Logic from the Left Coast

I saw GTD compliance in the advert and was impressed by the quality of in the web-site presentation, so went ahead and bought the program. (doh!)
You should not be able to use GTD name if you aren't actually able to implement D. Allen's methods in your program. I hope he sues you for libel, because your program is pathetic. You have two contexts available: At Home and At Work. That's it, you can't specify contexts, everyone is a freakin 8bit Sim with binary state set, At Home or At Work. I went to the Feature Suggestion part of the forum and did a search for Contexts. The search returned a few posts, one of which an exceedingly polite person very methodically presented an argument that it might be a good idea to have programmable context generation (GTD), and in response some smarmy administrator marketing type said that they considered it but no it couldn't fit in the 'visual footprint' of the program or something like that.  I think you are all marketing hacks, which is why the presentation is so polished and the program is so fundamentally useless to anyone but marketing hacks. David Allen understands these things, but he also seems to have an appreciation for the diversity and complexity in peoples' activities and lives. The specific structure of his system is very important. He has garnered justifiable fame for producing a system of remarkable simplicity and generality which is nevertheless applicable to pretty much any active life imaginable. Your program on the other hand, is just going to cause people more stress in the long run; though in the short run they may be excited by all the pretty little colored windows and such.

A much better program, in my opinion (though suffering from flaws of its own, mostly programmer/resource neglect) is EasyTask, but they don't have desktop sync, and they also don't integrate Calender, which is one feature you seem to have picked up on.

So, to recap and conclude:
1.  Please consider taking the GTD tm out of your advert. It's functionally incorrect on several counts, and probably unethical.

2.  Consider hiring a new program design team, and recuse yourselves from this process. You should focus on marketing, of which you are undisputed masters. Ideally, your design team would (a)think minimalist, (b)request consultation through D. Allen (or people at 43Folders.com or LifeHacks ...), (c) look very closely at the exceedingly simple and beautiful EasyTask (Orionbelt), which is really only missing an integrated calender and some structural cleanup/refactoring. 

Cheers!
-j

A much better program, in my opinion (though suffering from flaws of its own, mostly programmer/resource neglect) is EasyTask, but they don't have desktop sync, and they also don't integrate Calender, which is one feature you seem to have picked up on.

I looked up EasyTask, and they seem to have a desktop version available for $20. The iPhone version is actually free, so I tried it. I do agree that the Leftcoastlogic marketing team tends to over-promise features and fall short on delivery, which I think is very unfortunate, because while this tactic might initially entice more people to buy the product, it also results in more dissatisfied customers, who can then bring down the rating for the app by leaving negative reviews at the app store, ultimately resulting in less sale of the app in the long run. However, I disagreee that "the pretty little colored windows" are just window dressing. The more I use ST, and the more I try other task managers like EasyTask, the more I feel convinced that the "pretty little colored windows" condense a lot of information in a visual way, thereby increasing ease of use exponentially. I can get a lot of information off the smart view in a glance, whereas I have to drill down several levels in other task managers in order to see the same info. I can see that ST might be frustrating for people with more complicated project structures, and I wish it would adopt the "dashboard view" of EasyTask instead of the overly simple "focus view" it has now. If all the kinks and bugs are worked out, ST would be the perfect task manager for me, though of course, it wouldn't be so for everyone. That's why I'm sticking with ST despite the frustrations of so many bugs with each new release. Of course I would be a lot happier without the bugs. I often see people asking for recs for good task managers / scheduling apps in iPhone/Touch forums, and I've never recommended ST because it's too buggy -- I couldn't in good conscience inflict so much bugs on another user, even when I think ST's features are exactly what the other posters are looking for.

Agree with Fly. I also find that LCL is too inclined to use their customers as real-life beta testers. And they tend also to over-sell their app. On the other hand, they are rather reactive and they do listen to their customers, this is a good point. On the long run, I'm confident that they will keep their promises but sure that ST is currently somewhat disappointing when compared to the description they put on the AppStore.

As a task/to do app, ST is quite good. I used to use "To Do" (by Appigo) in conjunction with RTM and find that ST is, overall speaking, more convenient. I don't know if it is GTD compliant or Franklin Covey compliant and don't care much about it (people who care about GTD compliance, please raise your hand).
About the "At Home"/"At Work" concept, I think that it is wrong to assimilate it to the concept of "context" in GTD. I think that ST is using this concept just to schedule the tasks.

As for EasyTask Manager, I have also tried it some time ago and found nothing exciting about it (I deleted it after 1 day). It is just like the dozen other todo apps which flourish on the AppStore, and it is not even among the best and most popular ones ("ToDo" and "Things").

I do agree that there's some confusion if you're into GTD and tries to use ST+ as "just another" GTD app. I think the biggest confusion is between the GTD and SmartTime+ contexts. As Ivy just pointed out it's not at all the same as David Allen proposal. I would love to have some sort of tagging system for the tasks/events but SmartTime+ doesn't support that yet. Nor can I according to GTD get everything out of my head and into SmartTime+ as separate tasks, cause that would bring down SmartTime+ on it's knees. (As I guess you already know that that will easily imply 30-40 "projects" with several 100's of tasks.)

But from that draw the conclusion that ST+ is useless as GTD app is a bit farfetched in my humble opinion. I for one have tried several GTD apps on the iPhone. I bought OmniFocus the day it hit the store. I've tried Things, Zenbe Lists, TouchTodo and others. They're all good in their own way but no app has increased my productivity as much as SmartTime+. I guess that it's just the best app so far for me. It has it's drawbacks but also it's good points, which for me, by far out-weights the bad ones. So for me it's the best GTD app so far.

Here's my GTD approach for SmartTime+ which maybe can help:

1. Use context "tags" in the title field. Enter @phone (or @p) for phone, @home, @city, etc. you can then apply a filter to show just one context.

2. Use one task named weekly and put all things that I want to review on a weekly basis as separate lines in the info field. Set that task to have a due start one week ahead and it will show up on week into the future for your weekly review. When I then perform the review I delete all items that I create separate tasks for.

3. In the same way you can add monthly, yearly etc and set their due start accordingly.

Due to the lack of copy / paste, and SmartTime´s one way task sync, I usually use gCal to view the "info field" during my reviews and enter tasks on the phone.

I think LCL tried to make a "simple" app to help ordinary people get more things done, but then the power user nerds entered (coming from GTD or some other methodology) the arena. Yes, I admit belonging to that category. We "demand" a lot of things not currently in SmartTime+ and LCL listens and so far the progress has been really good, but there's a swords edge to walk on to get the app to still be "simple" and still add all the features the power users "demand".

Good luck with your SmartTime+!

I think we all get a little bit distracted from the main topicstarter's theme

Helen,

Thanks for bringing this up. I'm just re-reading Hakan's very helpful ideas and I'm going to have another discussion with our development team.  Actually SmartTime has always had a Filter feature that allows you to do Tagging, but it's not possible to "save" the most commonly used Tag sets so that may be something we need to work on.  If anyone is interested, I would be happy to put together a separate discussion Board (which spans several of our apps) for making them easier to use for GTD aficionado's.