do not have a Palm Pre or Pixi to try it out.

How much does it cost?

There is a free version on the App Catalog that limits you to 50 tasks but the full version costs USD23.50.

What version of WebOS is it compatible with?

You will need webOS 1.3.5

What are its main functionalities?

• Organize tasks and sub-tasks as many layers deep as you need
• Keep track of where you can work on a task and who’s responsible
• The dynamic to-do list shows only the tasks you can work on here and now
• Color-coding shows at a glance who’s responsible for a task — you, your organization, or no one
• The dynamic waiting list shows tasks that are waiting for action by someone else — a single tap takes you to their entry in the webOS Contacts application
• Items with a due date appear in the webOS Calendar and the project outline, and tasks appear in the dynamic to-do list as well
• Coordinate with others using Basecamp from 37signals (useable through any web browser, with custom apps available for many kinds of smartphone)
• Basecamp items are cached locally, so Basecamp projects can be edited without a network connection. Changes will be uploaded when the network connection is available.
• Supports David Allen’s Getting Things Done® methodology
• Also functions as a general-purpose outliner, exporting to (and importing from) the modern XOXO format, easily integrated into web pages

GTD – Able to Organize in tree structure

with this you can essentially create Tasks and Sub-Tasks or Sub-Projects

GTD – Able to filter by Contexts/Places

if you are to perform GTD you will need to be able to filter your tasks by places or agendas. This one does it but not sure if it can achieve the sophistication of Appigo ToDos context filtering. [context/places intro and tutorial >>]

GTD – Waiting for looks good!

You can review your waiting for list according to the people. Outline Tracker allows you to go to the Palm’s contacts when you click on the person’s name.

Very useful.

GTD – comprehensive task view and integration with webOS Calendar

This is a good move that i don’t see on alot of mobile apps on iPhone since you will need a fair bit of work to achieve this on the iPhone OS platform.

essentially, your items need not be tasks and need not have dates. this gives it flexibility, but also increases the developer’s complexity.

also, note seems to be missing if you want to add additionaly details.

the kicker is that those items with due date specified will go into your webOS calendar. some folks definitely love to have this in their GTD system.

Final Thoughts

i thought its abit expensive at $23 bucks but really not sure if all App Catalog application are priced at that range. I hope we come accross more apps like this to compete and come up with good GTD apps for the webOS.

At the iPhone App Store competition have kept the incumbents at the top of their game and we do hope to see more of these on the webOS.

[Outline tracker for Palm Pre and Pixi >>]

I came across this Windows desktop application that aim to follow the Getting Things Done to organize the information you come across in your daily lives.

I didn’t manage to give it a try but it does look very sophisticated, on the level of Mind Manager by Mindjet.

How much it cost?

its not free and the price might turn off a few people. it cost like USD197.

Who is it for?

Probably for people who have a windows desktop or laptop as their main GTD planning and collection center. Definitely not for me since i seldom have access to my personal computer.

What are its main functionality?

You would have to check out a very very detail walkthrough at Information Management Tool’s website. There it will show you how to Collect, Process, Organize and Review using their software

• flexible structure helps you to merge individual to-do lists, projects, articles into a strategic plan
• use the program for online research, journaling, to-do lists, note taking, document archiving, GTD and more.
• break down large projects into smaller parts using as many tree-levels as you need to keep everything in one place and under control
• use Wiki-hyperlinks to tasks, web pages, notes, to-do lists etc.
• capture web pages directly from the integrated Gecko Web Browser by Mozilla
• drag-and-drop notes, hyperlinks, files in appropriate place in the free-form database, reorganize your projects and tasks at any time
• reorganize your projects, to-do lists, ideas and tasks at any time you want
• find what you need when you need it using fast search
• create your own structure of GTD Trusted System, capture, organize and manage all your projects and tasks in the free-form central database
• real-time immediate save of all added information to the database
• fully customizable interface: more than 300 icons, custom colors and font formats to help you focus on what is most important
• capture any ideas, notes and edit them using full-featured Rich Text Editor
• recall items quickly with tagging
• align your time, effort and energy with your highest priorities so you can focus on what really matters most to you
• browse local files and forlders using integrated Folder Explorer
• work with multiple projects without feeling overwhelmed
• save any web pages in HTML, edit them in the integrated HTML Editor and preview them
• integrated tools needed to create your own structure of a logical and trusted system outside of your head
• display only the tasks, notes, to-do lists etc. you want to see at the moment by expanding them

Final Thoughts

It does look more polish than alot of the free desktop apps that i see, but its steep at USD 197 and i wonder with the coming of the mobile internet you should be paying that much for a standalone desktop app.

[Take a look @ Information Management Tool >>]

Introduction

In my opinion,for a productive worker, once you get pass scheduling on your calendar, reading mails and taking notes, the next frontier is whether you can do the same on your mobile device like how you do it on your desktop computer.

I always tell my friends that on a 3.5 inch device, and for the matter, the old devices comes not more than 2.8 inch screen,

1. The OS SDK might be a limiting factor
2. The OS might be generally powerful enough to reproduce the kind of things you can do on your desktop
3. Your word processing can be carried out quite well on a mobile device
4. You can do limited powerpoint slide review and creation on a mobile device
5. Using excel will be a pain in the ass on such a small screen

I’m glad that the folks at QuickOffice is kind enough to provide me with the resources to carry out this review. The folks at QuickOffice have been doing this difficult task in translating what you do on the desktop to Palm,Symbian and Blackberry since i first saw them in 1997, so they are very experienced in this area.

The Cost

The iPhone App cost USD19.99 but as far as i know for a limited time you can get this application for USD9.99 on the app store

The QuickOffice Suite

What you will be getting is a suite that enables you to manage your files, not just your Microsoft Word,Microsoft Excel but also

1. Images: .jpg, .jpeg, .png, .tif, .tiff, .gif and .svg
2. Microsoft Word: .doc and .docx
3. Microsoft Excel: .xls and .xlsx
4. Microsoft PowerPoint: .ppt and .pptx
5. iWork: Pages, Numbers and Keynote (iWork ‘09 is not supported
6. Adobe Acrobat: .pdf
7. Web Pages: .htm and .html
8. Text: .txt
9. Audio: .mp3

Of course, what is important is that you can create and edit Word and Excel documents well on your iPhone.

Transfer too and from your iPhone is a breeze with Web Access.

On top of that it does leverages on MobileMe’s iDisk to provide cloud storage so that you can have access to your files that is not on your iPhone.

You can also forward your email attachments that you want to open with QuickOffice to files@quickofficeconnect.com to edit your files quickly.

Transfer your documents and spreadsheets via WIFI

The first way to get access to your existing word or spreadsheets is to transfer wirelessly by ensuring your computer is on the same WIFI network as your iPhone

By going to the Settings icon, you are able to configure your file transfers. You may also provide Authentication for added security.

You will be able to see a url http://192.168.1.101:4242 below. Basically, your iPhone is now a server and any computer on the network can connect to your iPhone via the Web Browser to transfer files to and from.

At your desktop computer, type in the URL and you should be able to see the above page. You would be able to download the files stored on your iPhone and at the same time upload files to your iPhone.

Accessing your MobileMe iDisk

The beauty of cloud computing is that it works very well if you are using a Mac computer and have a MobileMe account. To find out what is iDisk [link here >>]

Once you have set your iDisk details you would be able to edit and create files if you are connected to the cloud. There is this much i can say about this service since at the moment i do not have a MobileMe account.

Do feedback to me if you have problems with it.

Editing and Viewing your Email attachments

This is a functionality that i thought it would be quite seamless but it is not. Basically, when you see view email attachments, the idea in your head is that “I head over to Safari and i should be able to launch quick office when i select an attachment”

Well, this is not the case. Here are the steps. Basically, you will need to go to this screen and add your email accounts that you want to monitor for attachments. This would likely be your regular Gmail and Yahoo accounts people usually send mail to you.

Now once you click save, you are not done yet. You will need to go to your email accounts and validate the email account

Go to your email account and you should receive this mail. Click on the bottom Validate your address

You should see this page where they will teach you how to access your email attachment. So from now onwards, whenever you forward your email to files@quickofficeconnect.com from this email address, the files will be stored. Note that you have 50MB of space for these to be stored online.

Here i will compose a mail with a text file and an excel sheet.Once sent i should be able to see it on my iPhone app.

I think its a long process but they probably don’t have a direct way of accessing safari for your attachments which is why they have to resort to this method. Having 3 methods is better than 1 i feel and they should look into partnerships with Dropbox, Syncplicity,SugarSync or ZumoDrive to make their network stronger.

The Quickword

Quickword comes in the QuickOffice Suite but if you do not need to Excel component you can always purchase it at USD11.99 and at a special offer now at USD8.99.

So how does this measure up?

I think its pretty good. Its got most of the things that you need to be on the road. For sure you are not gonna do full wordprocessing on it. You are looking to

1. Kick start a document while the idea is fresh in your head
2. Finish up a document as you really need to rush out
3. Review a document someone did

If you are thinking about doing this then i think it measures up.

Apparently you can choose which format your new document is saved whether its MS Office 97-2004,XP format or Office 2007 format which is DOCX.

The first button below enables you to edit your text to the desired format. What you see in that image is what it can do. There are quite a few standard colors to choose from even though i hope that there will be more.

Selecting the Text Format and you are able to choose the font size and font type. Other than the 5 shown on the screen there is also Arial. Very limited selection here. Which is a down side

The second button on the bottom brings you to the Alignment options. You can drag the blue text left center or right to format it to how you want it to look. You can indent only the first line or the full paragraph here.

The fourth button lets you insert bullets into your document. The negative thing about this is that it only allows you to insert unordered bullets and not numbered bullets so i hope to see this in the future versions as i am sure alot of folks will need this.

The last button enables you to comb through a document to find certain word or phrases. Works like what it is suppose to.

Overall, I would say it serves the 3 functions that i mentioned above but not as close to even what you can do on a cloud word processor like google docs or zoho word.

The Quicksheet

The standalone quicksheet cost like the standalone quickword and alot of people will look forward to this as more important since it enables you to check calculations on the go or for some people they keep their accounts and expenses in excel sheets.

In terms of presentation i feel that the cell size is big compared to their old Palm and Blackberry software. Of course you can drag the columns to resize, no problem there.

You would be able to see the formula’s on top just like your excel and the layout below is just like Quickword

Clicking on the first button will bring you to the formatting options. Most of them are covered under Quickword but there are a few pertaining to sheet, which is Background color and Cell borders.

The Number Format gives you the standard options which is good because you can further define how many decimal places for example you want your Percentage.

Clicking on the third button enables you to add or go to another worksheet. you will use this alot for complex worksheets.

I did an experiement to see if you can cross reference cells in different sheets. In the above example i created a Sheet 2, and i try to reference cell B1 of Sheet1. It does work just like the desktop one which is a good thing.

The last button i want to go through is the fourth button which enables you to insert and delete columns and rows. A very useful feature that worked well.

Tapping on the fx word on top will bring you to the functions you can insert into your current cell formula. The formulas are well categorized but i haven’t fully tested them out so not sure if there are problems with it.

If you are going to use excel you want extensive formulas to work and this is where they score big points with me.

Overall, i would say in terms of functionality for Quicksheet it is adequate. Unless you are a math professor you won’t be meddling alot with things that are out of reach in terms of formulas. However, the problem is that the cells take up too much space and on portrait you can only see this much and you end up scrolling left and right.

The problems with QuickOffice

Landscape mode

The main problem i have with QuickOffice is that it is somewhat lacking when you switch to Landscape mode for Quickword and Quicksheet. You do not get the bottom bar any more. I do not know if its to faciliate more screen estate to editing but for Quicksheet it really hurts without the top formula bar and the bottom bar.

It highlights that when it comes to user experience, working on a 3.5 inch might not be big enough given that resolution.

Switching between landscape and portrait

This is what pissed me off more than anything else on an iPhone device. Doing spreadsheets and word processing while the screen accidentally switches from landscape to portrait can be very detrimental to a person’s patience and productivity.

There are some software that have incorporated options or locking mechanisms so hopefully Quickoffice will come up with a great idea on this, since most of the time when you are reviewing something or editing you either view it for a prolong period in landscape or portrait.

PDF viewing of large files is laggy

I do understand that PDF is not the most friendly format to render and not the best format for reading. But would just like to point out that if you are looking at this to view alot of PDF files you might as well go for one that does well viewing PDF files.

Performance Issues

Every software have its performance issues and you do have to understand when you open a large word document or text file or pdf files, its not gonna open immediately. If you are using a 3GS device then you might not face the same problem since 200Mhz diff can do quite a fair improvement to software responsiveness.

Conclusion

Overall, I think wordprocessing and spreadsheets have come along way from the days where we have to rely on Microsoft crappy Mobile Word and Excel. However, office productivity is one area that is very difficult to overcome due to the screen size and resolution.

I have a feeling a minimum of 6-7 inch is required for an adequate experience but feel that QuickOffice have provided a comprehensive Word and Spreadsheet package here. If  you have the need, then you can’t go wrong with this one.

So far most of the To do List applications that i have been talking about seems to be revolving around the iPhone platform. Don’t worry i am not a fanboy, just that i used this device more than alot of others that i have come across with.

I actually started off using a to do list with Remember the Milk some time ago, so i do know abit on web task management.

This week i was given the opportunity to try out a Web To-Do application called GTD Agenda. GTD Agenda, as its name sounds is a task management application that attempts to be close to what David Allen have envisioned to help a person manages his task.

Pricing

Like ToodleDo or Remember The Milk, GTD Agenda is those web app that have different tier pricing. The free package gives you just about enough to try, but if you are going to run it as your main to do dashboard then i think its not gonna be enough.

You should be thinking about the Basic and the Premium

Using GTD Agenda

Most of the web apps nowadays would have an element that makes them compatible with GTD (or Stephen Covey) for the matter. The only web app that blatantly does not is Remember the Milk.

GTD Agenda’s strength is that it is constructed out with GTD in mind. For those that are new to this term you can check out this series of articles on what Getting Things Done is About.

What i like about the presentation of the interface is that it is more clean compare to apps like ToodleDo which is very cluttered. A clean interface enables the user to focus on what he should be occupied with at this moment.

The user can go about setting his 20000 feet to 50000 feet goals and visions under the goal tab

Notice that all the goals would need to below to a certain category.

After all these are defined you can get down to planning your projects. Projects can be linked to a particular goal. So that during review you are able to list out the projects that you will undertake to meet that goal.

With the goals and projects defined we have set up the basic infrastructure of our todo list. Whats left is to explore how we use it daily.

Suppose that a thought enters you head that you have an actionable task to perform or you are doing your daily mindsweep, you can enter the task one at a time through its easy to use interface.

By doing this, you will not bother about the Categories/Contexts and due dates, notes. A key difference between GTD Agenda and many of the other todo list applications is the absence of an Inbox when you work on tasks that have not been processed yet.

At times i would need to skim though all my tasks to identify those that i have not organized.

The task details is important and gives you a good idea how you can filter in your review and do it phase. The Context enables you to freely define whether you want it to be based on Location, Person or Something else. You can set 5 levels of priority and you have a check box to mark this as next action.

The repeating option is great. But most other todo list have this and they do provide for more flexibility like repeating on Thur,Sat and  Sun. Repeating is important to me and certainly is a good initiative here.

Reviewing

A good feature for GTD agenda is the ability to set Daily and Weekly Schedule. Before you go about doing your task you gotta plan what you want to do for that day. That would mean breaking your days down into chunks. This will give you a good marker what is planned out for that day so that you attempt to use each day to the fullest.

When it comes to actually making use of the task list to do work, you will always want to use a Next Action and GTD Agenda does provide that.

Else when you switch to another location or with a person that you might have things for you can make use of the contexts to bring up tasks related to the person.

If you would like to have a one stop shop where you can view key milestones or important events there is a calendar section for it too.

Mobile GTD Agenda

In this age and time, if a web application is not ubiquitous then its not really going to be useful. I try out the mobile version of it and i have to say its very good.

I am using an iPod Touch trying it out on the Safari browser. You can bascially review and add new task on your phone or pda now. The flaw is that you cannot use this offline on your mobile device.

Conclusion

Its a good package i feel and it certainly helps that if you are going to do GTD you might as well go for one that matches the work flow as close as it can. However, i think there could be some challenges for GTD Agenda as the free Web apps around are getting close to this capability. They would need to up their game if they really want to start differentiating themselves  from them.

Do give GTD Agenda a try by using the image url below

Introduction

In one of my previous post, i did a brief overview on Mindjet, a mind mapping software that is available for your ipod touch or iphone. Mindjet is also the company that brought you mind manager, a state of the art mind mapping software that is pretty expensive for most of us.

Digital vs Analog Mind Mapping

I used Mind Manager before and really its a great software to mind map on your laptop or desktop. But my good friend Melvin made a comment, that if he were to mind map, he would rather use a piece of paper.

I find that digital mind mapping have advantages, particularly, you can:

• re-arrange the nodes so that you can structure your thoughts
• you can easily archive and reference them next time for notes
• you can translate them into project plans or tasks list
• you can link them to your word,excel and web documents

Perhaps the problem with a desktop or laptop is that for Kinetic people they need to scribble down things instead of clicking and typing and looking at a screen.

For me though, I find it difficult to collect my thoughts or do planning facing a digital mind map. I am a kinetic person, which means i remember things better if i scribble it down. But really, the problem for me is that i tend to misplaced by maps all over the place. So i like something digital, but also enables me to mind map wherever i can, not bounded to any desktop or laptop. The best option is that if i were to be able to find something good on the Apple iPhone app store it will be good!

Requirements of my mind mapping software

In my exploration of apps on the Apple iPhone App Store, i found a few softwares that does mind mapping. Some of them are great like Mind Meister, which touts that their app for the iphone can sync real time with their online maps.However, as part of my needs to keep notes offline and away from the web, i need better solution. Specifically:

• Maps must be sophisticated compare to desktop mind mapping tool
• Maps must be able to view both on iPhone and desktop
• Maps must be portable
• Pricing must be affordable

So i stumble upon Mindjet and iThoughts.

iThoughts Overview

iThoughts was released first before Mindjet. And the similarities between the 2 applications are very very similar. I got a feeling the folks at Mindjet copied what the folks at iThoughts did to come up with theirs (don’t sue me! everyone will think the same way after looking at the comparison here!)

The problem of them being so similar is that for the same price which one should i go for?In the end i took my plunge with iThoughts instead of MindJet and i have not regretted since.

Pricing

Both iThoughts and Mindjet cost USD6.99. Its not cheap, but its not that expensive compare to GTD apps that i bought such as Appigo ToDo. The cost is nothing if it brings improve productivity to my life. Hey, some of my dinner cost like USD15, so i believe i am not paying an expensive price for an independent application.

Version

Version reviewing is version 2.1.

Why is it good?

Basically, most of the basic things you are able to do on your desktop mind map software such as Nova Mind and Mind Manager you can do it here

Able to handle large maps

iThoughts uses a canvas to paint the topics and they tout that you can go greater than 1000x the screen area which is more than enough for me.

You can zoom in zoom out of maps to get a better vantage view after you have rearrange or finish composing

Very good performance

What i really like about this application is that not only does it have a lot of good functionality, those that i expect to be in it, but on the iPod Touch 2G it does it with a very good performance.

• Double tapping immediately brings out the Topic input screen
• Not much lag on scrolling around canvas to review Map
• Organization of the above map neatly is fast

Very friendly Topic input mechanism

Entering a new topic or nodes is a breeze! All you need to do is touch on a parent topic once to select that topic. You can enter a new topic by touching the top buttons to either enter a child or sibling topic.

Additionally, the fast way is to double tap an area to insert a child topic.

(More screenshots and functionality explanation after the break)

[Read the rest of this entry...]

There are a few project management solutions if you are having a team to work with globally and you would want a centralize place to:

• handle project calendars
• handle project tasks
• email to all
• host your documents

Open source solution OpenGoo is one of them. Today, i found another one in Collabtive. Like many web based tools they serve as alternatives to Basecamp. Features touted by Collabtive are:

Core functionality

• Unlimited projects, milestones, tasklists, and tasks
• Unlimited members with user profiles
• Role-based permission management
• Messaging and instant messaging
• File management
• Timetracking

Reporting and notifications

• Timetracker reports, activity logs and messages in PDF format
• Export user profiles as vCard
• RSS feeds for messages and tasks
• Synchronization of calendars via iCal task export
• Excel files from activity logs and timetracker reports
• E-mail notifications

Other

• Search, tags
• Basecamp import
• Fully themeable
• Available in more than 25 languages
• Full UTF8 support

Who is it for?

OpenGoo and Collabtive are for teams that have a small webhosting and can mount a php based web application such as OpenGoo and Collabtive.

Installation is not difficult and you should be able to get it up and running very fast.

Alternatively, if you are a guy that wants to do your own scheduling and practice Getting Things Done where information is on your own server, you might be interested in this solution as well.

[Check out Collabtive today >>]

Project Managers that are used to Microsoft Project would be interested to know if there are any microsoft project like management tools on the iPhone or iPod touch.

I believe project management should be done on a device with a larger screen as the key to planning is viewing Gantt Charts and Calendars and on iPhone’s 3.5 inch screen it will be a crumblesome experience. However, on a Archos Android device and the upcoming iTablet, we might have something there.

Nevertheless there are 2 softwares that falls into this category.

iGantt Chart

This is a simple Gantt chart application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. This will cost you 0.99 and really it is only good for simple purposes. As a project manager it is probably not robust enough for you.

Certainly not recommended.

Projects

Now this is a more robust application. certainly looks like a project management app with Gantt Chart and all but it does have serious problems in that task dependancies and resource allocations are missing. It cost 6.99 so its pretty expensive in app store world as well.

Here is a really good review of Projects. It will show u what it can do and what it cannot do.

Conclusion

We haven’t arrived yet. Productivity GTD style on an iPhone have come leaps and bounds but if you want something that you are able to review as a project manager with dependency and nested subtasking, you are asking for too much now.

Lets hope some great company actually develops one.

It looks like MSFT are planning big things for the new MS Project 2010. I recently got re-acquainted with project at work and will look forward to news on MS Project 2010

Simple and Intuitive User Experience

• Project Professional and Project Server both use the Fluent User Interface (aka Ribbon), based on Microsoft Office. This helps users discover new tools relevant to what they’re doing at the moment.
• Intuitive Excel-like behavior adds the ease-of-use of Excel to the power of Project’s scheduling engine.
• Powerful new views like the Timeline View and Team Planner.
• Web-based project editing brings the power of Project to the web.

Enhanced Collaboration and Reporting

• Built on SharePoint Server 2010 to bring the power of SharePoint’s business collaboration platform with Project’s advanced portfolio management. It also shares the same interface as SharePoint.
• Easily create reports and dashboards on the fly.
• Better time and status reporting.
• Connect teams with SharePoint Sync to allow two-way round-trip synchronization of tasks and schedules. This allows team members to update their status on SharePoint and stay more connected as a team.

Unified Project ad Portfolio Management

• Common experience across full PPM lifecycle, including centralized administration.
• Flexible project capture and initiation so that organizations can also capture work that may not be part of a project yet.
• Enhance governance through workflow.
• Powerful portfolio selection analytics.

Scalable and Connected Platform

• Extended interoperability with other Microsoft products like Exchange Server so that team members can report status directly from Outlook, for example.
• Simplified Administration.
• Rich Platform Services make it easier to connect with 3rd-party products.
• Enhanced Developer Productivity through integration with Visual Studio.

Microsoft Project 2010 builds on the Microsoft Office Project 2007 foundation with flexible work management solutions and the right collaboration tools for occasional and professional project managers, and includes a pathway to more advanced project and portfolio management capabilities as business needs evolve.