Thanks Dwight, that does help a bit. Knowing #1 gives me a route to try to get some of the smaller annoyances/bugs I've found in MLO hopefully addressed. At least I have an idea how to start and not be whistling 'into' the wind.
And as much as I find it helpful, the rest of the post just illustrates too well how ineffectual the present system is. The simple fact is a typical user generally can't/won't lead a cheerleader charge for a simple feature request/improvement/bug fix. The basis that this needs to be laid out this way in fact almost guarantees that a typical end-user would be so overwhelmed by this process as to just not bother. An end result any of us can surmise ends either in a continuing but frustrated user, a user abandoning the software or just a lost sale before it ever started. None of those is desirable. I've been in and around IT and development roles for most of my life. But frankly I've not the time to devote to making proposals for features, cheerleading them and building them into critical mass, scoping uservoice for duplicates and trying to aggregate votes across poorly written/expressed/conceived proposals... I'm sorry, that's the job of the devs. Not a user trying to ask for a simple improvement. I'm sorry for the rant here - it's not aimed at you Dwight. My frustrations around MLO rise and fall like the sea tides on a roller coaster. It would be easy if I didn't give a crap; but I can't not. MLO is an extremely unique and powerful tool with the potential to be so many things to so many people but somehow it just refuses to do that. At a time when this exact space of self/personal improvement and life control is heating up and a forefront, and so many players (with inferior offerings) have gained momentum and notoriety, why is it that this swiss-army knife on steroids of a software package can't manage to get noticed? Trello. Podio Nozbe NirvanaHQ Todoist any.do Wunderlist Evernote 2Do (built on the friggin TOODLEDO backend!!) How are all these halflings gaining such notoriety and success while MLO piddles around? When's the last time you saw mlo on any mainstream media's top 5, top 9, top 20.. list of todo apps? Me neither. Take Trello for example... The G-Damn POSTERCHILD for spartan and almost featureless. You a busy guy? You have a lot to do? I dare you, I DOUBLE dare you, I TRIPLE DOUBLE DARE YOU to try and implement a workable GTD solution on Trello. I've tried. Thirty seven ways to sunday and at least a dozen more on the way back.. Now maybe, MAYBE, if you have a mild need - maybe 30 projects (in the strictest sense of a project according to GTD) you might get away with using Trello and nothing but. But any more and you're *hosed* Yet this frickin thing just got spun off from Fog Creek and is now getting injected with VC money. **VC $$$$$$$* !!! How is that not some sort of bad cosmic joke! Meanwhile, I have at any given point in time between 10 and 20 (in the classic sense) projects going just for work alone. In the GTD sense I typically have between 70 and 100, maybe up to 120 or 130 projects at any given point in time. For that kind of workload, ever since the loss of Life Balance on my Palm (and ShadowPlan before it) nothing, NOTHING has come close to the power I get out of MLO. Yet time and again I run into BRICK WALLS with it that I have to fashion some sort of workaround to, because some portion is unfinished (or just 'feels' that way) or isn't fully thought out or fleshed out or polished. Like things that don't sync through or have no analog on the mobile side.. And there's no confidence that it'll get resolved in any due time frame because all the focus appears to be elsewhere. (Either directed to the Android app or the iOS app, or at some point back at the Windows app while the mobiles get neglected.) Or there's no clear cut system for engaging the devs; only this forum is apparent - and we all feel how haphazard the engagement here is. It appears to be an untennable situation and, at the risk of sounding petulant, one I put squarely on the dev leadership for a lack of focus; a seeming lack of 'knowing what mlo wants to be when it grows up' I watched MLO through a good portion of the 3.x branch's dev, waited patiently for the 4.0 release only to be quite disappointed. The changes were mostly cosmetic and UI oriented and instead of moving MLO to a simpler to use interface, proceeded to make it more complicated. To this day I'm not quite sure that the addition of tabs was any revolution in my workflow but I'm quite sure of the annoyances they added. I'm also quite aware of the added confusion they produced for me and can only imagine what they do for John Q Public and Suzy Q Typicaluser. I watched the launch of an Android app, the much heralded release of an iOS app and then the realization that the devs, rather than building on a cross-platform platform, splintered themselves into an unsustainable 4 different code bases (possibly 5 - not sure how disparate the Android phone and tablet versions are) + the Cloud Sync code base. How many devs over there?? vs. 5-6 codebases.. No wonder it seems that no two projects can move forward simultaneously. MLO need to get it's act together in a big way. It needs a roadmap. A real one. It needs to focus it's UI so that it's simple enough for Suzy Q to jump into with ease, hiding (but not removing!) the power user complexity. All the power that's here is needed! Fix the niggling bugs that seem to get floated about the fora as being year old even 2 year old or whatever. Focus on selecting a feature set to share across the desktop and mobiles and then create PARITY across all the platforms for those features. I'm sick of differing behaviors for inheriting contexts depending on if I'm on the desktop or mobile. I'm sick of differing behaviors for objects modified on both sides (mobile and desktop). Hell, I'm sick of still having a clobber versus field-level sync in 2014. We had that ish worked out on the palm back in 2006. MLO insist we use their cloud so they can have total control of the sync at a record level - fine - just do something *useful* with it! Even now with new features, we continue to add DISparity - True or False that the new "views" on ios aren't fully compatible with the desktop? WTF is that?? That's a brand new feature/platform in ACTIVE development.. wtf are we still fragmenting the system???!??! I'm past rambling so I'm gonna stop here. Every time I get started on MLO I get twisted into a ball of convolution because I just can't wrap my head around HOW a product with such superior abilities, just can't seem to distinguish itself into a finished form. All the while I'm following along just hoping for this or that bone to fall off the chuck-wagon so I can repair just one more broken part of my system because even though it's broken it's still(?) somehow better than the alternatives I've found. Or IS it? Talk about a f*((ing conundrum. /rant -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MyLifeOrganized" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mylifeorganized. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/mylifeorganized/4aae07bf-b363-4fe0-bf87-ae5420784ec2%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
