Brain Murmurs

We’re back with site improvements, product announcements, Mentat for OS X pre-registration, a new product, and more!

New Mentat BlackBerry features and pricing

After listening to user feedback, we have added several new features to our Mentat BlackBerry application:

• Automatically convert emails or SMS messages on your BlackBerry to Mentat tasks.
• Fully editable task description, summary, date, priority, assignee and status.
• Rearrange your tasks to suit your prefferences and speed searches with smart sorting by prority, summary, assignee, or due date.
• Create Projects and Tasks directly from your BlackBerry.

Price change: effective 3/14, the Mentat BlackBerry price will be changing to $49.99. You still get this great product for only $25 if you register before the 3/14 deadline!

Mentat website updates

Performance
We’ve spent a considerable amount of profiling and optimizing the Mentat website and are happy to announce the the site’s performance has been substantially enhanced and is noticeably snappier!

iPhone web service improvements
Like the regular website, the iPhone web interface is significantly improved, particularly over the EDGE network. In addition the web interface itself has had several improvements as well.

Pre-register Mentat for the Mac today!

Mentat.app utilizes a non-intrusive heads-up-display interface to provide you with a simple way to track personal and group tasks on your Mac. The HUD interface allows you to quickly capture personal and group tasks without breaking your workflow. Growl notifications make you aware of new tasks assigned to you by the people in your network, letting you quickly handle, comment, or delegate them with a few quick keystrokes or clicks of the mouse.

Although styled as a simple todo list, Mentat.app provides you instant access to task details and setting, including personal notes and task-specific comments from your team.

Mentat.app is currently expected to be released to the public on 4/1/08 and will retail for $49.99. Users interested in helping beta test Mentat.app should send email to support@brainmurmurs.com with the subject line “Mentat.app Beta”

Pre-order Mentat.app for only $19.99!

iPhone native applications news

We’re doing in-house alpha testing on our native iPhone client. It’s looking great and we’re looking forward to distributing it out to our beta testers! Stay tuned for more news on this offering.

Expected release date: 4/1/2008. Users interested in helping beta test the iPhone client should send email to support@brainmurmurs.com with the subject line “iPhone Mentat Beta”

New Products

Secret Mission: Agent Craig

In the next couple weeks, Brain Murmurs, creators of Mentat will also be rolling out a new application for Craigslist users.

Agent Craig lets Mac users define a Craigslist search, then runs in the background, keeping you up to date with intel on new postings with growl notifications and the ability to save and sort searches.

If a new job opportunity, apartment, slightly used couch, personal ad or whatever you are on the hunt for crops up, you can be the first to spring on it - without needing to constantly check back to the site and saving on distractions.

More enhancements are on the way with that as well…

Agent Craig will cost $39.99 to register, but you can pre-order it now for only $14.99

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We’re making good progress on our native Mentat application for the iPhone, currently known simply as ‘iMentat.’ As this point, we have native build that that can log, display a navigable list of projects, and download and display task summaries.

More to come soon, we are making rapid progress.

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Download the latest build here to upgrade (now is a great time to get started too if you haven’t tried it yet!).

New features added:

* Edit task descriptions and summaries from the BlackBerry. Just scroll to the text you want to edit, hit delete (or alt-delete to clear the whole field) and start typing. You can also add descriptions to tasks created on the BlackBerry now too (so you can give some details without resorting to comments).

* Smart-sorting keeps your tasks sorted by the category you chose after you make changes. So, for example, if you are sorting by priority and update a task priority to a new level, the list will adjust accordingly.

The Mentat BlackBerry client can now handle most task functions the site can, for total mobile independence in your task handling and group GTD.
More will still on the way later. Keep us tuned in with your feedback!

-Erik

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In keeping with our GTD focus, the email to task feature was a big deal for our last Mentat BlackBerry (OS 4.2) release. Unfortunately, the trackwheel gave me nothing but grief when trying to set up the project selector part of that screen on the first go-round, so we compromised on ‘click for next options’ solution. This week, I buckled down and practiced my code kungfu to master the esoteric “18 hands of .getContextMenu()” on a quest for a better user interface…

* You will find the latest build has a fully armed and operational project selector: Just click on it to display a list of your projects and scroll to the one you want (we even managed to skip the Choose Option/Cancel step for trackwheel users, since you always want to Choose Option-otherwise you wouldn’t have clicked on a selector in the first place).

I hope this makes Mentat just a little better for all our users. Download the latest release and stay tuned for the next feature updates.

Filed under: mentat by erik
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Note: this is a contract to hire position

Brain Murmurs, Inc, a guerilla software development team nested in the hills of Queen Anne is seeking a talented Java developer for a Contract-to-Hire position. Java code experience is desirable for this position. If you looking to get into Ruby on Rails or Cocoa development, this is also great opportunity to learn and develop those skills with our help. This position will mainly focus on Java code updating but will soon branch into into Rails and native Mac development as you transition to working on our other products.

Ideal candidates will have experience developing in object oriented languages and programming in web technologies. We are willing to help you further your skills, but you’ll need to hit the ground running. If you have examples of code that you have written or worked on, we are happy to see them. A healthy tolerance for Star Wars paraphernalia/mac enthusiasm/martial arts geekery is also welcome here.

Position Requirements:
• Working knowledge of Java and web coding.
• Strong problem solving and willingness to learn new skills.
• A minimum of two years development experience (more, or a lot more, is fine)

Useful Areas of Experience:
• Website development
• JavaScript, HTML, XML, PHP, Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, C++ or any other coding languages
• Graphic design/website design skills would be icing on the cake
• Mastery of the 18 Hands of Lohan.

About Brain Murmurs, Inc:

Brain Murmurs is an eclectic, growing software development company! Our products include Mentat - a social GTD and task management app with lots of mobile support, Pulse - a bluetooth dialup networking stack for the BlackBerry, and JIVA - one of the first practical in-house grid computing systems.created the Pulse bluetooth dialup app for BlackBerry users, as well as Jiva grid computing. We are always developing new technology solutions for everything from computing to independent media publishing for artists and musicians so adaptive learning, creativity, and constructive teamwork are things we admire.

If interested, please send your resume to : garrettATnospambrainmurmurs.com

To learn more about us visit brainmurmurs.com or gomentat.com

Filed under: Press Releases, Professional Services by Daniel
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My dear brother and sister Mac enthusiasts,

We’ve got the Mentat iPhone browser back online and now you can browse Mentat with that interface using an iPod touch as well! We’ve touched up the interface a bit and improved load speeds where we can. For now things are a bit spartan, as we are primarily just making sure you can use Mentat on the go from your iPhone/iPod and keep up to date on your tasks.

However, in the foretold future, when the dawn of the iPhone SDK is risen, in the halcyon days where indie developers shall rejoice… we will be developing a Mentat app for the iPhone to really improve the experience and kick things up a notch.

We’re making steady progress on the Mac OSX client as well, along with another secret project so stay tuned for more news on that (it will be extremely cool).

-Erik

Filed under: JIVA by erik
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We just deployed an updated version of the Mentat BlackBerry client to both download links on our site: http://gomentat.com
Here are the fixes:

* Itallics should be working correctly now for both 4.1 and 4.2 users. If you are in a project viewing tasks, the ones in your agenda will be itallicized until you highlight them 9to help you find what’s already on your list of things to do now).

* You can now create tasks from SMS messages as well as email messages. The same New Mentat Task menu item will appear when you bring up the menu on an SMS task, and it will automatically create a task description using the message text.

* The project selector in the email (and SMS) task creation screen will now update correctly with new projects you created from your BlackBerry and allow you to start saving tasks to them.

* New task alerts (* icon and audio alerts) will no longer be triggered by tasks created from emails or SMS messages. These tasks will still show at the top of your agenda so they are easy to find and file right away. Assigning tasks to yourself will also no longer trigger an audio alert or icon. The new task alerts are meant to only be for tasks assigned to you by someone else, which you may need be made aware of, and should now work accordingly.

Be sure to download the updated version if you have already installed and purchased Mentat for your BlackBerry so you can take advantages of the fixes and features.

Erik

Filed under: JIVA by erik
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Xcode has a very, very good set of searchable documentation that you can access from within Xcode by going to Help->Documentation. It comes with a set of bookmarks including:

• Interface Builder User Guide
• AppKit Reference
• Foundation Reference
• Web Kit Reference

For a long time I used the browser-based documentation located under on the hard drive under /Developer/Documentation. Unfortunately, it’s not the best reference for searching and, as far as I can tell, is mostly limited to general API documentation. As a consequence of this I spent a lot of time looking up minutia about NSTableView and it’s brethren on google instead.

I had seen the Documentation link before, but had assumed that it was going to be some lightweight fare about the basics of using the Xcode IDE, not a set of developer’s documentation spiritually equivalent to Safari Bookshelf.

I’ve known about what I’m about to say for awhile, but I’ve been so embarrassed that I missed it that I’ve really sat on this instead of mentioning it. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone else that didn’t know.

Follow up

Mike Lee of Delicious Monster pointed out that you can pull up said documentation at any time by pressing option, command, shift, and ? at the same time. Works well.

He also mentioned that you can look up specific terms in the documentation directly from your source code by holding down the option key and double clicking on the term of interest.

Thank you, Mike.

Filed under: Professional Services by Daniel
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We’ve just launched the latest build of the Mentat BlackBerry Client with some nice new features:

* Email to Task option:

As promised, provided you are using the Mentat BlackBerry Client OS 4.2 download, you can now convert emails to tasks. To try it out, first download the latest build then:

1. Log in to Mentat
2. Press the escape key to back out to the main screen
3. Open the BlackBerry Email Manager program and find the message you want to convert to a task
4. Open the message and click to bring up the menu. You will see a new menu item at the top “New Mentat Task” Just click on that and you are ready for conversion!

The message subject will be auto-filled as a task summary (if you need to change it so something more task-worthy, just press alt-delete and it will clear out quick) and the body of the message will automatically become the task description. You can edit either of these if need be.
You’ll also see a handy project selector to choose where the task goes. Just click on that til you see the project you want (space key also works) or type the first letter of your project to jump right to it.

5. Hit the Save button and the task will be sent off to Mentat. You’ll be back at the Email manager screen to rinse & repeat as needed.
This should help you keep that Inbox free & clean by converting important, actionable emails to tasks for later, and clearing out the rest of the junk so it won’t distract you. GTD all the way.

* Public Projects

We’ve also added in public projects, letting you post a project for all to see in case you want to share with members outside your workgroup (customers for instance). In fact, we’ve created a public Mentat Public project here , for you all to share in. Let us know your ideas or report any bugs you encounter directly into tasks for us.

To create a Public project, you have to be an admin (so any projects you created yourself are fair game, otherwise you’ll need permission from the creator). Just click on the pencil shaped icon next to the project name on the home page, or the admin link on the project page and then choose Public from the dropdown selector. Easy.

We’ll review our public project and get to those tasks as we can (or maybe have senior engineer Garrett Kelly handle them).

Just look jazzed he is!

I hope you all enjoy the latest Mentat BlackBerry build and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

-Erik

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The Mentat BlackBerry Email to Task feature will be up in tomorrow’s new build release. GTD fans, prepare for some awesome.

Filed under: mentat by erik
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