Riaan Eloff
Did you ever get any resolution to this?
In the end, having tried MLO in about 10 different ways, and having spent
countless hours fiddling and configuring MLO, I eventually found MLO to be
unusable for GTD if you have fairly large numbers of tasks (e.g. 200+).
In particular the lack of a field that could be used as a Status field
(that unlike flags would 'inherit' sensibly) was a deal breaker. It was a
huge shame because MLO is astonishingly powerful in so many ways... but
there you go.
So Riaan, are you still with MLO or did you go elsewhere?
J
On Thursday, October 29, 2015 at 1:25:50 PM UTC, Riaan Eloff wrote:
>
> Joel, who are the competitors for MLO? And do they compare? I ask this
> because I am where John is...VERY DESPERATE, TRIED MANY - my situation is
> also one of: there's nothing else even close out there, so I'll have to
> settle for MLO. Don't mistake this to mean it is bad. It does have
> EXTREMELY handy functions and comes so close to being exactly what the GTD
> method requires. But, I am also at: wayyy too fiddley and messy and
> invoplved to learn. SO, please suggest any others, I'd love to try them
> out before buybing Pro.
>
> To comment on support: I mailed support with three questions.
>
> The first question was "How would it affect me if I had the PRO version of
> Android vs the FREE version of Desktop, considering Cloudsync needs to
> synce between them, and they have different levels of functionality (ie:
> dependencies, recurrence, etc etc etc)". Bear in mind, I had downloaded
> Android version, purchased pro. Their respondes: "There is no free
> version of desktop, and please read on the website the differences between
> Standard and Pro". MY GOODNESS!!! WHAT AN IDIOTIC RESPONSE!?!? I have
> already read the differences, THAT'S WHY I AM ASKING. Second, they do not
> go ahead and answer the question, they just remain with: there is no free
> one. Obviously I must be on a "free trial" version. This response just
> seems like some lazy, not-feeling-like-doing-any-work response?!
>
> Second question was: "I have a context: Work, with open and closed hours,
> then I have a context: Calls, with no hours, as I often use this for
> personal call to-dos also. When including a work-call in both these
> contexts, it shows up the whole weekend. How do I solve this?". Their
> response: Ask the users on the forum. (Nicer words, very "PC", but that's
> what they said. Ask the users on the forum.
>
> Third question: "Am I able to disable ONLY location-based reminders on
> Android? I want to have reminders active, but I do NOT want location based
> active. There is only an option for "enable/disable reminders", but this
> is for all reminders". No response as yet. Fair enough, it's only been
> two days, and they were quite quick on the other two. But...yaaaa....not
> the greatest experience.
>
> On Saturday, 29 November 2014 22:50:29 UTC+2, Joel Azaria wrote:
>>
>> With all due respect to you Dwight (and I do respect your tenacity and
>> contributions here), I'd posit that you are precisely the " early
>> adopters are happy to tolerate lots of complexity and difficulties of use"
>> John refers to.
>>
>> If you would look past that horizon you would see tremendous sense in
>> what he's saying about mainstream users. In fact he's said pretty much the
>> same as I have many times past (though perhaps more eloquently than I've
>> ever managed to muddle through my frustrations and anger.)
>>
>> I also suspect that as a beta tester your perception of being a "regular"
>> user is somewhat skewed. In particular your view of how effective the
>> feedback loop to the devs is. Frankly it's way to invovled for an average
>> user to bother navigating. As an ex-IT pro and one still involved in
>> technology for a living I think I rate above the average user and I too am
>> frustrated by the feedback loop to the point that I won't bother engaging
>> with it. I think that's a very important point for Andrey and co. to take
>> from this though who can tell if they'll find reason to bother.
>>
>> @Andrey - if you do take time to read this post, reread John Smith's post
>> above many times. In particular pay close attention to the parts about
>> momentum and the rate's at which MLO competitors are growing/gaining
>> visilbility and ask yourself why exactly it is that even with the major
>> rewrite that was MLO 4 why there's still no momentum gain and this product,
>> as fine as it is on a TECHNICAL level, remains an also-ran on the
>> Productivity/GTD playing field.
>>
>> Joel.
>>
>>
>> On Friday, November 28, 2014 5:26:06 PM UTC-5, Dwight Arthur wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi, John. My answers are a little different from Joel's.
>>>
>>> Just to get it out of the way, I will start with #12. I'd like to break
>>> it into three parts: Listening to users and being guided by user requests,
>>> quick turnaround on requested enhancements, and communicating plans and
>>> status back to users.
>>>
>>> In my opinion (others may disagree) a substantial amount of the
>>> development of MLO since I got involved with it a few years ago has been
>>> based on, and guided by user requests. There are some long-standing
>>> requests that have not been addressed but I do believe that the development
>>> team deserves credit for giving serious consideration to user requests.
>>>
>>> MLO seems to have a longer development cycle than many other apps. I
>>> won't speculate as to why, but I will say that it's not uncommon for the
>>> time between releases to be quite long, and for users to become quite
>>> impatient with the wait for features that have been promised but not yet
>>> delivered. I don't view this as unresponsiveness, it's a different issue.
>>>
>>> Finally, MLO developers are not good at keeping users posted about
>>> what's on the way and when to expect it. We have seen several attempts to
>>> make this better but as of today the problem remains.
>>>
>>> Moving on to your other items
>>>
>>> 1. It would help to know what mobile platform you intend to use. On
>>> Windows the Rapid Task Entry (RTE) window is fairly effective. Unlike Joel
>>> I find the Add-Task widget on Android to be more effective than RTE. I can
>>> open a new task in one to two taps, type the task name and then save it in
>>> one tap. If I want to set priorities, categories, schedules etc one more
>>> tap brings up the full task properties menu. I don't know anything about
>>> what happens on Apple, though.
>>>
>>> 2. Subprojects and subtasks are solid features.
>>>
>>> 3. You can toggle project status with a single click or the hotkey
>>> Ctrl-Shift-P. Note that you can find lots of hotkeys (and redefine them if
>>> you like) in tools>options>general>hotkeys. There are also a number of
>>> users who exchange scripts for MLO under AHK (AutoHotKey) in this forum.
>>>
>>> 4. The built-in Next Actions view should provide what you want.
>>>
>>> 5. if you sign up for cloud sync (an extra-cost service) you will be
>>> able to set up an email address for your tasks at the cloud server. Any
>>> email you forward to this address will be added to the cloud copy of your
>>> tasks. The next time you sync, the task will appear in your task list.
>>> There is a scheme for encoding parameters like context, importance, etc
>>> into the name of the task when using RTE; if you turn on the Parse option
>>> RTE will decode the parameters and apply them to the task. (the parsing
>>> syntax is a little obscure especially with respect to dates but once you
>>> get the hang of it, it works well.) There's no parsing in the email to
>>> cloud service, but once the task is in your profile you can select it an
>>> hot some hotkey (I don't use this so I'm not sure of the hotkey, maybe it's
>>> alt-enter?) and MLO will parse and apply the parameters at that time.
>>>
>>> 6. You can set importance and urgency separately. There's also something
>>> called computed-score which takes importance, urgency, schedule issues, the
>>> tasks' parents and other stuff and creates an overall priority. Computed
>>> score is written up in the User Guide - I don't use it because it's too
>>> complex, but some people really like it. You can use autoformat rules to do
>>> the highlighting and formatting that you seek. It involves creating rules
>>> like "if importance is greater than 100 and less than 150 and task is not
>>> completed then font color is orange." There's a bit of a learning curve to
>>> this stuff but it's worth it because it's very powerful.
>>>
>>> 7. In MLO there are often many ways to do one thing and you should chose
>>> the one that's easiest and most effective for you. (Which might be
>>> different from the one that's easiest and most effective for me). I would
>>> use the "star" which can be turned on with a single click or by hitting
>>> ctrl-shift-s. Other people might define a flag called "inFocus" and
>>> associate an appropriate icon.
>>>
>>> 8.OK, it's time to talk about position-in-outline versus
>>> position-in-report. Every task has a position somewhere in the outline,
>>> alongside of its siblings, above any subtasks, subfolders or sub-folders
>>> (collectively "children") and (unless it's at the root) its parent and
>>> grandparent etc items (each of which can be a task, folder or project).
>>> Position in the outline is helpful for finding a task and it matters for
>>> "complete tasks in order" and has a big effect on the calculation of
>>> computer-score. But position in the outline is not necessarily related at
>>> all to what tasks to do next. A view showing all tasks in their
>>> hierarchical structure is an outline view, a view showing a selected subset
>>> (eg tasks in a certain context) in their hierarchical structure is a
>>> filtered outline. People often find it helpful to work in the outline when
>>> analysing and designing their projects. When actually getting things done,
>>> many people prefer to work in a to-do list, which is a flat (no hierarchy)
>>> filtered and sorted view of things to be done. Sometimes there is a
>>> legitimate need to move a task around in the outline, but usually when
>>> people ask about this, they are wanting to move a task up or down in a
>>> sorted list. Again, there are a lot of methods - my favorite is to sort the
>>> list by importance then, click on the importance slider and hold down the
>>> left arrow or the right arrow on the keyboard. The slider starts to move
>>> and the importance numbers start to climb or dive. At the same time, the
>>> task jumps up or down the listing as its position in the sort order
>>> changes. When the task has landed where I want it, I let go of the arrow.
>>>
>>> 9. You must be familiar with the PC application program by now. There's
>>> no web program at this point.
>>>
>>> 10. mobile and desktop apps can sync by either wifi or cloud sync
>>> facilities. Wifi syncs between two devices on the same IP subnet. If your
>>> mobile device is out of range of the wifi then sync will have to wait till
>>> it's back in range. If there are more than two devices (eg a desktop, phone
>>> and tablet) you have to set up sync between two of them (say, the desktop
>>> and phone) and then exclude the phone and reconfigure the desktop to sync
>>> with the tablet. It's free and the data never leaves your subnet so
>>> security is less of an issue. With cloud sync, each device syncs separately
>>> with a cloud server. There is a monthly charge for the service. You can
>>> sync any device whenever you want. Conflict resolution is nicely
>>> implemented on windows-to-cloud syncs but is a bit more primitive on the
>>> Android side. You can have lots of devices syncing (and sharing) the same
>>> task list. You can email a task to the cloud server and it will show up on
>>> all of your devices. Security entails the use of standard SSL for
>>> communications to and from the cloud server. Databases on Android and
>>> Windows are encrypted only if the user has set up some sort of encrypted
>>> volume using OS utilities, MLO remains unaware of any such protections. At
>>> this point there does not seem to be any way to cause the cloud database to
>>> be encrypted. The cloud service is apparently hosted at Amazon, which has
>>> better than average security as compared to other unencrypted cloud
>>> databases. This was clearly an acceptable level of security for nearly
>>> everyone when the cloud sync was implemented but the number of people
>>> seeking improvements such as encryption of cloud data are increasing.
>>>
>>> 11. security was discussed in item 10 above
>>>
>>> 12 dealt with at the top. As others have noted, communication is
>>> somewhat better with those who apply for and are accepted into the beta
>>> program, which entails committing to spend some serious time testing beta
>>> versions of MLO. Full disclosure: I'm a moderator in the Android and
>>> Windows beta teams.
>>>
>>> Best of luck to you.
>>> Dwight
>>>
>>
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