leftcolumn.net

Undone just got some new features/improvements:

-Show Date that Actions were added, and allow editing of these dates. If you use the hours tracking as well, you’ve got the basics of a time-keeping system for contractors and small businesses. This is going to work with the Reports system, which will let you download CSVs, so you can take time records and load them into your own billing system.

-After you add an Action, the next time you click ‘Add Action’ the Context and Project default to the last ones used. Obvious but still useful.

- Sorting of Actions in the main Actions page is now Alphabetical within Contexts and Projects, with any ‘Done’ actions sinking to the bottom of the list. Attentive readers will realise that this means you can impose a system of Priorities on your Actions simply by prefixing them with a number. See below for more on Priorities.

-Some visual improvements, and expect further improvements in that area.

There are more changes on the way, including Reports, as noted above. Another big one is Priorities for Actions. See the Leftcolumn.net Undone profile and it’s Feed version for some more features we’ve got planned, and use the contact form if you have any suggestions or feedback.

I’ve just made a few improvements to Undone, including:

-Security enhancements. Thanks to all the people who tried to break it! Your efforts have been educational.

-Atom feeds are now better, the unique IDs point to valid ‘Single Action’ pages so they should be clickable in most readers.

-Closed/Done actions now appear at the bottom of lists, which just makes sense.

There’s a bunch more stuff coming!

Undone now has syndication capabilities - essentially you get a list of actions, sorted by the most recently modified. This is still pretty primitive, but allows you to share your changing to-do items. See an example user’s profile and Atom feed. At this stage the feeds are available to the world if you make your profile available - this will probably change to a more granular system where you can make individual contexts, projects and actions public, which would be applied to your RSS feeds too.

The RSS feeds are pretty simple right now, but we’ll shortly be adding summaries of the contexts and projects etc that they are associated with, as well as detals of whether they have been marked complete, any hours logged, etc. Enjoy!

Well, we’ve been quietly working on this for a while and it’s finally ready for an alpha launch. Undone is a GTD-based (yet still somehow flexible) productivity/to-do-list/time-tracking tool. At this stage it is still very basic, but is ready to use by  foolhardy, intrepid folk. We have big plans for Undone, including better time-tracking, Team project tools, reporting, an API, etc.

Registration is free and fast. Feedback welcomed via the contact form.

Check it out at http://www.leftcolumn.net/undone/

Just saw this on MacNN: EMC Retrospect 8.0 on chopping block? (ok, it’s month’s old), so it looks like version 8 definitely isn’t coming to the Mac. Is it just me or does this seem like an opportunity for some hungry Mac developers to build a really good backup system that suits Small Office Networks, has provision for offsite backups like Retrospect does, but sports a swish Cocoa interface and is Universal?

Because basically Time Machine covers local backups but doesn’t serve the same ‘Backup Server’ role that Retrospect Workgroup does…

I know there are some good small backup apps for the Mac out there, but do any backup a network of Macs and provide backup set management?

…At least in our office. With the imminent arrival of Leopard, my attention’s turned to the upgrade process. At the moment, the only application that I can foresee having problems is Retrospect. No real reason for that, other than it’s not Universal and is generally old and clunky! But Time Machine might take care of most of our backup needs pretty simply, so I’m considering just ditching Retrospect. The only snag is that we do offsite backups with Retrospect - every week I retrieve one drive and send the other.

So how to replicate the offsite part of the backup system? If Time Machine supports multiple drives and therefore Multiple backups, it would be simple. Perhaps an online system, e.g.: .Mac or S4? Is Apple doing this to drive more customers to .Mac?

I’m in two minds about the departure of Retrospect, it really is flexible and it has done a great job, but the interface is arcane and non-Intel native (and with no upgrade in sight!). It also requires a bit of administration overhead, so I’m angling to reduce that and go for a more Mac-like backup experience - it should just work!