I have been trying to Get Things Done for a while, and using Trac to do it. It has been a pretty nice experience, and has changed some of my thinking about how bug tracking software. But trac clearly wasn’t written for GTD, and it shows from time to time. Today the insufficiency came up again (I don’t remember why) and that prompted me to google more thoroughly, and I found the totally awesome Tracks. I’ve really only been using it for less than an hour, but already it kicks the socks off Trac as a GTD tool. Has nice ical feeds, slick integration of contexts and projects, and some nice ajax-y bits. No offline support, of course, but I guess I can fake that with evo + the ical feed. So, yeah, if you like GTD, and feel comfortable throwing up a webapp on your own server (no hosted tracks yet), definitely try out Tracks ASAP.
[Tangentially: my rough and ready count shows that the whole thing is about 3K LOC. Simply put, no one could write such a tool in GNOME in 3K LOC. I doubt anyone could write it in any desktop GUI framework that I know of in 3K LOC. This is part of why the web is kicking the desktop’s ass.]
13 thoughts on “from trac to tracks for GTD”
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Luis, thanks for the link!
I poked around though and found some cheapish Tracks hosting. Free for the first month, and then $1.49/month after that. Maybe there are others.
Try this http://www.rousette.org.uk/projects/wiki/Tracks-Hosting/ – points to 3 hosted versions
Missed that- cool.
Maybe you want GTDTiddlywiki -> http://shared.snapgrid.com/ you have it in your usb and carry with you and so you can use it anywhere even without internet access…
I’m also trying to go ahead with GTD. This webapp seems very good. I have been using Evolution to-do
lists a lot. I’m trying to use the ical feeds to connect to tracks, but i don’t know how to setup them. Do you have an idea how to do this? Thanks
You are assuming that the code is concise because it is a web application, but I think it probably has a lot more to do with the language. Tracks is written in Ruby, a language that is highly conducive to rapid development and compact, maintainable code. Using Ruby bindings for GNOME, you could probably write an application of comparable sophistication in only 3K LOC. Ruby applications are generally very impressive in terms of maintainability and code volume.
No, I’m assuming it is concise because it is in Rails, not Ruby. Ruby is not substantially more concise than Python or C#. The Rails framework, however, is unlike anything we have on the desktop side. Certainly something like Rails could be done for desktop- it just hasn’t been yet.
[…] I read Getting Things Done about a year and a half ago. There’s a lot of good information in there, but frankly keeping all of the lists got to be too much. So I backed off a bit and started keeping lists for some things that came in via email, but that’s about it. Then luis posts about Tracks – a GTD web application. It looked fairly nifty, so I installed it and will give it a shot for awhile. […]
We have free tracks hosting at ZenList. Enjoy!
[…] And just after I blogged about Trac, I remembered Tracks. I first read about it from Luis Villa (of GNOME fame). I decided to look for it again just now. Unfortunately the weekend is over and I have to switch back to money-making mode (hehe). I aim to give Tracks a shot soon. […]
[…] hit my radar. Luis Villa, GNOME bugmaster extraordinaire, and overall really helpful guy made a weblog entry about switching form trac to tracks for GTD. I was intrigued. I had never thought about using Trac to manage my GTD in the first place, I guess […]
[…] hit my radar. Luis Villa, GNOME bugmaster extraordinaire, and overall really helpful guy made a weblog entry about switching form trac to tracks for GTD. I was intrigued. I had never thought about using Trac to manage my GTD in the first place, I guess […]
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