Knowledge Revolution

Update on March 7, 2011: I’ve basically stopped actively thinking about developing this application…there a few other options out there, check out this post for more information.

I’ve been thinking about writing a ToodleDo Desktop Application ever since I switched to the online service as my primary means of task management.  Before ToodleDo I had been using OmniFocus and before that I had been using a Sony Clie Palm Pilot (which was great, by the way).  Now I use an iPhone and a Mac, and I just never got to liking OmniFocus.  I am not sure why, but I really tend to think in ‘day centric’ approaches as opposed to ‘project centric’, and the ToodleDo ‘hotlist’ just seemed to work for me.

As all ToodleDo users know, having your data with you in any web browser is great, and the iPhone app is also pretty nice.  The sync mechanism is perfect and fast.  But working with the website day in and day out is a hassle, and once you disconnect from the Internet, you can’t do anything on your computer (the iPhone app continues to operate offline).  The missing link is a ToodleDo desktop application that caches your tasks and then syncs with the server when a connection is available.  The user interface of a native desktop app could also be more user friendly and faster than the web version and various tie-ins to the operating system become possible (like notifications, dock icons, and so on).

So I looked around and was surprised to find no options, or very few options.  I turned up:

• A now defunct script to synchronize OmniFocus with ToodleDo – worked ok, but was slow and the two apps don’t have the same fields, so some data was ‘lost in translation’.  Plus Omnifocus costs $80! (yes I bought it myself when I started using it, along with the $20 iPhone app…)
• A Windows only desktop app called TaskAngel that is in beta – seems to work ok, but has a bit of a clunky UI
• Some talk of a script to sync The Hit List with Toodledo – although I suspect the same ‘lost in translation’ will occur, as would solutions that sync to Outlook, and other desktop apps

I started a survey to see if there was any interest in a ToodleDo only desktop app and was not surprised to find a lot of folks like me.  To date, there have been about 160 responses, with the breakdown between Mac and Windows users almost split equally (Windows has a slight edge).  This presents a small problem: developing for both platforms can be pretty costly unless you use a cross-platform development tool.

For the past couple of months I have been investigating development options, with a high priority given to rapid development on multiple platforms.  The choices I’ve found are:

1. Write native apps for each platform using .Net/C# for Windows and Cocoa/Objective-C for Mac.  This produces the best final results with totally native applications for each platform, but is the most costly and time consuming option.  I’ve developed extensively for Windows, but would be relatively new to Cocoa. Bonus: tools are free on the Mac, and I’ve already got Visual Studio for Windows.
2. Use a web-based cross-platform offline tool, such as Adobe Air or Microsoft Silverlight.  This produces a desktop application that runs on both platforms.  I’ve used Air applications before and the UI just never looks right to me on *either* platform.  It reminds me of desktop Java applications from the early 2000s – all the UI elements just seem out of place and wrong.  Bonus: still thinking of one.
3. Use a cross-platform development toolkit, such as WXWidgets or QT, along with a nice language such as Ruby.  This produces native desktop applications with the right widgets, but it can be time consuming to lay out the UI with a visual editor, plus you don’t get an IDE with debugger.  Bonus: Ruby – great language!
4. Use RealBasic (now Real Studio) – a cross platform visual basic like language with a nice visual UI editor.  This is similar to #3, except laying out the UI would be faster.  Granted, I have to use the RealBasic language instead of Ruby, but I’ve used both before.  Bonus: quick compile to Windows and Mac and a vibrant community.

In the end, I am opting for Real Studio, even though I didn’t own the development tools and had to buy them, and they are proprietary (unlike some of the options in #3, which are open source).

Anyway, the first step is done – I’ve selected the tools, and even done some very basic prototyping.  Now, I’ve just to find the time to code in between my other projects: working on the Encyclopedia of Life project, with NASA on education and outreach, and fatherhood.

Stay tuned for future developments as I begin working in earnest on V1 of the ToodleDo Desktop Application.

Update on October 12, 2010:  See my later post for information on progress (or lack thereof).

Do you dread coming back from vacation to find the buckets of work email waiting for you?  Do you secretly use your iPhone/Blackberry/etc. while on vacation just to “clean out your email a bit”.  Do you think all of this email is making us smarter or able to work better?  And…what did people do 20 years ago when email was almost non-existant in the workplace?  People still did stuff, the economy still grew, right?  I mean, we built rockets to fly people to the moon before we had laptops, web browsers, Mathematica, and email!

I don’t know the answers to most of these questions…but I do know that the good use email is wonderful and a great time saver, and the poor use of email is a time waster, a morale killer, and sometimes bad for your career.  People do things like blindly reply-all over and over again filling up everyone’s mail box, CC their boss just in case, say angry things they would never say in person, and more.  So how do we define the difference between good and bad email.

Characteristics of bad work email:

1. Bad emails tend to have a lot of people on the TO or CC line.  Unless its a group announcement of some kind, this usually signals the sender doesn’t know who the relevant people are and is just blasting it out.  Equivalent to standing in the lobby and yelling out your message.

2. Bad emails tend to have information instead of knowledge.   As my friend from high school put it, information is simply data without a clear understanding of its significance, while knowledge is the useful application of accumulated data.

3. Bad emails tend to have no clear indication on whether action is expected from the recipient.

Characteristics of good work email:

1. Opposite of the above three items.

The key challenge is to deal with the daily deluge of information from all sources: email, Twitter, Facebook, newspapers, TV, websites, Digg, and so on. Sifting through all this raw data, analyzing it, discovering patterns, ignoring the noise, and not spending too much time acting on irrelevant information is critical to the survival of any information worker or professional.  Improving our use of email is one way to reduce the mental clutter of our daily work existence and hopefully moving us closer to spending time generating knowledge instead of just more information.