This is an essential cornerstone, from my perspective: to find a developer who is feeling the same itch that motivates this project. Also important from a maintenance perspective, to have that “eating our own dogfood” dynamic working for us. We want the developer(s) to get paid of course- that is also essential -but it’s a HowTo, not The Why.
Am so glad to have your voice in this conversation, @simon -not only because of your MonkeyGTD experience (most relevant!), but also because i tend to agree with @boris about making save-to-TiddlyHost (and/or GitHub) a requirement.
To your Q:
As mentioned above, OmniFocus provides the most feature-complete implementation for standalone use, but… Too heavy, and non-interoperable. At the other end of scale, Todoist is probably the most popular agile tool for a mobile inbox & task-list manager, but it is a mature commercial product that i (like everyone on this board, i guess) consider quite “stiff.” The one to beat, i would say, is the all-singing/ all-dancing (as per their “What-it-is” video) Notion.
That’s my nutshell summary of the marketplace, but putting that aside: i think we should just focus on essential workflows, and build out from there. In fact i took a little stab at creating a GTD app for own use almost 2 years ago, which has been sitting moribund on TiddlyHost for almost 2 years… So i just posted there an overview of the core workflows and 3 UseCases i want to develop. Please take a look; i’d love to know what you think, of: GTD Wiki — Getting Things Done the wiki way
As far as I know, neither Todoist nor Notion support the GTD methodology out of the box. This might significantly limit their helpfulness in terms of inspiration and design reference. Identifying a tool that implements GTD and does it well might be helpful, or for example a Notion template that provides the requisite functionality.
Also, horses for courses and all that but Todoist is the only task management app that has ever worked for me. 
In fact the workflow and code for Streams was derived from a TW based Todoist clone. My only gripe with Todoist is that I cannot host my own data, and that their design revamps over the last couple of years have taken away some of the things I valued the most.
Quite right, Saq. I haven’t used OmniFocus in a good few years, but even then it had a GTD mode (‘mode’ i mean generically; don’t recall how that config was packaged) that even David Allen called quite robust. As to Notion: i only know what i see in their promo and fanboy reviews (why should i invest in that product when i have TW? )
This helps, to have such insight from a serious user; thanks for that! For my purposes: you’ve taken the essential value from Todoist to support what i call “Agile Note-Taking” and “Agile List-Making,” and rolled it into Streams plugin -which i use the heck out of, b/t/w, and consider an essential part of this proposed product.
Probably … by far
---- may be OT, but I think it is a good example ----
I didn’t really track the time, that I did invest in the new PaletteManager Edition / Plugin. But I’m sure in sum I’m close to 100 hours already. And the polishing needed to make it ready for the core there is no end in sight. For the core all the UI text elements need to be translatable. – To know what needs translation, the project has to be “feature complete”. – My goal was to “not introduce new translatable text elements.”
The scope of The Ultimate GTD App “that scales” as described in by David Allen in the 2019 GTD summit has a much lager scope.
That’s right. Because if that would be enough, the existing editions would already have “taken over the market”. … But they didn’t.
As I wrote at:
The underlaying structure is key. For that structure one needs to understand GTD in detail. So I did study the book in more detail.
As I wrote. I did study the book in more detail. My focus was from an “app developer” having the “user in mind”. Over the last weekend I did use Saq’s Streams-edition to outline 224 “elements of interest”, for an app, covered in Part 1 of the book.
Part 1 is an overview of the whole GTD concept and “the other parts” in the book are detailed descriptions about the elements defined in part 1.
The first heading in Part 2 is: Getting Started: Setting Up the Time, Space, and Tools
… What a coincidence. If we start an empty version of our trusted tool, we are greeted with GettingStarted.
… just some thoughts
3 Likes
In my earlier response, i neglected to mention one other important development:
This thread about GTD plugins, which i’m afraid i sorta hijacked (sorry @arunnbabu81 !) featured this link to a GSD5 variant that i consider quite relevant.
I know it’s just a demo of some tooling i don’t yet understand well enough to use (if indeed this is the intention- to engage interested non-technical users? -bit of in-context documentation could really help), but i’ll be watching this project w/ interest, and would love to engage in a dedicated conversation about it, if there be any other interested parties. What do you say, @arunnbabu81 ?
I think design elements can be used, but the UI implementation itself should build upon the new cascade mechanism that is part of the TW UI now.
It should make the UI more maintainable, theme independent and more flexible.
The gsd-plugins should all be independent from themes … if possible.
1 Like
From the non-technical user perspective, i’d like to know what this means. Ultimately, the aim should be (on the dev RoadMap, if not in initial release(s)) an essentially feature-complete package of software that let’s us know when there’s an update available with 1-click install to keep all code up to date. This has come to be the expectation of any software user for which users need to pay- and for polished FOSS packages as well- so i would ask: how can this be most easily implemented in a TW5 product?
Absolutely. From my perspective, the two key concerns to address are:
- Constraints. If you want something well polished and consistent then a part of that is introducing constraints in terms of what is and is not possible in terms of customization and integration of other plugins.
- Sufficient funding. The more polish you want, the higher the associated development and maintenance costs.
Sorry for the poor wording. … It’s been “dev-talk”.
I meant that the new edition should be based on the latest technology TiddlyWiki has to offer. Existing implementations started to be used years ago and had to use what was possible at that time.
All great to hear, Mario; your contributions here and in that mother-thread provide invaluable grist for the mill.
Mmm… Can’t wait to learn what emerges from that brainstorm, in due course.
I just have to point out (in case anyone failed to pick up on the irony) that master Allen was being semi-facetious in that presentation.
Ultimately: there is no “ultimate” GTD app, and never will be. “Horses for courses,” as Saq says… And i think you’re right-on in your recommendation that this app needs to present a drop-dead simple interface for Getting Started with just the first step (i.e. CAPTURE everything in a mind-sweep) and maybe the 2nd (i.e. PROCESS each item with minimal friction into one of a handful of lists).
Just to provide further context, I maintain an edition for a small group of close friends who have no idea what TiddlyWiki is. They have now been using it happily on a regular basis for almost two years during which I have pushed out updates maybe 7-8 times, and they have been able to update by clicking a single button. The updates mechanism is something I implemented from scratch and would need a lot more forethought and redesign if one wanted to use it for a larger audience. The other key part of what has made this successful is that they interact with a fully customised TiddlyWiki with a bespoke interface, and have no knowledge or expectation that they can tweak it. They use it as is and these constraints remove a lot of potential pitfalls.
3 Likes
This is well worth a RETWEET if we could do it here. 
Fantastic to know how you leverage TW so users never-ever need to be concerned with how it works. And also you update them seamlessly.
THIS kind of story is a USE CASE that needs telling again & again. ???
TT, x
I did create a new thread: Getting Stuff Done -- Basic Elements -- implemented using TiddlyWiki, that can follow the development process.
You try to get the funding up to speed. … I try to get it
1 Like
Whups -looks like i missed that one (easy to do, in this firehose that is talk.tiddlywiki!)
I am no great shakes at fundraising… But i’ll do my best. “Next Action” (or rather, a multi-step PROJECT in GTD-speak) seems to me it should be an OpenCollective launch. Notwitstanding the good Q&A we’ve had in that top-level thread, i’m not yet clear what my Next Action should be to advance that cause.
Based on the lively show of interest among the start-studded cast of contributors here thus far, i believe this RFI has fulfilled its purpose of engaging sufficient interest already. Is that fair to say? If so, then how should this go up on TW’s OC board, to see if it will attract some financial backers?
If you are willing to help administer the project, then I think sensible next steps would be:
- writing up the scope and clearly defined features of the project
- either as a phased multi step project or even just the first step initially
- setting a fund raising goal appropriate to the above
- pinging Boris and Jeremy with a request to run this as an Open Collective project.
Just to be clear, my interest lies more so with facilitating discussions around how to explore a community funded development model rather than with the proposed edition.
As you might be already knowing, the above linked GSD based demo wiki consists of a few cosmetic changes I added in addition to the GSD5 core for easy usage. I haven’t touched any GSD5 core tiddlers. Since I don’t know to do large scale TW programming, I am unable to modify it beyond these cosmetic tweaks. I have reported some issues which I encountered in the GitLab to the plug in creator, but he hasn’t responded yet.
Here is another GSD5 wiki which I have been tweaking - https://muuri-test.tiddlyhost.com/
If you want to read about the GSD5 plug in, this docs plug in of GSD5 contains everything - GSD5 — a getting-stuff-done tool
Also try this tiddler - GSD5 — a getting-stuff-done tool
1 Like
3 essential steps, surely, which can certainly start now & run in parallel, but i guess #2 (fundraising goal) can only finish after #1 is finished. I’ll certainly keep the Scope-Setting & Feature-Focusing conversation moving along, but meanwhile…
Clear! So, in the interest of exploring that “community funded development model” @saqimtiaz, perhaps you can lead the conversation with Jeremy & Boris about alignment w/ TW’s OpenCollective, as you’ve been down that road already?
I have actually only been on the other end of this before, where the project was proposed and I volunteered to do the work. This does not have to be something elaborate, once you have #1 finished it is just a case of requesting here in the forum that the project be added to Open Collective, and asking for guidance if something more is needed.