Weekend Project: Building an App

thoughtbox

Here’s the deal.  I’m a recent discoverer/convert/believer of Getting Things Done (the personal productivity book by David Allen).  As I’ve been trouncing around in an effort to track down some software to do things the GTD way, I’ve found great software for the Mac and for the iPhone, but so far nothing that really stands out for Windows.  So, my mission: create a sweet GTD app that runs on Windows.

The app will be called ThoughtBox (it’s a place to gather and organize your thoughts).  It’s a pretty standard GTD app, basically a glorified to-do list.  It’s a perfect fit for WPF because it’s a lot of lists…very data centric.  If I can find time, I’m also going to try to get it to sync with Remember The Milk so that there’s an online and an iPhone story.  Turns out that a lot of people are already doing GTD with Remember The Milk so I think it’s a good fit.

Here’s the twist though.  I thought it would be fun to blog about the process.  This means that you can expect some serious bloggage from over the weekend…and possibly the next couple of weekends…as I go through this.  I’ll post updates as I go through a design process and then share any interesting tricks I come across while dev’ing.

So there you have it.  Wish me luck.

By the way, in case your interested the logo for ThoughtBox uses this image from iStockPhoto and the typeface is Pill Gothic.

5 comments

Kurt Brockett

03 aug 2008

 

This will be fun to watch as you build it up. I’ve got my approach down pretty well using a variety of tools build around Outlook. I’ll be toying with ThoughtBox as it becomes available and would love to be able to help test it out as I know sometimes being the developer you may be too close to the code to get an objective opinion.

Kurt

 

Anna

11 aug 2008

 

Great idea! I’ll be watching you.
I love GTD too but use Google Docs to keep track of my stuff. I’m up for testing!

 
 

[...] ThoughtBox – a GTD application by Robby Ingebretsen [...]

 

BRiaN

03 jun 2009

 

I try to be platform-agnostic, but I’m coming from a similar place. I toyed around with some of the GTD TiddlyWikis and they are pretty fab, but I’m [hmm.. anal] particular. I’m working on a GTD implementation using Eclipse RCP as a platform, should run on just about anything. I’m very familiar with Java and Eclispe, but not doing RCP dev, so it’s been fun so far.

 

BRiaN

03 jun 2009

 

BTW, your stuff so far looks fabulous.