DailyTasks.net

Time Zone support is a specific feature provided from iCal, but when I use it I was not feel good enough their design. In iCal timezone can be changed, but it change global. So there’s the problem, I was in China, and my calendar for those days will be as normal in that timezone, but after I flew back North America, all information those days will be in a mess.

I think about my solution for this, as most of days, timezone is fixed for a single default timezone that used. So I will keep a single default timezone for one-timezone-only days, and for any days with more than two timezones, make it dynamic (keep record for sure). So in theories, dynamic timezone days can be more than 24 hours for my database, and some event entries will be duplicated before and after when display them.

Unlike day, week, month views has been popular with calendar applications, I have to design layout for goals view by myself. To make it simple, I plan to use a monthly timeline as the main section, after sub-goals/tasks added into grid, with simple click/drag to plan each tasks to be pushed into daily tasks database to be used in day view. The goal timeline will be some like a project chart, so we know how many days each goals has been used. A ‘hours’ column to be used to count exact hours used for each task of that goal.

Goals in this application are tasks group to be plan for more than a day. I always feel it’s a big problem to use popular calendars, information of a single task group always divided into several days, and have to find here and there. I want to make it more simple to use. So I will use three lists of goals, closed goals list, active goals list, inactive goals list. Inactive goals actually plans for future goals, while closed goals are those goal finished, wouldn’t affect to have a big list of goals, that make list less. It’s always recommend to have a short list of active goals, so we can focus a small list on our day/week plan, to maintain a good sense of priority management.

A same note interface will be used in goals view, when clicked a day and display all relative notes in that day for the specific goal. There’s some space left, it can be used to display some other information/charts.

The target of this application is to build a light-weight planner that support some major time management functions like Dr. Covey’s methods, which I myself used in PlanPlus before. 

Major features:

• Daily tasks list, event list, and notes. Some items of each can be connected, so it can be much easy to find notes. It will be one of the hardest part in this application.
• Daily notes will be organized in pages, but no scrolling. I don’t like scrolling, that’s my top one dissatisfaction in PlanPlus. Though it make this application a little big complex, it need to do lots of job similar with Buzzword, i.e. to support image alignment.
• Week event planner is a must, and monthly event view are helpful to search events. I will use iCal’s design for early version.
• Goals planner will be connected to other views, and it might good to display progress of those goals. Some kinds of chart will be used to display progress of goals for sure, with notes in daily basis.

I’ve planned for this application since early 2007, suppose to get a personal organizer on the Mac. I was a Plan plus (XP/Vista) user since 2004, but Franklincovey has no plan to build a Mac version, so, after I bought my first Macbook, I can no longer manage my daily tasks/notes like before.

The target of this application will be not only a web 2.0 online personal organizer, but also an AIR organizer for local native running. As online version will have to cost monthly money, also lots of challenges such as version control and syncs, privacy information security, the first version will be an AIR-only version. Simplicity is more important than perfect at least in beginning stage.

Personal organizer is very important for a guy who use computer/laptop almost every day. From year to year I found my information/notes/files lost in my hard drives/network drives. I have stacked 5 gigs files before 2003, today they grew to several hundred gigs. It’s hard to find old records effectively without a good organizer.

It’s impossible to build such an application to fit everybody, but at least I’m going to build one that fit myself first. Most free/commercial organizer has some dissatisfactions. I like Stephen Covey’s idea to organize, which other organizers’ cannot have, although I found most of things from Covey’s software are not so useful as I wish; I like the new iCal come with Leopard, nice design and good for much simple to use then Planplus, though it lack most of functions I want, and something useless too; I hoped FileMaker’s Bento can help to organize my informations to use like a database, I disappeared soon as I felt hard to find where I saved my records.

A better personal organizer will save lots of time everyday. I put this application into my high priority.

Now it’s in my design/prototype process. I like Apple designs, UI should follow popular application first, so I choose to start with layout of iCal in my alpha version. I choose pureMVC for structure of this application, pureMVC give not only the framework, but also some best practices, helpful for refactoring and future design changes. I found it much easier than before to create symbols with Flash CS3 to be used in Flex 3, simply export the Flash file to a SWC and imported in Flex project, that’s how Flex skin template for Flash CS3 worked now.