Daily Stack was built during a four week exploration in Tangible User Interface at CIID. The project was made by everyoneelse in collaboration with Sebastian Rønde Thielke.

Daily Stack is a playful tool that helps you become more aware of your daily work-flow and time management. By creating a physical representation of your tasks, Daily Stack speaks subtly to your conscience and helps you manage your time through unobtrusive ambient feedback.

Daily Stack consists of a base device and a collection of wooden bricks in different shapes and colours. The bricks represent different kinds of tasks and time-intervals. By adding a brick to the base you commit yourself to the task and time span that the selected brick represents. Daily Stack communicates with an desktop widget on your computer that enables you to keep track of your time and tasks in progress. It also enables you to browse through your past and and compare your days in a colourful informative pattern.

Read more about this project on everyoneelse.net/#23

(via Laurent on CAN Vimeo)

MandalArt is an iPhone version of the Thinking Editor Mandal-Art which first run on Macintosh Hyper Card since 1995. It is a form of idea processor, outline processor, mindmap or GTD where your task/event management is arranged around ways to easily comprehend and map your ideas. Where you normally think about these in the linear form, MandalArt is about layering these in depth. These ideas are organised around ‘cells’ where each cell may contain multiple cells, organised in circular patterns. It is all about expanding ideas into cells, a form of mind mapping rather than being organised as a network is done via multiple grouping of cells that can be fed into tasks.

When you first start the app you are met with four menus. First one at the top being ‘Manda’ a section meant to provide elements and factors essential to edit a person’s life. Here you will find few ideas to do with time, accomplishments, money, etc.. You can of course ad you own but the ones provided (with double click) provide suggestions on how your should use them. For example in a week, say a day in a week is is filled with a “meeting”. The next things to come in your mind will be what, why and how to progress with it, thus expanding the cell by adding additional items. Cells unfold leading to a conclusion.

Second menu on the left includes GET which are the things you got, want to get and just about getting. It is similarly organised except it is the content that feeds directly into the third menu on the right which is LA, meaning things to complete or accomplish. This is more of a plan, where you ad things you want to get done.

Whilst some elements are pure GTD, functional and rational, other (which the app creator encourages) are more spiritual, addressing things such as “life”, “prospects”, “internal”, “mind and body” and more.

Each cell you open can includes three different media types. You can either create text, take a picture or record sound. In addition, all of the cells on the screen can be rearranged by dragging so you can organise your thoughts how you feel most comfortable with them. The app has been beautifully designed with smooth transitions and minimal interface allowing you to focus on the ideas rather than being distracted by unnecessary GUI fluff. Gentle textures on menus provide enough depth to know where to click. Use of double click to get more info and edit is just right where single click is to navigate through the cells. iMandalArt is a pure joy to use.

It’s a scrapbook of ideas and thoughts, and regardless of whether you enjoy Budism or the 50′s Situationist International movement, psychogeography, or the simplest, most efficient GTD method, iMandalArt provides that flexibility to use it in a way most conformable to you. The app is priced at $12.99 which may be pricey for some but considering it’s functionality, from what I have seen, it’s definitely a worthy purchase but a demo version would be useful for those not sure whether another ‘method’ has a place in their daily life.

See movie guide below.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0
Cost: $12.99
Developer: Hiro Art Directions,Inc.

Continue reading.... MindMeTo Development [WebApps]

Continue reading.... Flow [Mac, Windows]

Outpost was developed by Morfunk, a small developer based in Philadelphia. Since it’s announcement few months ago, there has been a lot of attention and excitement around Outpost. We were very pleased to hear that few days ago Outpost was submitted to the AppStore. We have been sent a pre-release to have a play with so here is what we think.

37signals are known for their widely acclaimed set of web applications for organising teams built on simplicity and effectiveness. Basecamp is one their feature products with comprehensive support for projects, message exchange, milestones, to-dos, timekeeping and writeboards. Designing an iPhone app to support basecamp is not just a technical challenge but also a design one where 37Signals simplicity, clarity and ease of use may be a challenge to communicate.

We are very pleased to say that Outpost feels like an app built by 37Signals. There is a great sense of care taken into the layout, navigation and functionality. Whilst some design elements are SDK defaults, little colourisation to the menu bar, already familiar basecamp identifiers and comment icons really help translate design values of 37Signals. The core functionality of is translated very well too. Similar to the Basecamp webapp, the app has been organised in such a way to differentiate activities relating to you and those inherit to the project. Bottom bar lists all the activities related to you whilst the navigation via the projects shows all the activities related to that particular project. 

When you first open the application you are greeted with a welcome screen and fields to add you Basecamp credentials including the URL where your account is located. This is followed by a sync, copying data from your Basecamp account to your iPhone. The first sync can take up to 5 minutes or more. Our took around 2, with around 25 projects and so so data. When you update or add new content changes are automatically uploaded to the server. This may appear slightly slow at times especially when you are finished with the app and need to wait for the sync to complete but this could be partly blamed on Apple for not allowing processes to run or at least finish in the background. We have also found occasional slowdowns, especially when trying to assign one of your team members to the task. Although the app is designed to work off line, at times, it appears that the slowdowns are a result of the app syncing the data on the go. Interestingly it is important to note that the Outpost team have gone through great lengths to minimise syncing time, ie syncing only your most accessed projects but unfortunately when accessing buried data things can get a little slow.

Other features are as you would expect. Its is very easy to navigate the projects, flip rotation to access the project is a nice touch, avatars in comments are great and there is really very little you would want to change. Nevertheless there are features we would like to see in the future. Most importantly, access to “Time” on Basecamp as well as some form of support for files, PDFs at least. Compared to other iPhone Basecamp applications available in the AppStore such as Groundwork and Projects, Outpost is definitely most appealing. Groundwork offers very similar features but can be slightly slow at times as the data is loaded on the go. Projects on the other hand includes additional features such as Time but seriously lacks attention to detail that comes naturally to Outpost. If you are considering the price, Outpost is $12.99, almost triple than Groundwork ($3.99) and slightly more expensive than Projects ($9.99). The choice is going to be hard especially because none of these apps offer lite/trial versions.

If you are looking for an app that resembles simplicity and beauty of Basecamp, Outpost should be your number one choice. If, on the other hand, you are after the features, ‘time’ particularly, Projects is the app to have. Finally, if you think $12.99 or $9.99 is too much to shell out for an app/service you may not use that often then you should consider Groundwork ($3.99). We own all three but it is the Outpost that has taken position on the first home screen. See below for video walkthrough and screens of the app.

Platform: iPhone
Version: 1.0 (Pre-Release)
Cost: $12.99
Developer: Morfunk

[xrr rating=4.5/5]

      

1. Fluid [Mac]
Fluid is an application that allows you to create your own .app (application in your applications folder) from any website. We wrote about it few weeks ago and you can read the whole review here.
What is great, is that Fluid is perfect for apps like RTM.  This is because RTM offers a number of webapp interfaces that can work in different configurations with Fluid. First of all is the main webapp which works great with fluid. You can grab a special icon here and you are ready to go, launch and use RTM like you would any other app. Secondly, there is also a mobile webapp that works great with Fluid’s menu item functionality. If you are looking for an icon for your menu, we made one you can download here. Lastly, iPhone webapp version of RTM is another option for your new RTM desktop app. Here are some images of how you may use Fluid with RTM.

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2. Prism [Windows]
Similar to Fluid for Mac, Prism is an application for Windows and Linux that lets you create apps from any website and run them directly on their desktop. Whether this be the main RTM webapp, mobile or iPhone web app, you can run all of these as you would native applications for your PC. Here are some images of how this may work.

3. Twitter Integration [Mac, Windows]
You can interact with Remember The Milk via direct messages on Twitter. To add a task to your account, just send your rtm friend a direct message with the name of the task. Here is a list of full commands to Twitter. Another great intergation is that you can recieve morning task lists from RTM via twitter. This is additional to email notification but very useful addition to reminders about the things you need to do that day.

Continue reading.... 10 Must Have Tools for Remember The Milk on the Desktop [WebApp]

Since it’s release, OmniFocus has had some difficulties. Partly due to the problems with early 2.0 version of iPhone firmware but also to the sheer list of features Omni set out to include in the app. Iphone is a new development platform and one can be sure that Omni as well as many other developers found a learning curve pretty steep. I am sure if it was just a mac app, Omni would have no problem developing a rock solid app like the mac version is. More about the issues a little later in the post.

When the app was released I was very pleasantly surprised. Everything you would expect from a mobile task manager was there, including clean and well laid out interface, syncing with desktop over MobileMe or any other WebDAV server, contexts, project and more. Syncing was probably the biggest challenge for Omni and this is evident in the way app does it. It’s a kind of a non so intelligent sync where at times you have to make a decision which database should be used (local or server). This can sometimes be a problem if you are not sure whether you used the desktop or iPhone version last. Never the less it is great for Omni to have included sync in the first release and those accustomed to Palm syncing (me being one of them) will appreciate that iPhone and Desktop do actually sync. One of the features no one expected was location aware tasks. This allows you to assign locations to contexts so when you load up the application and click on the find-me button, your tasks will be listed by proximity. Omni’s ambitions for the app unfortunately have had some drawbacks. Application seemed very slow at times, took long time to launch as well as sync. As I mentioned earlier this could partly be blamed on the flaky 2.0 firmware but since the release of 2.1 firmware and 1.0.3 version of OmniFocus the bugs were fixed, a lot snappier interface, syncing and loading times greatly improved and one can say that OmniFocus for the iPhone has really grown up. This is not to say there there are still no problems but OmniGroup’s past record reassures that any bugs or problems still around will be resolved very soon. Omni continues to improve the desktop app with nightly builds. The most recent release includes wifi sync across multiple machines and we are told that this will be included in the next version of the iPhone app.

To conclude, OmniFocus for the iPhone is a great app, a must for all GTD fans out there. Fortunately, Omni is not the only one on the playing field so this will keep them on their toes. Amongst many to-do apps available in the appstore,  Things is a another desktop and iPhone application that offers very similar features. I for one, believe that GTD apps need to be clean, fast and rock solid. Things’ eye candy interface, for me, gets in the way of actually getting things done but this is just my personal preference. If you are considering purchasing a GTD app for your iphone you should use a desktop app (OmniFocus, Things) as a guide. Syncing feature is a must for GTD apps. Both Things and OmniFocus are great apps. For me, Omni wins this round and I highly recommend it.

Platform: iPhone
Cost: $19.99
Developer: Omni Group
Download
[xrr rating=4.5/5]