Here is the inside scoop. Over the last 3 months we’ve been working feverishly on radical changes that will make Trog Bar even faster and more flexible with a smaller memory footprint.

The Road MAP(I) and Syncing

We began to notice that our data storage system (MAPI + Outlook) was limiting Trog’s performance and our development options, including how well TaskSense does its job. It was also preventing us from adding the most requested feature: compatibility with Thunderbird and other email clients. By mid-April we were ready to launch into a new architecture.

One of our primary concerns was maintaining the real time binding with Outlook. In other words, when you make a change in the Trog Bar or Outlook, it needs to appear in the other immediately. Until now this was automatic since we stored everything in Outlook’s database. Now, however, in addition to storing data in Outlook (for Outlook to use directly) we needed a second, much faster database (for Trog Bar to use). Programmers reading this will recognize that this requires a robust synchronization system.

Syncing requires caution. If you do it wrong, you can duplicate data or worse. It can be slow enough that you don’t want to do it in real time with every little change. Even worse, the patent landscape is littered with syncing algorithms owned by big names like Microsoft. (Interestingly, they published one algorithm to the world while not mentioning that they had it patented!) One false syncing step could turn into a nightmare.

Needless to say, we moved very carefully. Still, we are pleased to announce that we have developed a safe, proprietary syncing approach that allows Trog to remain responsive. The new sync approach and database are now largely in place and very exciting.

Please, Predict the Future

1. While much of the new approach has been coded, much has yet to be tested, and the size and scope of the conversion demand careful quality assurance. Things look good, but we don’t have a projected release date yet.

2. When we do release, the first benefits will be improved performance in nearly every area. Trog will load faster, use less memory, respond faster, search faster, handle huge task lists without blinking, and do everything else faster. (Size on the hard drive will increase a bit; that is the only impact.)

3. We will be integrating Trog Bar with more tools besides Outlook. We are also expanding our coaching offerings, and a Remember the Milk version of the TRO Field Guide is nearing completion. The goal is to make Trog Bar and the TRO Self Training System available to a wider audience, including folks needing shared or online access to their tasks lists. (Don’t panic, we’re not abandoning Trog Bar! We’re actually allowing Trog Bar and TRO Self Training to embrace additional tools people already love.)

4. We’ve started a Trog Bar documentation/help project in response to user demand. This appears to be progressing quickly. We’ll be sure to announce when this is ready.

5. Usability and interface enhancements are planned to make Trog even more intuitive and stress-relieving.

6. We will, of course, fix the bugs that have been reported. Some bugs take longer than others, but as always we intend to zap them just as fast as we can hunt them down.

7. We’ve received very valuable feedback on the new Projects feature while it was in preview, and we will use what we learned to complete the feature with a dramatic boost in usability. Thank you to all who provided feedback, asked for clarification, or reported bugs!

Getting the Updates

The best way to get the updates is to get a Trog Bar Premium Registration, which includes all feature upgrades for one year.

How will you know when we release? Keep Trog Bar configured for Automatic Updates, and you’ll always get the latest changes at the right time. New features will be released in Beta mode, so anyone running in Release mode will not be affected until the Trogger community gives its final stamp of approval.

You can check your Automatic Update settings by going to Windows Start > Programs > Trog Bar > Configure Trog Bar Automatic Update. We recommend configuring it to check for updates daily.

Also, subscribe to this blog by clicking at top left for further announcements.

Stay tuned…

It’s a Project!

Your unprocessed list meets with numerous new arrivals every day. If you are among the blessed few, this number has only one digit, but if you are like me, or countless others, you net 20-100, maybe more. One of the basic tenets of GTD is the processing system, and one of the first questions you ask yourself when processing is “Is it a project?” Now, with the Trog Bar, you can handle these projects better than ever.

When you meet one of these projects, flip open the “Steps” tab, and type in the next step, easy as that. Now for the awesome part: it works with emails too. When you get that email, just add a next step, and voilà! It’s a project!

It’s a BIG Project!

Every project should have one next action, and you should work only that action until it is done, so says GTD. Unfortunately, the reality on the ground is a little different. Especially in large projects, there may be many steps in a project that you can do, so there is no solid “next” step. There are in fact many possible next steps. Natural Project Management allows you to specify multiple steps as they occur to you. Any steps with no remaining prerequisites can be marked as “Ready” and will show a green circle next to them. These steps will appear in the various lists in the Trog Bar. The remainder should be left on hold, and will be hidden from your lists.

With Natural Project Management the “one project has one step” philosophy changes slightly. Each project must have at least one step, and at least one must be “Ready.” If a project has no remaining Ready steps, it will show in your unprocessed list.

It Belongs to a New Project

Even cooler, Natural Project Management has the ability to attach a task to a project that doesn’t exist yet. This works the same way as with categories. Just type in the name of the project, and when you save the task, the project will be created. This is an extremely powerful feature, and allows a new project to be created on the fly when you encounter a task that belongs to it.

It Belongs to That One Project

Believe it or not, adding a task to an existing project is even easier than adding it to a new project. As you type in the Projects field, Trog will match what you type against the list of known projects. If any possible matches are found, a list is presented, just like Outlook does with email addresses. When you see the project you want, hit enter and it will be selected. If that isn’t easy enough, you can hit the “Projects” button and select the project you want from a checklist of all your current projects.

What else?

There is much more that you can do with Natural Project Management, but this should be enough to get you started. Subscribe to the feed to be notified when we post more.

So why the change of heart? Ironically, it was a new feature!

We have been developing support for projects, which is no small task when you are bound to Outlook’s database. On the one hand, the project support works, and we are starting to use it internally. The feature is very useful, and we have received emails from many customers begging us to get it out there so they can use it. On the other hand, it is missing important functionality, has a number of known bugs that we aren’t really proud of, and we’re not sure we like the way it works in some places. In short, we do not think it is done, but folks are asking for it anyway. What do we do?

For a while it has been possible to dynamically enable “Beta Features.” This allows users to get access to new features and bug fixes while they are still in beta testing. Beta Features can be enabled on a whim from the options screen, and turned off without having to re-install. We recently realized however that we could do one better.

We’ve extended our existing Beta Features functionality to allow for “Preview Features.” Just as with Beta Features you can turn on these Preview Features at runtime. Unlike Beta Features, these are cutting edge, definitely not complete, and have a number of known unresolved issues; however, they are probably still very useful. Everything about a Preview Feature is a work in progress, and is highly negotiable. This means that Preview Features can change significantly and users can easily mold it by sharing their wants and needs with the developers. It also means that they don’t have to wait for the features to be released “someday.”

The concept of releasing functionality in early previews and betas is not new. Microsoft has done this with many of their products, most notably Vista and Orcas. Google allows you to turn on “experimental” search features, or occasionally tags functionality in their tools as “Beta.” Open source projects typically allow people to download the absolute latest code and build it themselves.

Each of these systems has its faults though. Microsoft requires you to download massive installers, and installing beta versions of Microsoft products usually causes problems when you get the real one, costing hours or days of time just to use the features early. Google makes it easy and seamless, but sometimes there is no way to “opt out” if the changes are giving you trouble, meaning it is really a released feature, with enough known bugs to put a “beta” tag on it. The SVN repository used by open source projects is so technical, that even hardened programmers will avoid it.

What we’ve done with the Trog Bar is combine the best of it all. The beta features come as easily and seamlessly as with Google’s variety. Like with Microsoft’s system, you can opt in or out, but unlike the Microsoft approach, this doesn’t require you to uninstall the beta version, and reinstall the normal one.

So we can deliver Previews Features with all the geeky benefits, congratulations to us, but why does this change the blog situation? It changes because now we don’t have to blog about the development of great new stuff we will give you someday. Instead we can blog about the development of great new stuff that you can already try. The blog ceases to be a hole to throw valuable development time into, and becomes a communication medium for discussing development of the latest thing in Trog. So give it a shot, turn on Preview Features and take a look at our first one: Natural Project Management. Tell us what you like, and what you hate, what you want, and what you’d rather not have. Your feedback will shape the development of this, and other features.