Revue de MonkeyGTD

Original article on Bligoo's Weblog:

http://bligoo.wordpress.com/2008/08/31/revue-de-monkey-gtd/

Translation by Google:

According to David Allen One of the best tricks for enhancing your personal productivity is having organizing tools that you love to use. After trying different tools, I finally decided to support my collection system on Monkey GTD. Monkey GTD is a customized version of TiddlyWiki, in a nutshell it is a single sheet HTML, enriched with a set of scripts. Ca n'al'air anything, but in the end this version 3 is a very simple, functional and stable environment that will help you organize activities, projects and contexts.

1. Simple
There is no installation to perform. Download 1 blank template, open it in your browser and go! Two huge advantages:
     * Portability guarantee (I store my file on my USB key)
     * Works with all operating systems.

2. Functional
This version offers more () of tables (combining different views, by project, by statute, by context, etc. ..). I especially reports by contacts to monitor the actions that I delegate. The presentation has evolved, it's easy to create projects, actions and change their status (via the use of small 'present everywhere). Once you understand the principle of tiddlers (tickets which are the foundation of tiddlyWiki) you will see that almost everything is reorganized at will.

3. Stable
No crash. On the other hand, for safety, you can make a regular online backup through tiddlyspot.com (possibility to choose the status of the backup "public" or "private"). I Monkey GTD to manage my projects at work and frankly it's great. I sometimes ask me why this kind of tool is not available to employees when they integrate society.

Chrome, we are clear for launch

It works and it's FAST!!!!!

Here's what I did:

• Chrome updated itself at some point. This was automatic for me, in fact I didn't know it had happened. If you have updating switched off go to the spanner menu and click About Google Chrome. It should give you a chance to update there.
• I put TiddlySaver.jar in the directory with my MonkeyGTD file.
• Now when I loaded MonkeyGTD Chrome told me it wanted to install Java. I clicked OK and it downloaded and installed the latest beta of Java. Looks like version 6 Update 10.
  
• When that was all done I tried a save. It asked me if I trusted TiddlerSaver signed by UnaMesa. I said Yes.
• Then I saved and it worked!
  
• (Though at first it was failing to save backup. I think perhaps Chrome is not able to create a directory (if you specify a directory for your backups). So adjust the directory in AdvancedOptions or create the directory if you need to. Once I did that backups worked fine).

Firefox, we'll always be friends.

I should mention that there are some cosmetic issues with the header and the blink tag doesn't work at the moment.

And... I just tried a Tiddlyspot upload which didn't work (though I think this has worked in the past). Will investigate this later.

Saving works now in chrome nightlies

Details here.

Script to migrate from d3

Patrick Ohly has written a python script to help users migrate from d3 to MonkeyGTD. He has posted it here on his blog.

Chrome and MonkeyGTD

As you might know MonkeyGTD runs pretty well in Chrome. The problem is you can't save. Jeremy Ruston has been looking at TiddlyWiki saving in Chrome and has found that it should work the same as Safari which requires a little java class to save TiddlyWiki files to disk. However there is a bug in chrome preventing it from working. My guess is it that it will be fixed soon but it might help if you "star" that issue to bring it to the attention of the Chrome developers. In related news I've heard that Firefox 3.1's new javascript engine will be comparable to Chrome's which should be good news for MonkeyGTD users.

Gtdagenda.com, please stop the blog spam

Every blog post I see mentioning GTD gets comment spammed by Gtdagenda.com. I don't know what the product is like but the marketing strategy sucks.

Re: lame MonkeyGTD questions

On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:16 PM, Artur N... <.....@....pl> wrote:

...

4) Actions and Project tickers look very similar - there are "Action"
or "Project" box on the top left side, before the help button, but
it's very small. Of course Projects have lists of "Next Actions"
etc... I think it would help a lot if the background with name and
drop boxes etc, would have a different color for Actions and Projects.

That seems like a reasonable idea. Actually you can almost do this now by styling projectcontrols and actioncontrols. Try this for example: In the StyleSheet tiddler add:

.projectcontrols { background:#bfb; }
.actioncontrols  { background:#bbf; }

Save and reload. It should also work for other types of tiddlers, eg .ticklercontrols, .areacontrols etc.

Regards,

Simon.

To Jared Prins

http://jaredprins.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/28/gtd-software-review.html

> This one has a lot of potential.  However, it is still in Alpha mode (i.e. not recommended for production use).  This can be scary because one day you are working away and then suddenly you lose your data. 

As far as I know this doesn't happen very much. Or ever. MonkeyGTD is based on TiddlyWiki which is a very mature and solid product. The "alpha" designation is because the UI needs a lot more polish before I'd called it finished. But it's used 'in production' by lots of people around the world who trust it not to suddenly lose their data.

> Monkey GTD is easy to use and I actually enjoyed playing with it.  One downside is it helps to know wiki syntax... ewwww.

Actually you don't have to know any wiki syntax to use MonkeyGTD. You can create and manage projects/actions/contexts etc without using it at all. It's only if you want to add notes to your projects or actions or reference items that you can use wiki syntax. But trust me it's not that bad. Here's a little example:

!Heading
Some text in a paragraph with some //italic// or ''bold''.
* List item 1
* List item 2
More text

> It's free and platform independent.  Although there is no online component, it can be easily run off a USB stick.

> Although there is some benefit above a paper based GTD system, .  In both systems, if you wanted to change a Next Action items Context, it is time consuming.  Either you are re-writing your list in the paper based system or you have to cut, copy, go to context section, and paste in the wiki GTD system.  How annoying!

This sentence is 100% wrong and means you didn't really get far enough along with MonkeyGTD to understand how it works. To change an action's context, click on the name of the action to open it, then uncheck the old context and check the new one. (Or if you have multiple contexts disabled then select the context from the drop down selector). This will update all your context lists appropriately. For instance, to see your actions for a certain context, click the name of the context under the "Do Work" tab on the right. If you want to give MonkeyGTD another try I'd be willing to give you some help. Contact me at simon.baird@gmail.com.