The Runway Blog

Weekly Reviews

2009-06-04T12:49:00.006+10:00

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

2009-05-27T23:12:00.009+10:00

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

2009-05-18T20:50:00.003+10:00

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

2009-05-05T15:02:00.010+10:00

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:

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.
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.
We've also simplified the action editing experience and made the editing of notes part of editing an action.
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.
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

2009-03-20T12:01:00.004+11:00

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

2009-03-01T13:11:00.001+11:00

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

2009-02-28T19:45:00.001+11:00

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!

Happy Tabbing

2009-02-19T10:37:00.008+11:00

If you're a keyboard junkie using FireFox on the Mac, you may have been frustrated at the apparent inability to tab between controls in Runway.

After much scratching of heads and gnashing of teeth--it works on my machine--Mike discovered the answer:

Open your Mac OS X keyboard preferences Apple Menu > System Preferences > Keyboard and Mouse > Keyboard Shortcuts
Under Full Keyboard Access choose All controls.

Odds are this also affects Safari but as it turns out I have this option enabled on my machine which is probably why I never noticed the problem.

This Week in Staging #2

2009-02-16T11:50:00.001+11:00

As promised, here's the latest instalment, keeping you up to date with what to expect in the next release of Runway:

We've made the login error message a little nicer. I admit, it was a little on the terse side :)
Generally tried to make error messages a little nicer all-round.
Error message no longer disappear automatically. Click "close" or hit ESCAPE to close them.
We've formalised the waiting for syntax. See the Special Actions guide for more details. In essence, any action that follows the pattern "Waiting for X to ...' is considered a waiting for. We'll extract the X and use that as the nickname for a person of interest to you, linked back to the action. You can then filter based on the person in the focus panel. We've also migrated as best we could most of what looked like waiting fors. The conversion process wasn't 100% accurate so we won't have found all your waiting fors but we did our best. In any event, you can easily convert actions to a waiting for by editing it to conform to the new syntax.
Time zone is now mandatory. We had defaulted it to Australia/Melbourne (GMT+10:00) because that suited us but it most likely doesn't suit everyone. You can change it on your account page.
Actions now support due dates with the same syntax for incubation only using a less-than symbol ('<'). Other than display the due date to the right of the action, this isn't of great use on it's own. The intention is that actions with a due date will change colour from green (2 days before) to orange (1 day before), and red on the due date. Oh yes, we've also restricted the incubation date to be no later than any due date you have specified. We wouldn't want you to be able to accidentally ignore something beyond it's due date now would we :)
The greater-than symbol ('>') is now a synonym for the plus symbol ('+') for incubating an action if for no other reason than symmetry with the new due date syntax.

As usual, if you can spend a few minutes in the staging environment and give us some feedback that would be greatly appreciated.

This Week in Staging #1

2009-02-11T18:03:00.001+11:00

I thought it was about time I started blogging about the up and coming changes on a more regular basis. Each week, I'll give a rundown of the notable changes that have been deployed to staging so that you can have a play and let us know what you think. So here goes

Buttons can now be invoked using the SPACE bar
Fixed broken keyboard handling on Safari and Windows that prevented the use of "!" as an action shortcut
Fixed a bunch of guides that had gone stale
HOME/END keys now take you to the first/last action in the list
"Thinking..." indicator now stays at the top of the page even when you're scrolling as well as sporting a new less obtrusive, look and feel. What's more, it now displays a summary of the activity being performed. So for example, when using the 'm' key on an action, you'll see "Deferring until Monday..."
Speaking of deferring, the 'Do Later' tab is now called 'Deferred'. Seems people were confused at what 'Do Later' meant. Hopefully this clears things up.
The 'Waiting for' tab is gone! Yes, perhaps the shortest lived Runway feature ever. In it's place we're developing a more formalised waiting for syntax and handling of the people responsible for getting it done. Don't worry we haven't lost he waiting for actions, they're just treated pretty much the same as everything else until we roll out the new behaviour.
For the mouse-bound, the action icons now appear as you hover over each action. This should remove a mouse click per action when you're processing your lists
Focus items--contexts, tags and energy--now sport nice round borders
You can access your account page to change your username, email, time zone and password if you so desire, as well as view your email integration address
There's a password reset page which is still a work-in-progesss
Most controls now have a blue focus ring to better indicate where the keyboard focus is
If you delete all the text while editing an action and tab away, you'll now see the original text as a hint
Once you're in an action list or have clicked on a folder tab, you can use the LEFT/RIGHT arrow keys to move between folders
The staging environment now has a thin orange border to distinguish it from production. Hopefully this goes someway to preventing those of you kind enough to try out the bleeding edge from accidentally using staging when you thought you were using production

Behind the scenes we've also been implementing twitter integration, a self-signup mechanism, increasing our test coverage, and planning load testing in preparation for a public beta in a few months

Most of this is ready to push to production (and some of the minor changes have already) but we're waiting to finalise the Waiting for behaviour and do some final testing before a release.

Enjoy!

Runway 2.0 Lives

2009-01-31T20:36:00.003+11:00

As I mentioned in an earlier post, we recently started up Runway development again, this time for the long haul and as promised, this evening we cut over to the new (and improved we hope) version with little fuss.

We hope you like where we're heading and look forward to all your feedback, good and not-so good.

So what are you waiting for? Go check it out.

The Ducks are in Alignment

2009-01-31T10:06:00.002+11:00

We will be deploying the new version of Runway this evening (GMT+10:00). Some of the changes affect our infrastructure, on component of which is email integration. To enable the new domain to activate, it is necessary to disable email integration. It will be available again after deployment--which hopefully won't take too long :)

Don't forget to check the status on twitter: http://www.twitter.com/runwayapp

Changes are Afoot

2009-01-27T20:45:00.002+11:00

We're just letting you know that after a spell of inactivity, we've started up Runway development again and we're about to release the first new version which brings some small, and not so small changes.

Probably the first thing you'll notice are some changes to the appearance and the layout. We've put a lot of thought into this and hope you'll appreciate it. We welcome your feedback in this area so don't hesitate to drop us a line.

You will also notice the new "Waiting for" tab. Whereas in the version you're using now we flagged actions that were waiting for someone else with a context of '@waiting', they now have a tab all of their own.

If you've been using email integration then you'll also have to make a small adjustment there as well.

For the keyboard fanatics, some of the hot-keys you may be used to have changed. In particular, the same hot-keys work across all browsers. For good measure, here's a list:

ctrl+n Takes you to the new-action input field at the top of page
ctrl+a Takes you to the list
ctrl+0 Takes you to the "To Do" tab
ctrl+t Takes you to the "Do Today" tab
ctrl+l Takes you to the "Do Later" tab
ctrl+w Takes you to the "Waiting for" tab
ctrl+d Takes you to the "Done" tab
ctrl+x Takes you to the "Deleted" tab
ctrl+shift+t Clears the today tab (this used to be ctrl+p) and is only available on the Today tab
ctrl+r Resets the focus

Most of the other shortcuts remain untouched.

We've also rolled out a number of support mechanisms (all of which are linked to from the bottom of each page):

A dedicated blog
Bug-tracker
Google Groups
Direct support email
and a Twitter account

All things going to plan we hope to release late this week or perhaps over the weekend. We will send out another email just prior to taking the server offline for the update.

As with all things, there's still a lot to do and we'll be working steadily over the coming weeks, months and years to add more GTD-inspired features that make managing your life easier.

Regards,

The Runway Team