Dryice Liu’s Blog

Well I’ve used Emacs planner for more than 2 years everyday, and really happy about it.

However, as I got more and more rely on it, I can still find some room for improvement, but not easy to do:

• It is all text based. This is good in some way, but bad in some other way. Say the planner-id thing is still not working very well, so we can’t say something like “this task need to be done after that task”
• It is not easy to sync with a mobile device. When I start using planner, this is not a big deal, but now mobile device is becoming more and more popullar. Someone has tried to do this, but looks they are all on the way. THe best way I can think off is to get Emacs running on PDAs, but it is not easy, and even if we get Emacs running on PDA, on most devices we won’t have the keyboard, even if we have some keyboard included device, the key bindings is not easy to type. And we don’t have those Esc-Meta-Alt-Ctrl-Shift keys

And after I reading David Allen’s Get Things Done, The most thing I’ve learned is that we should get split tasks to “todo”s. So I think a PIM should support turn a note/task to a project, whice contains sub tasks and more notes. And the discuss on 43 folders didn’t mention a software that can do this. So I might write one my own some day. And here’s some dump of what I’ve got so far:

• cross platform, and sync. There might be a server, which also runs the web version, that do all the sync thing, or the desktop/mobile version could sync among themselves.
• This should do the “task management” stuff only. Leaving contact manager and/or email client alone. But should support other contact manager/mail client as more as possible
• Say for contact manager, we could store the contact name and email address (the email address is unique). And call the external contact manager to search for the email address, and so on
• There should be some kind of “meta data”. So I can convert a task to a project, or a note to a project
• Everythink is linkable. Like in trac. Some kind of wiki should be good for this.
• Data storage. Need to take cross platform into consideration. XML? Or JSON? Will wiki works inside XML?
• There should be templates for both GTD style and Franklin Convey style, and user should be able to define their own.
• There should be both GUI version and CLI version. I don’t care CLI version very much, but there must be an Emacs interface. I could write the core with Python, the GUI with wxPython, and call the core via PyMacs. For mobile version, I don’t know. Maybe write on their own API, to work with the contact manager/mail client on them.
• Should support print task list. For people who don’t have a palm/PPC
• Standard protocals. Should support standard protocals like iCalendar, etc.

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Tags: planner, cross platform, emacs, GTD