So, after using Jello Dashboard for a few months, I have ventured out to see what else it out there in the same category of products. After trying FranklinCovey PlanPlus, David Allen GTD for Outlook and Effexis Achieve Planner (all commercial, some upward of $100 per license), I must say that Jello is the most intuitive and the least cluttered solution!

Oliver

I have been on my GTD journey for about 2 years now and I’ve being trying so many different approaches, some with Outlook add-ins, hand-carved customisation in Outlook, standalone programs, iPad and Mac apps. Nothing ever quite fitted my method of working (supporting IT for many different customers with lots of projects).

For a couple of days now I have been transforming my system over to the Jello approach and liking almost all I’ve found so far. It just fits the way I want to work. You have covered so many features and ideas that have been missing from other implementations.

Alex

A new version of Jello Dashboard was released today, under the codename 5.25 Astral.
There were some new features added, since the bugs reported by users were significally limited.

Almost all of the new features were requested by you.

So, this is the full change log for the new version:

You can proceed immediately to the downloads page and get the new version.

I will be more than glad to hear your opinion on this update or take notes on possible bugs you may encounter (there should be not many left!).

Thanks everyone for your continuous support on this project.

If you think Jello Dashboard is cool, don’t forget to be a fan in facebook or follow my twitter updates!

I’m glad to announce that the new 5.23 version (Ulysses) was released today.

Thanks to the feedback I got from the forum, I was able to track and fix many bugs, and some pretty serious ones.
I was even able to add many of your feature requests!

The main changes in version 5.23:

- New, cleaner icon set from famfamfam
- Spanish translation by Alberto Perez!
- From now on Jello Dashboard will alert users of new versions! Will check every 10 days
- Ability to add custom icons to tags, folders and projects
- Masterlist items display their tag list next to them in green color.
- Support for recurring tasks. When completed, next instance is created
- Sorttype error when navigating to an Outlook folder from the folder view
- Masterlist expand/collapse all groups toolbar button
- 3 Characters [  ] and + are no longer invalid
- Displaying flag icons for flagged messages in inbox view

See version history page for the full change log.

Thanks again to those of you who contributed in anyway, helping me again to move the project forward.

Now proceed to the downloads page and… enjoy the new Jello!

You can tweak a lot of options in Jello Dashboard using the settings screen. I guess you realized that the tags and folder you create are not shown anywhere in your Outlook folders.

All of these data are stored into the settings Journal entry. Maybe it seem a bit inconvenient, to use a journal entry and not a file, but remember the limitations of Outlook itself. No file write access is given to it for security reasons.

Using the setup.hta file located into your Jello Dashboard installation folder you can change the location of settings. But that won’t be for long. Latest Internet explorer blocks file writing access to HTA files as well. So, in this post I will guide you through the process of setting your own Journal folder for storing settings, instead of using the default Journal folder.

There are many reasons to do this. Maybe you work in a company which wipes journal folder data of your Exchange folder every day, or you want your settings on a local pst file. You could even connect a remote pst file containing your journal folder through popular file sharing services like Dropbox to keep it synchronized with your home Outlook installation.

Whichever the reason, here are the steps to do it. It is really simple.

1. Open Jello Dashboard, go to your folder view and expand the Outlook folders node. Here you can find the journal folder where you want your settings to be stored. If you want to use a new Outlook PST file you should create it before that by clicking on the Outlook’s menu File>New>Outlook data file. Remember to create a new journal folder for that file too.

2. Right click on the desired journal folder and select properties.

3. Copy the Outlook ID value to the clipboard (right click and copy or Ctrl+C)

4. Next, fire up my computer and get to the folder where Jello Dashboard is installed. Navigate into the /js folder of Jello Dashboard and select the customSettings.js file.

5. Edit the file into the notepad (right click and select Edit)

6. Paste the previously copied Outlook ID of the folder into the second variable jelloSettingsFolder to look like this:

var jelloSettingsName=’<Jello.5 Settings>’;
var jelloSettingsFolder=’00000000ADBEA9F003C03A4F913498E84C2C7F4CE2800000‘;

7. Save the file and close.

8. Reload Jello Dashboard and the settings will be created into your new folder.
Please note that if you already have an existing settings set into your old folder, just move it into the new location before step 8. Jello will use your existing journal entry and will not create a new one.

Installing new Jello Dashboard versions using the executable installer will not replace this file to keep your preferences intact.

Happy customizing!

This new version mainly fixes bugs. Lots of them!

I have decided to post it a bit quicker than planned, because of the importance of some errors reported by users in the forum.

Of course there are some new features added, plus some experimental ones. You can try those by enabling them into the Settings screen>Experimental tab and share your experience in the forum.
Experimental features include, a new message body viewer, Process sent capability, review panel tag popup links and inline editing of due dates in action lists.

The extjs library updated to the latest version, providing a faster and more stable user interface, and finally the Important widget is fully customizable.

In the meantime I have created to new video tutorials for Jello Dashboard. You can check them out here.

For more information on the changes, please see the Version history page.

Thanks to all of you who keep posting bugs and requests to the forum, you found things that I wouldn’t see in a million years! 
Sorry that I wasn’t able to make it and post some more of your requested features. Some of them are really great and I plan to add them in a future release.

So, why wait? Get to the Downloads page.

Once more, I got a real sense of improvement while coding for this version of Jello Dashboard. The great thing was that I finally managed to resolve some old issues which were hard to track and got some spare time to work with some new features.

There is full compatibility with the new version of Outlook 2010, although some features were disabled by the latest versions of Internet Explorer and Outlook. So, if you are using Outlook 2010 you cannot have the Outlook view controls when running JD in Outlook. That means, no Outlook widgets or Outlook folders in native view for you except if you run JD in standalone mode.

Some of the changes:

- There was a huge issue concerning the standalone and browser modes when user data were located in other than the default PST file. That was fixed.
- The information popup now displays at the top left of the screen without getting above of the top menu links.
- The home screen is faster now. Collapsed widgets will not load their contents until they are expanded and there is also a special startup mode with all widgets collapsed by default. This tweak was absolutely cool. JD homepage can be fully loaded quite fast when unneeded widgets are collapsed.
-Widgets contents can be refreshed using a new special button and after customizing a widget you won’t have to wait once more for the home page to load. That’s a time saver too!
-Review and Folder panels are now residing in two separate tabs, giving more vertical space. The Review panel is faster, it can display the full path of the tags and you can run a quite fast weekly review browsing through your contexts and projects with ctrl+shift+left and right arrows.
-Project list widget (quick view all your active or inactive projects along with their progress)
-Jello inbox zero widget (quickly process your messages one by one and empty your inbox )
…and some script loading was optimized to get faster to the home screen.

Again, I would like to thank everyone who contributed to the project, by donating, sharing their ideas or reporting issues of the 5.2 alpha or the older versions.
You rule!

So… what are you waiting for? Get it from the downloads page!

This is an amazing piece of software… and this has truly changed the way… I Live!

Best project idea ever, the app looks great, can’t wait for the final release.