It is week #287, it shares its name with various interstate highways, bus routes and a large main belt asteroid names 287 Nephthys. It has been a busy week here as we get back into gear after the summer time is completing.
We had a few meetings this week. We are working with a local organisation to test out our Online Volunteer System. It is pretty well up and running, but it needs plenty of tweaks and some real-world testing. Hopefully, over the next few weeks and months we can see how it performs and what needs to be adjusted.
We also met-up with a few other friends and chatted about surveys, apps, technology and a few other interesting topics.
We forgot to mention that in week #286, we were the guest editor for The Modern Desk email newsletter. We submitted 3 physical products that we love and use and 3 virtual ones with a brief description of each. The response has been great and it was an opportunity for us to talk about some of the lesser known tools that we are big fans of around the office.
Des Traynor is the co-founder of Intercom and writes a lot about start-up life, technology and customers. We’ve met a few times over the years at various conferences. Over the years he’s had less than flattering things to say about Todo lists. We whole heartedly agree. Around the office, we’re big fans of the Reminders.app on the iPhone because it seamlessly syncs with the iCalendar standard. That means we can use various different tools and still share the same data. Most of the todo list apps out there attempt to solve the same problem, but using their system. So this week, we started to tinker on writing our own Todo list app for iOS. Now, we didn’t try to reinvent the wheel, we just hit that last 5% of use-cases that the basic Reminders.app can’t solve. Namely, tagging a todo item so it can appear in various different facets. We started to simply “reskin” the Reminders.app using the built-in Event Store on the iOS device. That means editing a Todo in our app also changes it in the Database which the Reminders.app and any other iCal tool reads from. It is far from a finished app, but internally we’re using it and it works great for our GTD needs. We can create various lists, one for each customer, product or project, and still tag individual tasks with contexts like #call, #email, #buy and view those lists independent what list the task was created for. That’s it, after we polish it a bit more we’ll release it to the world. It isn’t special or the next big app, but it helps us and might help you too.
We’ve also started to refine the message that we’re presenting about the company. After this summer, we have been thinking more and more about what it is we want todo and how to convey that message to others. One working idea is “Product Midwife” where we help you get your idea into the world. It is still a work in progress.