I’ve been using Tracks, a GTD web application, to manage my life for a while now. I couldn’t run it with my previous web host (with my “gs lite” account). So I’ve been using the free hosted version at tracks.tra.in. I don’t mind hosted solutions (especially free ones). But I thought it would be nice to have Tracks running on my own host.
Dreamhost has Ruby/Rails even on the cheap accounts. If you’re on that host and going to take a stab it yourself, these instructions come highly recommended. With that bit of help, I had the latest stable version (1.043) rolling very quickly. In fact, uploading Tracks to my server took far longer than configuring and testing the install did.
I played with Tracks 1.043 for a day, but a few features I’d grown accustomed to in the tracks.tra.in version were missing. Those features–and plenty more, I learned–were available in the main trunk of the development version. The Tracks developers haven’t put out a new stable release in a year, but they’ve been working on the code base quite a bit. So I decided to try a second install, this time of the latest development version (R578 from the 1.05-trunk).
And that went fine, too. This was the first Rails app I’d ever tried to install, and it was also my first time using Subversion to check out files (though I have plenty of experience with it’s older brother, CVS). Again, Dreamhost helped me out here, as they have the svn command-line client available. So I was able to install across the net, which was much faster than having to download to my box and then upload to the server.
I’ll have a fuller review later. There are a lot of new features that I’m still checking out. Projects can now be “hidden” (as contexts could in the previous version). Next actions can now be “starred” (a la Gmail) and tagged (a la Flickr and every other social software webapp). They can also have “show from” dates, which is handy if you want to map out lots of future next actions but don’t want all of them cluttering the NA list. You can define a default context for each project, which can save some NA entry labor. There’s a data export feature (besides the usual RSS/iCal and TXT feeds), but no import feature yet.
The interface in general is more sophisticated, without going overboard. And I find the performance a bit better, too. So, for the moment, I’m very happy with it and will be putting it through its paces as I try to get some things done this week.