We’ve also recently updated the Mentat BlackBerry client with a few fixes:

* You can now close delete tasks from the site and have that recognized by the BlackBerry client, and vice versa.

* We’ve made the default task sorting by priority, from highest to lowest (customizable by the Sort menu option for your own needs of course)

The goal is to keep everything smooth & up to date, so within 5 minutes of something happening to one of your tasks, you will be aware of it whether you are at your desk or on the move.

–Currently, there appears to be an elusive bug that sometimes throws a “setFocus” error error if you are simultaneously logged in to the Mentat BlackBerry client and the site and you delete a task from the site, then move to working on the BlacKBerry client.. We’re looking into a fix, but if you happen across that bug in the meantime, the workaround is easy: just start Mentat again & all should be well.

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The Mentat OSX client is shaping up to be pretty smooth so far. If you’re a Mac user and you enjoy the simple and direct access the Mentat BlackBerry client provides, you’ll be really happy with the interface on the OSX client.
You can run the Mentat OSX client in the background just like iChat or Adium. Schedule, assign and organize tasks & projects with a few simple clicks then get back to whatever other programs you’re running, saving that precious screen real estate.
Growl notifications have just been added in, so you’ll be able to see that friendly gray box pop up at the bottom of the screen letting you know when a new task or comment arrives, without disrupting or redirecting from what you are working on at the time.
Like many of you, I often end up having lots to do, and some tasks require confirmation or groundwork from teammates to move on to the next step. I’m really looking forward to having real-time updates and a quicker way to jump in, capture a task or a comment and then get back to the work at hand while working at my desk. I’m certain this will make the Mentat experience even better for me & the team at Brainmurmurs and hope you’ll all feel the same in about a month when the OSX client is released.
If you have ideas or suggestions you’d like to see in your own future Mentat experience, let us know at the forums: http://gomentat.com/forums/2 .

-Erik

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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

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If you make it your New Years resolution to get organized, we’re here to help.
Just in time for the holidays we’ve got the Mentat BlackBerry client 1.0 ready to rock and and priced at $25 from our site. Naturally, the price of the Mentat site itself remains and will remain free.

New features are still being added as Mentat moves along, and for anyone who gets in early and buys Mentat BlackBerry 1.0 now, those future updates will be free.

We hope everyone has been enjoying the beta, and for those of you who missed it, you can still have 10 free trials of the 1.0 release to see it in action before you purchase.

-Erik

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We polished up the Mentat BlackBerry beta client a bit more this week and worked on some event handling and reassignment code to make for a smoother overall experience. There are also a few new features to enjoy:

Task Sorting
You can open up the menu with an alt click or the menu key from inside any project and use the new Sort option to rearrange your tasks by Due Date, Assignee, Summary or Priority(the default option). Also, note that if you click the same Sort button twice it will flip the order tasks are arranged in, in case you need to see it inversed.

Recurring Task Support
You can now see recurring tasks you set up on the Mentat site from the BlackBerry as well. Wen you finish a recurring task, just close it or choose the “Mark task complete” menu option and when it’s time to…recur… the task will magically(AJAXFully technically) reappear at the top of your agenda. You can finally see those reminder tasks when you need to on the move.

Bug fix
We also took care of the insidious “too many threads” bug with this update, so it should trouble you no more.

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Hello, a few people have pointed out issues successfully logging onto Mentat with the BlackBerry.  About half of our team is out today with some virulent form of the plague, so I will be working to reproduce this issue myself today and come up with a fix.

Update: I have just posted an update (version 0.83). This essentially provides more visibility into what errors have occurred. At the very least trying with this build may help us trace the issue.

Builds can be installed OTA directly to your BlackBerry:

Handhelds running BlackBerry OS 4.2: http://brainmurmurs.com/products/mentat/v42/MentatBlackBerry.jad

Handhelds running BlackBerry OS 4.1: http://brainmurmurs.com/products/mentat/v41/MentatBlackBerry.jad

-Daniel

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We’ve just posted a new update to the the Mentat BlackBerry Beta (version 0.82) and the evaluation period has been extended to December 25th.

This new build includes the ability to create projects from the BlackBerry. It also presents tasks in order of priority. A sort command has been added that will sort tasks by name, due date, or priority, but it is not active in this release.

Builds can be installed OTA directly to your BlackBerry:

Handhelds running BlackBerry OS 4.2: http://brainmurmurs.com/products/mentat/v42/MentatBlackBerry.jad

Handhelds running BlackBerry OS 4.1: http://brainmurmurs.com/products/mentat/v41/MentatBlackBerry.jad

Update:  we’ve made some changes on the server side that have improved task download times substantially.

-Daniel

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We have added the following features to the Mentat website

• Custom categories
• Repeating tasks
• Renaming Projects
• The ability to move tasks between projects
• Fully draggable task elements
• Public projects
• Guest users

Custom Categories

You can rename the categories for a project or create new ones from a project’s administration page. You can not delete a category unless there are no tasks using it.

Repeating tasks

You can set tasks to repeat every day, or on specific days of the week. We will add support for monthly and yearly tasks soon.

You can change a tasks repeating behavior by jumping to the task’s main view from the agenda or a project (the icon on the right right side of the task bar).

Renaming Projects

You can now change a project’s name from the project’s administration page.

Moving tasks between projects

If you are an administrator for two projects you can move tasks from one project to another. This is currently only supported in the Agenda view. Bring up the task’s HUD and click on the project name, and select a destination project from the drop down that appears.

Fully draggable task elements

You can now click anywhere on an Agenda view task and drag it: we have eliminated the old drag handles that we use to use.

Public projects

A project administrator can now make projects accessible to non-project members. We support 4 types of visibility:

• Private - this is the default for all projects. Only invited members have access
• Read Only - Users can browse tasks but can not create new tasks or modify existing task settings
• Limited public - Any Mentat user can access your project as a Guest (see the next section)
• Public - Any Mentat user can access your project as a regular contributer - this means that users you don’t know can create new tasks, delete or close them, etc

Read Only, Limited Public, and Public projects can be accessed with Read Only privileges by users that are not logged on to Mentat.

Guest users

You can now add users to your projects as Guest users.

Guest users are intended for bug reporting or basic CRM functionality. Guests can create new tasks, add comments to them, and mark them resolved. They can not assign tasks to other team members or close or delete tasks.

Coming up next

Bug fixes, UI refinements, and sub projects!

Technorati Tags:
brainmurmurs, GTD, Mentat, organizer, user interface design

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BlackBerry Cool posted a nice review of Mentat today! Simon Sage, the reviewer suggested a few additions, such as the ability to create a new task from an email message, and we immediately added them into our product roadmap.

My favorite quote:

Our latest revision, 0.81 offers improved support for collaboration and some added stability improvements. Thanks to some changes on the server side, tasks created by Jott now show up automatically in your Agenda.

Thanks Simon and BlackBerry Cool!

-Daniel

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blackberry, blackberry gtd, brainmurmurs, GTD, Mentat, organizer

made with mars edit

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The v42 version of Mentat Beta for the BlackBerry has been updated and extended out to December 15th.

The beta can be downloaded OTA from http://brainmurmurs.com/products/mentat/v42/MentatBlackBerry.jad

I’ll try and get an updated version of the 4.1 client uploaded soon, but it’s my birthday and I’ve got some family that wants to spend it with me.

-Daniel

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