Brain Murmurs

After 8 great years of business, we are transitioning Brain Murmurs into inactivity, effective immediately, as we shift our focus entirely to our spin-off company, Black Pixel.

We’d like to thank all of the customers we worked with over the years, it’s been a great run.

-Daniel Pasco, Lisa Hartin, Garrett Kelly, George Dick, Bil Moorhead

Brain Murmurs, Inc

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I am sorry to say that circumstances beyond our control have forced us to shut down the Mentat service for the foreseeable future.

User data is available for those customers that need it and can be provided upon request.

-Daniel Pasco, CEO

Brain Murmurs, Inc.

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Systems were down intermittently during a routine upgrade of the Mentat servers and their associated power subsystem.  There are no further outages expected at this time.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

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Our network performance continued to degrade well into the weekend, and we eventually traced the issues to our router. After a herculean struggle, I believe that we finally have a stable, fast network topology for Mentat.

We apologize for any inconvenience that this might have caused. At this point, the system is *fast* and stable. We hope that you enjoy using it.

-Daniel

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We’ve are migrating the Mentat service to a very high bandwidth service provider and will very likely experience periodic outages for the next few hours. Service interruption should not continue after this evening.

-Daniel

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As a result of the availability of numerous BlackBerry devices supporting Bluetooth dialup networking, Pulse has been obsolete for over a year. As a result, Pulse is no longer available for sale as of 10/16/2008.

The gateway will still be available as long as Austin Web Development is willing to provide the service. Since RIM started offering bluetooth dialup networking on all of its hardware about two years ago, our sales of Pulse have dropped to about one copy every two months. Consequently, it is no longer cost effective for us to keep this product on the market.

We are pleased that we were able to provide the ability for Mac users to leverage the connectivity of their BlackBerry devices at a time when there were no alternatives and are grateful for the patronage of our customers.

-Daniel Pasco, CEO
Brain Murmurs, Incorporated

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The Mentat website will be down later this month while we migrate to a new IT infrastructure. We have spent most of this month working on a new, highly scalable architecture for the site and are excited with the performance gains we are seeing!

We will provide 24 hours notice before taking the site down for maintenance, and all user data will be migrated to the new system.

-Daniel

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The Mentat web service has been updated to include contexts, subprojects, and data export.  

Coinciding with this, Black Pixel Luminance has announced Aria Touch, a native iPhone application that supports both Mentat and FogBugz.  

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The past couple of days I’ve been working on adding “contexts” to Mentat. This key component to the GTD methodology was a major feature request so it was first on our list of things to add to the Mentat system.

Contexts in Mentat will work like this - Although you have separate projects to keep all of your varied tasks separate and distinct (Work Projects, Grocery Lists, Chores at Home) - there are contexts which might be project independent and could help you filter down those tasks you can take care of when you are in a certain “mode”.

For instance, say you have some time to make a couple of phone calls - and luckily enough, you’ve made a special context called just that “Phone Calls To Make”. By pulling up the context view in Mentat, you will be able to see all of your tasks that you’ve marked with this context (whether they be phone calls you have to make for your “Work” project or your “Home Chores” project). Now that you are in a perfect opportunity to deal with this “context”, you can fire off all these tasks at once!

Contexts can be assigned by navigating to a specific task view. Or, in the Mentat Agenda, you can quickly switch between a project and context view to quickly drag tasks into your agenda using either filter.

I’m almost done incorporating this functionality - just doing some polish now. I hope to have something by the middle of next week, so stay tuned!

Garrett

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We’re moving back towards a focus on updating the Mentat website now that we’ve got a few mobile/desktop Mentat-empowered clients under our belt (Mentat Blackberry, Aria, Arioso). Today we compiled a list of feature requests and began prioritizing what we felt was most dire in building out and improving upon. This is what we came up with:

1. Contexts - As a GTD cornerstone, this looks to be a number one priority for our customers. We’re working on this one first and already have some functionality prototyped. With this feature, you will be able to lump tasks across projects into specific “contexts” such as “emails to write” or “phone calls” so that you can blast off otherwise unrelated tasks all at once.

2. Third Party Agenda Tasks - With the introduction of Aria, Mac OS X users can have access to both their Mentat and Fogbugz tasks. We’ll be building in support for generic third-party tasks and adding the ability to include them in your Mentat agenda.

3. Subprojects - Since the dawn of Mentat, we’ve been wanting to include this. Now is the time.

4. Email to Mentat - We’ll be adding the ability for users to use their email to create and respond to tasks in Mentat.

We’re still taking product suggestions, so feel free to drop by the forum and let us know what you’d like to see next in Mentat.

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