Brain Murmurs

Hey everybody, hope that your holidays are going well!

I wanted to take a moment and let people know where things are with Mentat and what’s ahead of us as well.

1. Site service
The website now offers most of the base line features we envisioned in the Mentat service, with the notable exception of subprojects. More on this to come. We will continue to add more features to the free service over the coming months, but for now we want to collect user feedback and wishlist items and generally let things bake for awhile. We’ve been looking forward to having a little downtime to just use the site and give it some polish before we dive back into active development.

2. New client development
I have handed off the BlackBerry development to some of our other engineers and am working on a Mentat framework for OS X. The framework will be the foundation for a Mac Mentat application for the Desktop and our native iPhone client. Like the BlackBerry client, both of these applications will be offered for sale at a reasonable price.

There is, of course, no charge for using the regular web service, and the framework itself will be made available for free for other developers wishing to embed Mentat functionality into their applications.

We are, at this time, in tentative discussions with Toxic Software to use this framework to provide Mentat/Omni Focus integration. We are also interested in providing the ability to manage Mentat plans directly from Omni Plan. Clearly, both of these options will require some enhancements to the Mentat service, as the utilize things such as subprojects/subtasks and dependencies.

3. Mentat BlackBerry status
The BlackBerry client is now available for evaluation and sale. You can run the client ten times without registering and can re-install it if you need a few more tries at it.

We’ve started on implementing some of the suggestions Simon Sage made in his review, starting with email integration first and foremost. We’ve already made some good progress on this and should have the new features in place by mid-January.

I’m also noodling on a generic off-line functionality design that will be wrapped into most of our native clients.

The price of the BlackBerry client will rise at its feature set becomes more sophisticated, but not arduously so. Customers that buy in at the current price will get the best deal, as upgrades to later versions are free.

3. Holiday Break
Most of us will be gone over the holidays but we will be checking email. I’m going to be in Iowa until early January with my wife and children and expect to use a lot of the quiet time to prototype the new Mac framework and desktop client.

I think that’s about it for now. Merry Christmas or alternative holiday of your choice.

-Daniel

Filed under: mentat by Daniel