Just a quick piece of information to make the story clear: the Todo app on both iPhone and iPad supported syncing with two web-based services: Toodledo and Remember the Milk.  As of 5/11/10 the folks at Remember the Milk shut off API access to Todo.  This was done without notifying customers.

The Appigo side of the story basically says that on 5/11/10 they were contacted via email from Remember the Milk and notified that access to the sync API had been shut off for Todo iPhone.   Appigo claims that the sync code for iPad was the same which is why they were using the same API key as the iPhone application.  They also claim that they have tried working with Remember the Milk to resolve the situation with no success.  Needless to say they have removed the RTM module from Todo and have worked with Toodledo to get RTM users 6 months free of Toodledo Pro.

I don’t know the details of the behind-the-scenes exchanges between the two parties but Appigo handled the situation, from a customers perspective, perfectly.  The status on the problem was matter-of-fact and cordial with no bad words for RTM.   Furthermore they worked with Toodledo to get RTM users a nice free period to switch over to Toodledo Pro if they want to try Toodledo.   Kudos to Toodledo for doing that.  Also a good way to get some new customers

Remember the Milk on the other hand come out smelling like a steaming pile on this one.  Emily from RTM, in the forums posted this:

Like many companies, our API is available for non-commercial use, with commercial use only available to select partners and products by prior permission. Third-parties who are interested in using the API commercially in a product can submit a business proposal for our consideration.

Appigo didn’t have a commercial license to use the Remember The Milk API for this app (and didn’t even apply for one); the first we became aware of the existence of this app was its launch on the App Store yesterday.

Unfortunately, despite being perfectly aware they didn’t have a commercial API license for any products beyond their iPhone app, Appigo chose to launch and advertise their new app with a Remember The Milk sync feature. The sync feature subsequently does not work, and this has resulted in a lot of confusion and disappointment for users.

We’ve given Appigo plenty of chances to do the right thing (they’ve been warned in the past about API terms violations), so we’ve been really disappointed in their recent behaviour. We take any abuse of the API very seriously, and have ended any relationship with this company; they will not have access to the API in the future.

We apologise to users affected. For any Remember The Milk users who were misled about this iPad app’s support for syncing with our service, if you upgraded to Pro on May 12 or May 13, 2010 to use this app, we will happily refund your Pro account payment (please contact us to request a refund; requests will be accepted until May 20, 2010). Any requests for refunds for the iPad app itself should be directed to Apple.?

It’s nice that RTM is willing to refund Pro payments for people who bought the iPad app on 5/12 or 5/13 but what about the folks using the iPhone version?  RTM is shitting on their customers.   I understand they need to protect their business but based on the Appigo side I find it hard to believe that RTM was working very hard to remedy this situation and the only losers are RTM customers.

A bit later in the thread of forum posts Emily says this:

It was a deliberate act on their part to abuse the API, and launch an app knowing they were not licensed to do so. They counted on the fact that if we terminated their API access after they launched this app, we’d have a bunch of upset Remember The Milk users on our hands. ?

I already posted about why I left RTM and this whole thing makes me completely sure my choice was the right one.  What a company.  Sheesh.  They counted on the fact that RTM would have a bunch of upset users on their hands?  Why in the world would Appigo want to do that?  It makes no sense given that those affected would also be Appigo customers as well!   Why would they want to piss off those users directly?

If there are any other reasons needed here to *not* support RTM by paying them $25 for a stagnant product this is another.  What a crappy way to do business.  Good riddance.

Toodledo consistently seems to work on the website (though I still can’t stand the plain-Jane UI) and adds features.   The feature set is much better than RTM and they have a date picker for due dates!   Seriously, this is the one major thing that pissed me off about RTM even though it might seem like a nitpick.  Their date picker is fantastic as it interprets strings like ‘next Tuesday’ in the due date field and translates them into dates.  However as great as that feature is sometimes a person just wants to choose a date from a calendar and that feature doesn’t exist in RTM.   There is a calendar icon that makes it look like it can be done but it can’t.

Toodledo also syncs wonderfully with Todo from Appigo (iPad or iPhone) which I just discovered yesterday with the release of the iPad version.  It is a fantastic todo list application with a beautiful user interface.   Todo actually syncs with RTM as well but you have to pay the $25 yearly “pro” fee to get the sync functionality which Toodledo provides for free.   I paid $14.95 for a yearly “pro” fee for Toodledo.  Hmmm….$25 for a stagnant application or $14.95 for an updated one.    Tough choice.

A $25 yearly fee certainly is viable if you provide a service for that fee but keeping the website stagnant and ignoring customer requests certainly isn’t what I’d call viable.  So it’s been fun RTM but you lost me.  ?Sorry.

In rendering HTML output JasperReports inserts various anchor tags of the form:

<a name="JR_PAGE_ANCHOR_0_1">

It doesn’t use these with href attributes but it does use them for some purpose.

Our global CSS file indicates that anything that is inside an anchor tag should be underlined.  This would make sense assuming that anchors are used for links (a pretty good assumption).    We also use the Dojo JavaScript framework and the Dijit ContentPane widget allows using the ContentPane (normally used with a DIV) to show external content.   That external content can be “scrubbed” to allow it to play in a nicer fashion with the overall site design.  That is where the problem occurs.

The scrubbing of the content coming in to the DIV, to filter out things like styles, TITLEs, and other tags, is where IE seems to have issues.  Those anchor tags mentioned previously, and which look fine in IE when previewing a report inside of the iReport designer, now all have text inside them underlined.   The quick fix, or so I thought, was to remove the A tag from our global CSS file.  That fixes things until someone hovers over any text at which point another CSS rule comes in to play for a:hover and all text is again underlined.    Probably time for another CSS tweak…

On September 10th of this year Merlin wrote in a post titled “43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work”:

Friends, I’m done with “productivity” as a personal fetish or hobby. There are countless sites that are all too happy to vend stroke material for your joyless addiction to puns about procrastination and systems for generating more taxonomically satisfying meta-work. But, presently, you won’t find so much of that here.

Except inasmuch as it can help move aside barriers to finishing the projects that you claim matter to you, “productivity” is often a sprawling ghetto of well-marketed nonsense for people who really just need a ritalin and a hug. So, for myself, random tips and lists that aren’t anchored to solving a real-world problem for a smart but flawed adult with a mind are dead to me. Pour a forty on ‘em.

The first time I read this I laughed. After all Merlin Mann pioneered productivity porn. To hear him complaining about how many sites are now out there peddling the stuff of his making was laughable. At the same time the guy has a point. In that article he describes, quite correctly, the problems with the productivity blogosphere today. Too much noise and not enough signal and I found myself agreeing with him to the point that I cut all of it out of my life.

Well, that and a big chunk of other time-wasting material. I trimmed about 2/3rd of the subscriptions I had going in FeedDemon/NetNewWire. I’ve all but given up political blogs which have been my other, massive, black hole of time. I’ve got a lot to do and not enough time to do it all. The cognitive dissonance being created by all of that reading without any real purpose behind it was becoming deafening so no more.

And honestly the best part of his post was the discussion of “conversation” and “community” :

Stupid, venal, ignorant, self-linking comments from people who couldn’t be troubled to actually read the article. Angry forum posts full of personal attacks, giant avatars of Manga characters, and 4-vertical-inch signatures about which Golden Girl you are. Nonsense tagging, meta-commenting, ass-kissing, trolling, and…oooo!…video responses….neato! Please. It’s nuts and it’s pointless and it’s really cynical on the part of almost every publisher that allows that crap to go on.

Right on. My blog hasn’t hit the popularity curve the same way 43 Folders has Not yet anyhow but this is my blog. I’ll say what I want, when I want to say it. If you have something to say to me email me but I got sick of tools like this on my own site. If you like what I have to say please keep reading. If you don’t keep reading or leave. The decision is yours but I’m not going to justify myself to anyone else let alone turds pretending to be people like I mentioned above.

Thanks for the whining Merlin. I feel a bit lighter now myself

I suppose in some ways that is similar to meditation and it was really damn hard.   My mind kept flitting all over the place.  I had to restrain myself from moving over to the computer to read something or send a friend an instant message.  I’ve been slowly weaning myself from various sources of information that have been nothing but time sinks.  Today was a quick plunge into the cold waters of single-tasking and boy…definitely not a simple thing.

Have a look at the help forum posting here.  The conversation gets real interesting when user wernst starts to do some digging into why the feeds aren’t working.  What he uncovers is that the RTM iCalendar feeds contain an excessive amount of timezone information.   He even sets up a new account, removes everything from the lists so that there are no to-dos and no events, and then grabs the feed.  That feed also contains excessive amounts of timezone information even though it has no events associated with it.   Emily from RTM insists its all about the timezones:

(for anyone curious, those lines describe the timezone; extremely important for ensuring your tasks display at the correct time!)

That’s all well and good but why is the timezone being described, in detail back to the year 1918, for a feed that has no events?  As wernst points out the feeds coming from AirSet, which can parse the RTM feeds, and which he then forwards to Google Calendar, don’t have all of that timezone information and, *gasp*, Google Calendar reads them properly.

So it very well might be an issue on Google’s end but I think it’s pretty clear that RTM is generating feeds, that while valid, don’t work properly everywhere.   I could probably form some valid XML that not all parsers can deal with.  That doesn’t mean I shouldn’t fix the XML to make it easier to parse.  RTMs position is that since Google is grabbing the feeds regularly the issue is out of their hands.   Google may very well be getting the feeds in a timely manner.  That doesn’t mean they’re parsing them properly.

To the folks at RTM:  your customer service in this instance sucks.  I can’t be much more blunt than that.  You had a paying customer do a lot of work for you and you’re passing it off like you can’t possibly have anything to do with the problem since Google manages to at least grab the feeds OK.  BOOO!!!!

I love your application but you guys need some work on the customer service front.  Sheesh.  Google is the 800lb gorilla here.  You’d do well to work with them to figure out what the hell is happening for the many users of both your service and theirs.  Just insisting that the calendar feeds are valid and then closing the posting certainly isn’t going to fix anything.

Apparently I’m not the only one noticing this either based on this post on the GCal Google group.  That post notes that it takes hours for the feed to refresh and that there is no way to manually refresh it (you can in with a  30boxes.com calendar but that one leaves a lot to be desired).  Quite frankly it’s ridiculous that it takes hours.  At that point I can’t be sure that anything I entered actually shows up in GCal.   It would appear this behavior just isn’t an RTM issue as I see the same behavior with a feed from iWantSandy.com.

RTM does have two other options available, one for GCal, and if you’re using Firefox, one for GMail.  The GMail Firefox plugin is quite nice but I don’t want my tasks there…I want them in my calendar.  The option for GCal itself is OK but I’m picky and don’t want to have to click that checkmark to see what I have for the day.

I suppose that GCal is like so many other pieces of software, it gets you most of the way there but then dumps you off about a mile away from your intended destination.  This is a real disappointment. I know GCal is free but adding a manual refresh link for the external feeds can’t be that difficult.  The Google Group link above notes that “they’re looking into it”.  I hope it happens sometime soon.

Not surprisingly this works flawlessly on iCal on the Mac.  I can even see tasks with no due date set in the To-Do list part of iCal.   But I can’t use my Mac at work anymore where I really need to see these lists

I had been using a combination of GMail, Remember the Milk, and Google Calendar for my GTD/personal organization needs.  This was prior to getting a Mac.   At that time I started using Apple Mail and iCal both of which I have grown to love.   I then ended up getting an iPhone for my mobile needs and life was wonderful.  About 3 weeks ago the axe was dropped on me and my Mac usage at work so it’s back to the drawing board.

I have to say I’m still pretty livid about the corporate computer policies at work that seem to keep springing out of nowhere.   Not being able to use personal equipment on the corporate network is just the latest policy to fly in out of left field.  But all that aside where does that leave me?

I guess I move mail back to GMail which I never really abandoned.  I just set up Apple Mail to retrieve my email from the IMAP interface of GMail.    I actually also still used Google Calendar in the respect that I bought and installed Spanning Sync to sync my iCal calendars with Goolge Calendar.  For tasks lists I really hadn’t found a replacement for Remember the Milk but then again i wasn’t using it much anyhow.  My list-keeping fell off and I just scheduled things directly in the calendar either on specific days and times or just on specific days as all-day events.

I do really need to get back in to keeping task lists though but I’m less than thrilled with having to pay $25 for RTM Pro to get the iPhone interface.  I’d be more inclined at this point to give ToodleDo a try again since at $14.95 a year you get the iPhone interface and quite a bit more.  I like RTM but the $25 is hard to swallow simply for the iPhone CSS and HTML they send out.

At any rate I’m back to square one because of a corporate policy that doesn’t take into account an employee’s productivity.   Maybe things won’t be so bad since I had woven in my gmail/gcal use with the client apps on the Mac.  Once again though it all comes down to the list-keeping and task lists and I’m not sure what I’m going to do there.

I’ve had feats of concentration so heroic there should be epic stories (you know…like the Odyssey) written about them.  Those are few and far between though Normally I have a real problem getting things going.  I can procrastinate with the best of them and I’ve been that way my whole life.  I’m not sure what it is but it seems that I have two problems: being able to break tasks down into manageable pieces and, these days,  being too attracted to the many distractions that is the internet.  Overall it hasn’t hurt my effectiveness because I get things done on time.  I just don’t like how I get there so it was time to give anything a shot that might help.  That is where (10+2)*5 comes in.

I was reading the other day about an application for Windows called Instant Boss that was designed specifically to time the dashes.  It actually isn’t limited to (10+2)*5, you can set the values to whatever you want.  The default is (10+2)*5 and that’s what I’ve started with.  So far it is working great.

One of the things all of these dashes seem to do (at least according to the authors) is get you to the point of working to where you start to skip the breaks.  This was true for me even on this first day of trying it.  The 10 minutes go by, you get the signal from the application to take a break, but you are in the middle of something and don’t want to stop so you hit the “skip break” button and go on for another 10 minutes.   This whole thing is fantastic because I’m moving towards a goal, sometimes in 10 minute chunks, sometimes longer, with what seems like little effort.   I suppose the knowledge that after 10 minutes you are free to let your mind wander for a bit is the key.

There is also another dash from Jeff Covey called The Progressive Dash which also sounds fascinating but again leads to the same thing as the other dashes:

By the end of that time, I wish I could continue and get more done. Pretty soon, I’m wanting to get back to it and finish it instead of procrastinating about it.

Exactly how the (10+2)*5 thing worked for me.  Amazing in it’s simplicity.  Limitless in its power for Good.