I just started to try using Tracks. I have been using What’s Next App (http://www.whatsnextapp.com) for sometime now (but the project appears to be dead). I only started using Tracks since I found Bitnami Tracks Stack (http://www.bitnami.org).

I do have a few things I missed from What’s Next App which I hope Tracks can learn/borrow from.
1. Easy installation.
What’s Next App has a pre-package with Ruby runtime. All I need to do to install is extract the zip, run a .bat file and point my web-browser to http://localhost:3300. Although Bitnami Tracks Stack makes it easy to install, it is still very bloated (with Apache, MySQL, etc) for those that only need to use Tracks off-line on a single PC as a personal GTD tool.
2. Re-order Next Actions.
What’s Next App allows Next Actions to be re-ordered (via drag and drop) to allow ordering of next actions in the order of the very next actions. I know that Tracks currently do not support this but this is in the plan. I do hope that this is sometime soon.
3. Move a Next Action to Tickler easily.
What’s Next App allows for easily click a Next Action and set it as Deferred (What’s Next App’s equivalent of Tickler) with a deferred date. I use this for a recurring action. For example a weekly pay for catering action. Once I have done the action, I deferred that action to next week. Come next week the deferred action will become a next action ready to be done and then deferred again.
4. Search.
What’s Next App allows to search for Next Actions, Projects, Contexts, etc. Does Tracks allow for this?

Jeff

Thanks for your feedback. I’ll try to answer some of your points:

1. I do appreciate that an easy, compact installation method would be good, but since BitNami does a good job (except for the size of the installation, as you mention), I’d rather that we put our very limited development time into the application itself rather than working on packaging methods. For one thing, I don’t have access to Windows, so I wouldn’t be able to do that myself. FWIW, I know that the BitNami guys are trying to get the size of the installation down in future - perhaps you could leave some feedback for them? There’s also now a decent hosted service, Morph eXchange for those who want a zero install option.

2. Yes, it’s in the plan. We did try implementing it before, but it turned out to be a bit tricky.

3. You can do this with 1.5: it’s not quite one click, but if you click the edit button on the action, fill in a date in the ‘show from’ box, then hit enter. The action gets added to the tickler, and won’t be shown on the home page until the date you entered.

4. There isn’t a search facility yet, but that’s also on the long-term plan.

I appreciate the quick reply
I guess I can handle a couple more click on moving next actions to tickler. Search functionality I can do without for now as I do not have that many actions in Tracks but I can see how useful this is for those with hundreds of tasks.
I can see your point regarding installation. It’s a good thing that now there is Bitnami. I looked at Tracks a year ago but decided to go with What’s Next App simply because it took too much effort to get Tracks working (as offline personal GTD app).

But I do hope that the re-ordering of actions is the top priority in the development as I believe this is the feature that most people desire of Tracks. I find it hard to let go of What’s Next App for Tracks without this feature. The reason I’m looking to move is that I hate to invest too much of my time and effort on a project that is most likely dead.

JL