Last Friday (4/18), I had the pleasure of doing an interview with Shaine Mata on blogtalkradio.com where we were able to discuss Vitalist and various GTD concepts. Shaine was one of our earliest users and has given us great feedback so I would like to thank him for the opportunity.
If you get a chance, head over and check out his show. There you will find some great discussions and tips on small business and productivity.
Twitter is a pretty cool short message communications service that has become very popular lately. It works really well across instant messaging services and mobile SMS gateways. We would like to announce that we have just finished an interface that allows you to send actions directly to your Vitalist inbox through Twitter.
At this point, you should be ready to start sending tweets as actions to your Vitalist inbox. Send them as direct messages in the form:
‘d vitalist action’ (Example: d vitalist Pick up dry cleaning)
Your action should then appear in your Vitalist inbox in the next few minutes. If you run into any problems, please let us know at support@vitalist.com.
We here at Vitalist hope everyone had a happy holiday season and would like to wish everyone a prosperous and productive new year. We thought that as everyone starts to settle down now after holidays and breaks, it would be a great time to announce our newest update to Vitalist.
For the past couple of months we have been working on a new version of Vitalist that represents a major overhaul in both the front-end UI and back-end code. Since our last major release, many features have been added or changed that have made the interface and interaction with Vitalist more complex than we would like. So with this release we are concentrating on simplifying and streamlining the Vitalist user-interface.
Here are some of the improvements that will be included with the update:
We will be beta testing this update as we finish it’s development. If you would like to help us test the new version before we release it, please send us an email at beta@vitalist.com with the email you use for your Vitalist account. We are planning on starting the beta test on Monday of next week, and we will notify the testers when it is available.
Thanks and Have a Happy New Year!
A few months ago, we wrote on this blog about how to set up a Jott.com account to send messages to your Vitalist inbox. It worked great but was a bit confusing to set up and get working right. Jott has since released a public API and we saw an opportunity to make the whole process easier.
You can now simply add Vitalist as a Jott Link to your Jott account. No more messing with creating a Vitalist contact and email address. Here is how to get started:
1. Login to your Jott account and click the Jott Links tab. (if you do not have an account, you can sign up free here)
2. Click Add next to the Vitalist logo in the Jott Links list.
3. Click Save or change the name of the link. (the default is Vitalist, if you already have another contact for Vitalist, you will need to change or delete it)
4. Enter your Vitalist login information and click Activate. (this is only required once)
Now you are ready to Jott to Vitalist.
When asked “Who do you want to Jott?” say “Vitalist”, speak your message, and it will be sent to your inbox!
For Windows users, you can now bypass your browser and access your Vitalist account directly from your desktop. It is called VitaDesktop and a big thanks goes to Michael Prendergast for creating it.
VitaDesktop is a little application that can reside in your system tray. This efficient app should only take up 1/5 to 1/3 of the resources that Internet Explorer or Firefox does. Just double-click on the icon in your tray and your Vitalist account pops up in one of three modes: compact (mobile), iphone, or full.
Read more on the VitaDesktop blog or go here for the download.
Note: There is no formal affiliation between Vitalist and VitaDesktop.
Just came across an interesting article online at Wired.com. It is a profile of David Allen and includes some of his thoughts on the GTD movement. Take a look.
Article via LifeHacker and Wired
First off, we would like to apologize to all of our users who feel as though they have been mislead by the recent change in our pricing structure. Although this was certainly never our intention, we recognize that some of you are upset. We also understand that these changes may cost us a portion of our user-base, but we feel they are necessary to maintain the health and development of Vitalist.
The main reason for this change is that the advertisements on the free accounts never seemed quite right to us. We always felt they were too intrusive and detracted from the effectiveness of Vitalist. In the end, we did not feel that the little revenue generated by the ads was worth the negative aspects.
After deliberating over the feedback and emails we have received since announcing the changes, we have decided to modify the structure of the free and basic plans. The free plan is meant to give users enough functionality to be able to decide whether Vitalist is for them and worth upgrading to use. To that extent, we are raising the number of projects (active), contexts, and contacts available in the free plan to 10 each. Also, because the Basic plan ($5/month) is designed to have enough functionality to satisfy the vast majority of our users, we are bumping the number of projects (active), contexts, and contacts to 50 each.
Lately, we have been working on creating an alternative to Paypal for our customers who choose to upgrade their Vitalist accounts. While Paypal has served our needs very well so far, we realize that it required extra effort on the part of our customers to upgrade. Therefore, we have created our own payment processing system that will run alongside Paypal. This system will give us much more freedom in how we set up our subscriptions. In the future, we will be able to run promotions with free/reduced rate months as well as set up referral and affiliate programs.
The first change we are introducing is the addition of a new rate plan and some changes to the free Vitalist plan. Vitalist plans will now be broken down into 3 plans:
Other changes include the ability to pre-pay for 1 year of Vitalist with a 2-month discount, and the removal of all advertisements on free accounts.
For our customers who have already upgraded your Vitalist plan: We will upgrade your accounts to the Premium plan you will continue to have access to the Vitalist Premium plan at $5/month for as long as your subscription is active.
For our customers who are currently using our Free plan: We will upgrade your account to the Premium plan which you will be able to use until September 16, 2007, at which point you will be prompted to upgrade to continue using the Premium plan. If you upgrade at any time in the next month, you will have access to the Premium plan for $5 per month.
We have heard requests from several users over the last week for an IPhone-enabled version of Vitalist. We have just pushed our first rendition at iphone.vitalist.com. This version is optimized for the IPhone’s large display and touchscreen interface.
A couple of things we plan on adding are grouping and sorting options in the next few days. If you have an IPhone, take a look at iphone.vitalist.com and let us know what you think.
Note: You can now group and filter actions by using the “G” and “F” icons at the top of the lists.
We have recently upgraded Vitalist’s email-to-inbox feature to work with file attachments. If you have a premium account, you can now attach files to the emails you send to your Vitalist inbox and the file will automatically be attached to the newly created action.
