Wednesday, May 28, 2008

"Please get help"

http://www.alxwbr.com/?q=content/trying-new-gtd-system

Dear Simon Baird:

Please get help! You have an awesome software, which is only hindered by its lack of speed. I know you're working to improve its speed, and already have, but the releases are not stable and I can't even figure out how to use them.
So please, Pretty please, solicit some well-intentioned open source coders?

Sincerely,
 Alex

Dear Alex Weber,

I'd like to help you figure out how to use the MonkeyGTD alpha 3.0. Where did you get stuck? It is still an alpha (as you mention) though I think it's pretty stable and usable as a GTD system provided you can forgive some rough edges. While it might certainly be described as slow, it is orders of magnitude faster than the 2.x version which had big problems with speed. Regarding enlisting a team of coders, well it would be nice! Some info on checking out the source and contributing patches is here.

Regards,
Simon.

5 Comments:

Blogger Chris said...

Hi, Simon-- I always smile at comments like these, because I know where Alex is coming from. Having bounced around between the original Ruston, Checketts, d3 and MPTW, I'm glad to have settled on MonkeyGTD as my current system. You've done so much work in improving the tool, but I sometimes have difficulty when I try to get friends involved, because they can't figure out how it works, or get uncomfortable with the TW elements that we've become used to. I live inside my tiddlyspot page, and I'm comfortable tweaking here and there because I've worked with previous flavors, but I know lots of potential users that get confused quickly or bogged down in the process. I'm certainly not using MonkeyGTD to its full advantage, so I'll spend the summer trying to get my inner David Allen to shine through.

I've determined that I'm not in a position to contribute code right now, but I do have some tech writing experience and might contribute some how-to and help text as I learn how to use the tool more efficiently. What's been done so far? Is there a preferred format for documentation (TW)?

I'd encourage users like Alex to embrace 3.0alpha and stick with it. It's a great tool with a bright future, and the TW community is growing, so there's good things ahead...

Thanks again for all your hard work...
ChrisW

8:01 AM PDT  
Blogger simon said...

The learning curve for MonkeyGTD if you've never used a TiddlyWiki before is quite daunting. There's people on the TiddlyWiki mailing list who can't save, can't edit, etc. And I'm pretty sure there are many silent people who never get past the initial hurdles. It's something I can see improving slowly if at all. So yeah, I can see where he's coming from too.

2:44 PM PDT  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hey Simon,

Wow, it's great to see that you heard my plight!

Honestly, I'm not even sure where to begin with MGTD 3.0a. I've been a user of 2.x for a while now, so I'm looking to upgrade from there.

I just dusted off my old TiddlySpot account, and tried the Upgrade plugin, but no such luck. Is there a feed/URL that I can give it to upgrade to 3.0?

Thanks for taking the time to respond to my note. Great to hear from a developer who listens!

Thanks again,
Alex

3:59 PM PDT  
Blogger simon said...

The process is a little tricky. It's described at here. Good luck and please email me if you get stuck.

7:00 AM PDT  
Anonymous Gary Buckley said...

I've been using GTD for a couple of years now and have just shifted over to mGSD. I've run it in IE (work) and Firefox (home) and found IE signifigantly slower. I'm now using it on Chrome at work and it's very smooth.

Great work.

7:15 AM PDT  

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