Monday, November 30, 2009

Updates for My Web Brain: Timezones, Topics and Bling

This Friday just past I released the latest changes and improvements for My Web Brain, my GTD web application.

Timezone support has been added for both action due dates and Someday/Maybe item tickle dates. You can now nominate your timezone under General Preferences. This change means that My Web Brain will know your current timezone and properly flag your actions as 'due today' and also properly calculate what you really mean when you say an action is due 'tomorrow'. Update: There are some edge cases where dates are still displaying incorrectly. These instances will be fixed the next iteration.

The concept of Topics has also been added the web application. A topic provides a way for you to categorise your actions independently of context. Part of the genius of the GTD methodology is divided actions between the contexts you can perform them in. This is excellent for actually performing the tasks efficiently, but oftentimes you wish to group your actions around a topic. This change is intended to provide that facility. You can create or delete topics within your user preferences, and you can select your topic when you process your thoughts into an action or edit it later.

In the future I will add topic associations to thoughts, reference items and someday/maybe items. The intention is to also make it easier to create a topic on the fly and view all your information by topic.  Topics are not the only organisational tool to be added; Down the track I intend projects and goals to be form an essential tool for organising your information within My Web Brain.

Finally, My Web Brain has a new logo and banner graphic. Prior to my holiday to Canada and the United States in October I ran a logo design competition through the SitePoint service 99designs. I was awed by the number and quality of the submissions and in this last release I am happy to apply the winning logo design to the website. I hope you like it (I do).

As always, feedback and comments are welcome. The application is currently free for use and and can be found at www.mywebbrain.com. To leave feedback or a comment, use the My Web Brain Google Group.

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