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 -- 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 mylifeorganized+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to mylifeorganized@googlegroups.com. 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/1f8aee6b-8548-40f9-a856-c245da6a6496%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
