Weekly Reviews

The Weekly Review process is one of the regular steps in GTD and now a part of your friendly neighbourhood GTD app. Runway now has a "Review" tab containing any actions that haven't been reviewed for, you guessed it, at least a week.

The list is sorted such that the items you haven't reviewed for the longest period are at the top. From there you can perform all the regular your activities--edit, delete, complete, defer, etc.--which implicitly mark the action as reviewed, as well as an option to do so explicitly.

Sometimes the sheer number of actions to review means that it may take you several goes to complete. This is where the focus panel helps by allowing you to narrow down the list to some sensible subset, eg. anything tagged with home, or everything I need to discuss with my wife.

As always, we know it's not perfect--unless you like pink--and we're looking for feedback on how we can better assist you with your weekly reviews.

Projects: coming soon to a runway near you

We're almost done our first cut at what we believe to be usable projects. Initially you'll be able to assign a project on creation and/or when editing an action. You'll also be able to focus by project and, assuming all goes according to plan, restrict the display to only "next" actions.

Of course we're fond of our syntax and single field so we're naturally keen to keep the user experience as simple as possible. Ideally that would involve a syntactic way to add set the project. With syntax comes possible ambiguities so, rather than rush out something that is half-baked, we thought we'd take a more gentle approach.

When creating an action, we're going to keep the single input field for the main action syntax and at the same time give you access to a project name field (and as a bonus a notes field) with a single keystroke: the tab key (⇥). Once you've created your action, the extra fields will automagically hide returning you to the original Zen-like simplicity of a single field.

If that seems a little hard to picture then here's a picture:

No more wondering what's changed

Ever seen "a new version of the application is available..." popup and wondered what changed?

We now have a very simple site change log where we will be posting explanations of what's changed. For those with news readers, there's also an RSS feed available.

Runway gets a makeover

It's been almost a month since I last gave you a status update. Let me begin by saying that by the end of the week we expect to be dropping a new version for you.

Take a look at the image below and you'll notice a number of obvious changes:

1. The most notable change is that we've collapsed the "Todo", "Today", and "Later" tabs. *breath*. OK. We've been feeling for a while now that those tabs were a little clumsy and were going to get in the way of the upcoming "inbox", "Projects", "People", and "Review" tabs.
2. The functionality hasn't disappeared though, it's just become part of the focus panel instead. For the keyboard jockies, instead of using ctrl+t, ctrl+l, and ctrl+0 you can now use ctrl+shift+t, ctrl+shift+s (for soon), ctrl+shift+l.
3. We've also simplified the action editing experience and made the editing of notes part of editing an action.
4. Speaking of editing, we've added a place for you to enter the name of a project. Now this probably isn't what you're used to thinking of as a project. in GTD a project is an overall commitment like "Mum's 60th birthday" which isn't actionable in and of itself. It's a way to group actions that are related in order to achieve some overall goal. Right now there's not much you can do with projects other than record the name but fairly soon we'll have a Projects tab and a whole bunch of functionality specifically related to managing your commitments.
5. The last obvious change is the tips. We've put together a bunch of hints we think will help you get the most out of Runway. These change automatically every minute or so or you can give them a hurry up by clicking on the tip itself. We'll be adding to these over time so you may want to leave them visible but if you find them distracting, you can click hide and they won't return unless you re-show them from your account page.

Besides the visual changes we've also made many enhancements behind the scenes. You can now create actions using Twitter as well as email; there are even more keyboard shortcuts; and we've generally improved the performance of the user interface.

We've also started a series of screencasts to help you come up to speed with Runway as quickly as possible.

We hope you'll enjoy the work we've put in and look forward to delivering even more cool GTD related features very soon.

Public Beta

After a week of load testing and tying up loose ends, we pushed the public beta version of Runway to production last night. Aside from the features you've been reading about in Staging, we also enabled self sign up. So if you haven't already done so, you can now go and get and account without asking. Importantly, if you like where we're heading and think someone else you know might benefit from using Runway, you can send them the link.

In the coming weeks we're going to ramp up development even further and you can expect to see features delivered more quickly than we've been able in the past.

For fear of sounding like a broken record, we really do take your feedback very seriously and do our utmost to incorporate your ideas an suggestions into our development plan. So if you have a wish list, let us know by raising feature requests using Lighthouse, posting to the Google Group or contacting us directly via email.

Enjoy!

runwayapp.com

For those few that use http://runwayapp.com/ a quick note to let you know that it now redirects to http://www.runwayapp.com/. Probably doesn't affect many of you but there ya go :)

This Week in Staging #3

Not too much to report this week:

• Fixed some layout problems with IE. Aside from rounded borders (which IE doesn't support) IE users should now be seeing pretty much the same display as Safari and FireFox users. Thanks Travo!
• Fixed a performance problem on Safari that caused large numbers of actions to take much longer to display. In one test scenario, 250 actions took 30 seconds to display; they now take 5.
• Tweaked the layout of the Done and Deleted mini-tabs so they now behave a little more intuitively.
• Added some more "special-actions" along with updated documentation. In summary we now have a formalised syntax for phone, talk to, ask, email and errands in addition to waiting for.
• Fixed some exception reporting issues that meant we weren't being notified when you experienced an application error.
• Email integration now sends you back an email if the message you sent was in someway invalid.
• Log in if you've forgotten your password. Every login block as a question-mark (?) which you can click that will take you to a form where you can enter your username or email and we'll send you a one-time link that will log you and and take you straight to your account page where you will be able to change your password.
• Email confirmation on signup.
  

That's probably it in terms of low-hanging fruit. Depending on what happens you may see a few new features here and there but our focus (pardon the pun) will now turn to stability, performance and load testing. Once we're happy with these we'll consider opening up for public beta.

Don't forget, as much as we'd like to, we can't read minds so please, please, please let us know how you're finding things. you can comment here on the blog, via the Google Group or directly via email.

Enjoy!