Is anyone familiar with BBTaskPro?
- Greetings,
BBTaskPro absolutely works on the Storm.
I've used BBTaskPro on the Storm 9530 for 2 weeks now. I found the BB Tasks adequate, but a bit light when implementing a GTD/Covey 7 Habits type system on the Storm.
I've been selfishly lurking on the web, using other's posts without putting much up, so to give back, I've attached a weighted matrix comparing BB Tasks, BBTaskPro, NextAction, ToDoMatrix, Viira and a bit of PlanPlus 6. I've also a short paragraph on each and a longer paragraph on BBTaskPro.
Caveats
1. It's software, so this comparison will be out of date tomorrow.
2. I only used these for 2 hours-2 weeks, but I feel confident in projecting these scores out to permanent usage.
3. I weighted the features according my usage. You may find that another app fits you better than my recommendation. The Excel spreadsheet is attached so you can play. My usage profile is:
a) 100-150 tasks
b) More tasks than time
c) No delegates
d) No tightly coupled team collaboration
e) Balance between managing and creating->most work done on laptop
f) Already invested in Outlook and Windows
g) Often out of internet access-on planes etc.
h) Value the ability to instantly interact rather than having to get online
i) Am a speed freak-online apps requiring high interaction tend to be too slow for my tastes
j) I don't manage massively complex projects with multiple dependency levels
k) I slice and dice my tasks with 8 dimensions: priority, due date, status, project, context, role, energy required, archetype/primal activity
l) Money is really no object. Just like shoes, I'd pay several hundred dollars because this app is used so much and is so important.
m) I consider the Storm a terrible way to enter and get data, except for every other pda phone. A laptop is much more efficient, but suffers from portability. For heavy work, I'd much rather use a laptop than the Storm. As good as it is, I wouldn't write War and Peace on the Storm.
Results from spreadsheet
*Spreadsheet weights were are my gut feel on relative importance and are normalized to a percentage. A perfect app would get 100%
FranklinCovey PlanPlus 6
Link in attachment
To be fair, I didn't fully evaluate this so I won't post the score.
I'm a big fan of Stephen Covey's work and I really wanted this to work well. The Outlook app had many things to help think about your true north and looked like it would be beautiful combined with the Storm. But, I've tried PlanPlus 4 and 6, and both were unstable and slow enough on W2K and XP with Outlook 2003 that I feared for my data and removed them. Lack of data integrity of data was a deal breaker. Also, the Storm is officially not supported. (I'd bet the PlanPlus app has a good chance of working on the Storm, though). I'll stand in line to try PlanPlus 7 if there is ever such a thing.
Viira 25%
link in attachment
For me, this was a step backward from BB Tasks. I hope there continues to be work done to reach at least the level of the standard Storm app. Detailed review in spreadsheet.
NextAction from S4BB 47%
link in attachment
I also wanted this very much to work. It seems to be the best advertised app on the web. They specifically stick to priority, context, project. That's probably strictly correct per GTD, but I wanted the other dimensions and I couldn't hack NextAction into supporting the extra dimensions. Detailed review in spreadsheet.
BB Tasks (the app that comes with the Storm) 62%
When I first got the storm I implemented this all on BB Tasks. I could have lived with that. It had all the basics and you could hack projects support in by prepending qqname to the front of each task (qq never occurs in regular english). The interactive task search easily pulled out the multiple tasks of a project. BB Tasks even has a feature I saw nowhere else-do a search that yields nothing, and the search text becomes your new task with 1 click. Cool. Detailed review in spreadsheet.
ToDoMatrix 69%
link in attachment
Let me first say that Rex Wireless is the most professional looking, with the best site, manuals and marketing material. I highly recommend their whitepaper on the philosophy of task management, GTD and Covey approaches.
link in attachment
It's a great paper. My only extra comment is that having a Storm with you is great, but there are things you need to do on a laptop at times. Rex Wireless is addressing this with a beta that does synching with BB Tasks and hence Outlook and other thick clients.
I also wanted this to be "all that" because I was inspired by the great white paper. I evaluated this very heavily, partly because it was so feature rich, and I didn't want to miss some really useful feature. At the end however, I realized that I wanted to be able to look at the Storm screen and quickly see how I'm doing and what to do next. You could absolutely do that with ToDoMatrix, but it involved selecting tasks vs. just seeing overdue tasks, tasks done today, priorities, states etc.
If I was in a team using Storms or had complicated projects or many delegates I wanted to track-more of a pure manager, I'd consider ToDoMatrix.
Detailed review in spreadsheet.
BBTaskPro 79%
link in attachment
This is what I purchased and now use. Before the main review, two funny things:
1. It's listed for $19.95, but when I purchased it, they only charged $9.95 and didn't give me a field to dispute the charge
2. You have to be in BB Compatibility mode to change the general options, colors and sorting screens. You then have to turn off Compatibility mode and pull the battery. Once you do this, it's superb at Storm support unless you have to change those 3 screens. But really, they're set once and forget
link in attachment
n.b. To get to the Colors screen do BB key->Options->BB key-> Colors
I found green for "In Progress", Grey for "Deferred", Orange for "Waiting", Red for "Overdue" and black for everything else to be quite helpful in sizing things up at a glance.
I was initially drawn to BBTaskPro over BB Tasks because of the 1 click time views and 1 click categories/dimensions "Quick Cats". But the sorting, grouping, display options, the native BB Tasks support and the ability to hack in projects as previously described kept me.
I thought hard about why I preferred this to ToDoMatrix. ToDoMatrix seemed like its genesis was from a very sharp engineer. Folders, dimensions, views all fit into the same hierarchy and that hierarchy makes for a nice backend database with much potential for adding features without affecting performance.
BBTaskPro seemed like it's genesis was from a UI/workflow designer. The views and clicks were all useful, intuitive and fast. BBTaskPro was more than fast enough with ~150 tasks, and I don't see myself hitting 1000s of tasks. So, BBTaskPro user experience won out especially since I didn't need/like a few of the ToDoMatrix main differentiators. Detailed review in spreadsheet.
Wish list
1. Add project support to BBTaskPro. The online manual still reads Oct 15, 2007. Overloading categories like NextAction does would allow Projects in BBTaskPro while still fully supporting BB Tasks.
Rex Wireless is trying to get away from a purely online subscription model for synching with synching via BB Tasks (they call it TAS). I didn't find the extra status options or that categories weren't powerful enough to transport those ideas to Outlook.
link in attachment
2. Ability to specify dependencies/task order like in project mgmt software.
Only the tasks you can work on are shown, not tasks that depend on you finishing something else first. I have only seen this with OmniFocus for Mac. Even ToDoMatrix doesn't have this.
3. Tasks that regenerate n days after completion
This is great for things that need to be done sometime in a time period. Things from Cultured Code does this for Mac and iPhone. Outlook 2003 does this, but you have to mark complete the task in Outlook to have the regeneration. Acking from the Storm just ends the task.
Having this would bring in exercise/habit tracking into the same app. Failing this, there is HabitMaster which arguably works, but is so feature poor that I feel it is morally wrong to pay $24.95. The best option I've seen is JoesGoals (link in attachment) which although is online, does allow decent habit tracking.
I hope this helps and that you made it all the way to the end of this post.02-08-09 11:19 PMLike 0 - ClickyThing - Great review, very helpful. Your zip file won't open for me... I keep getting an error saying that it "does not appear to be a valid archive". Anyone else able to open it?
BTW, MyLifeOrganized is a PC app that allows for dependencies (#2 in your wish list). They are planning to release a BB app soon as well (currently in Alpha release). The forum won't let me post links yet, but if you go to MyLifeOrganized dot net there is a link to their BB app page from the home page. I tried the PC app, but I wanted to keep tasks in Outlook as well and the sync function kept duplicating tasks. I ended up scrapping it. We'll have to see if their BB app uses it's own task database or works directly in the BB task DB.
Any way, thanks for the review.
-Carl03-07-10 10:56 AMLike 0
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Is anyone familiar with BBTaskPro?
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