We are glad to announce the immediate availability of Viira 1.3. This release is largely made of various suggestions that many of you passed along.

With many thanks to all of you that dropped us a line telling us what features you would like to see, here is what is new in Viira 1.3:

• Track project-less and context-less tasks. Project and Context Views now provide an easy way to locate tasks without a project or a context and prevent these tasks from “slipping through the cracks”. Simply select <No Project> and <No Context> in Projects View and Contexts View and all tasks without a project or context assigned to them will be displayed, respectively. (Thanks Sean for suggesting this one!)
• Start in Last View Used . A new setting available through Viira’s options lets you start Viira in the last used view, making it easier to return to where you left things off.
• BlackBerry Storm support. As the momentum behind the BlackBerry Storm adoption grows we are pleased to the Storm to the list of supported devices. Long-time owners of and recent upgraders to the BlackBerry Storm can take full advantage of the device’s unique capabilities like the touch screen and orientation sensitivity to get things done on the go with Viira.
• Performance enhancements. An engineering optimization put in place in Viira 1.3 drastically boosts the speed with which appointments stay in sync with the native BlackBerry calendar, making it possible to integrate a large number of appointments in your GTD system. (thanks Rajesh for helping us through this one)
• Appointments sorted chronologically. Day View now lists all appointments in chronological order, making it easier to get a quick and intuitive glance of what lies ahead for any given day.
• Free trial limits raised. The Viira 1.3 Free Trial comes with raised limits on the number of projects, contexts and tasks.

As usual, Viira 1.3 comes as a free upgrade to all buyers of the full version. To get upgrade Over-The-Air (OTA) simply point your BlackBerry to our mobile site www.kartamobile.com/bb. Alternatively buyers can log in to our site and download the ZIPed installer and install.

A free trial of Viira 1.3 is also available.

Viira’s feature set has grown a lot over the last little while, and so has the need for a how-to manual to establish a set of effective and productive best practices. This is the first post in a series of many and is intended to help you jump-start your implementation of GTD on your BlackBerry and get the most out of Viira.

0. Get David Allen’s Getting Things Done

It goes without saying that Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity is an excellent and inspirational read. For those of you that don’t have a personal copy of the book I highly recommend you get one as the timeless principles inside are invaluable and make a great reference at all times.

1. Explore Viira’s Views

Viira offers 4 views: Projects View, Contexts View, Tasks View and Day View. Quickly explore each one and familiarize yourself with the capabilities that each view provides by examining what is available in the screen context menu. You can go from one view to another by pressing the context button (the one to the left of the trackball, with the BlackBerry logo on it) and clicking on the view you want to go to next.

2. Learn Viira’s Shortcuts

Viira offers a variety of shortcuts since version 1.0. The goal of the shortcuts is to make the basic operations faster, save you a few keystrokes and ultimately make Viira more intuitive to use.

Here is what you can do in Viira with shortcuts:

• ALT-N creates a new item. When in Tasks View, Day View or when viewing the tasks associated with a particular project or context, ALT-N creates a new task. In Projects View and Contexts View, ALT-N creates a new project or context, respectively.
• ALT-A creates a new appointment. Available in Tasks View, Day View and when viewing a project or context
• Enter or trackball click opens an item for viewing.
• Del, the delete button, triggers the deletion of an item (it always prompts you first to ask if you are sure about the deletion).
• Space toggles a task or appointment between complete and not complete

Each one of these operations is also available within the corresponding screen or view that you are in. As a reminder, the shortcuts are also displayed next to the list of available operations.

Viira Options Screen

3. Set Your Startup View

Viira offers you the ability to customize which view gets loaded first when Viira is launched. Personally I like keeping a close eye on the appointments and tasks I have set to complete for the day ahead, so my Viira starts in Day View.

You can set the view that Viira starts in from the Options screen. Simply select “Options” from the context menu of any of the 4 views.

4. Set Up Your Projects and Contexts

Before going ahead and entering a lot of tasks and appointments, it is wise to first set up your projects and contexts, or at least enter enough of them to serve as a foundations on which to build the rest of your mobile GTD system.

5. You Are Ready!

Now that you have explored Viira’s capabilities and set up your initial projects and contexts, you are ready to go ahead and start using Viira. So go ahead, enter all those tasks that need to get completed into your new portable organizational system and start getting them done, one by one.

When Viira’s users talk, we listen. And lately some of you have been saying that the free trial’s limitations are a bit too restrictive to the point that it is hard to set up a proper implementation of GTD on a BlackBerry.

So starting with the latest version of the free trial (1.2.02) we have trippled the limit on the number of tasks in the free trial to 75 and doubled the the limit on projects and contexts to 10 each.

If you have already registered for the free trial, the latest update is available from our freshly-launched BlackBerry site. Just point your BlackBerry to http://www.kartamobile.com/bb, login using your username and password and grab the OTA download.

In our continuous effort to make more things possible on BlackBerry devices, we are proud to announce the availability of the Viira BlackBerry site www.kartamobile.com/bb. As we constantly improve Viira’s feature set and publish new updates we wanted to make getting the latest version easy - and doable right from your BlackBerry.

Through the mobile site you can download the latest version of Viira Over-The-Air (OTA): with a single click and straight onto your device. Just log in with the same username and password you entered when registering for the free trial, and you will be brought to a page with the OTA links available to you.

Buyers of the full version can also use the BlackBerry site to get updates of the full version of Viira. We have tried to keep the site’s design minimal and not overdo the graphics for those of you on limited data plans or sub-3G network connectivity.

Here are some screenshots of the mobile site taken from our BlackBerry Pearl Flip 8220 with the help of this great screen capture tool for BlackBerries called CaptureIt.

Viira BlackBerry Site Login

Viira OTA Download Links

Viira BB Site - What Buyers See

So put www.kartamobile.com/bb in your BlackBerry’s bookmarks and stop by for an update once in a while!

We are pleased to announce the immediate availability of Viira 1.2. Since we released Viira 1.1 we heard many positive words (thank you all!) and received many great feature suggestions, so we decided to make many of them reality in the 1.2 release.

Here is what’s new in Viira 1.2:

• Alphabetically sorted projects and contexts. (Thanks Greg for making us see the light on this one!) In addition to the visual convenience of being able to quickly zero in on a project or context this feature has the added benefit of “clustering” projects and contexts with similar names together. For example, all my projects that start with “Viira”, e.g. “Viira Features”, “Viira Suggestions” etc. all appear one after the other.
• Quick search for projects/contexts. Just press the first letter of the project or context you are looking for and the project or context starting with this letter will be highlighted. Works both in Project View, Context View as well as in the drop-down combo boxes in the Task and Appointment edit screen. Makes finding the project or context you are looking for a whole lot quicker!
• Support for recurring appointments and events. All BlackBerry Calendar appointments and events with recurrence associated with them now appear in Day View and can be assigned a project or context, just like any task or appointment in Viira. More on Viira’s recurring appointments and how to best take advantage of them is coming up in a follow-on post.
• Backup/restore capabilities.  All of Viira’s data now gets automatically backed up and restored when the entire device is backed up and restored, thus giving a peace of mind to the many of you counting on Viira day-in and day-out to get things done. A post on how to backup/restore Viira’s data for those that haven’t done a device backup/restore before is coming soon. Backup/restore is available on the full version of Viira.
• Device migration support. Thinking of upgrading to a newer BlackBerry model but have a lot of Viira data on the older device? Buyers of the full version can now migrate their Viira data from one BlackBerry to another, ensuring data continuity between device upgrades. (more on this to follow in a separate device migration how-to).
• Support for latest BlackBerry models. Release 1.2 makes sure that Viira works and looks great on the BlackBerry Pearl 8220 and the BlackBerry Curve 8900.
• Auto-capitalization of first letter of project, context, task and appointment names. Just makes things look a whole lot nicer!

As always, release 1.2 comes as a free update to all buyers of the full version of Viira. Buyers can get the update by pointing their BlackBerries to the Viira mobile site at www.kartamobile.com/bb or by logging in to our main site and downloading the ZIPed installer from there.

A free trial of Viira 1.2 is available as well.

Here is a small sample from some of the feedback emails we received since launching Viira:

“Very intuitive”

“Clean and easy to use”

“I think you guys have the first true GTD product for the Blackberry that actually works”

“Excellent piece of software”

“Love the app”

“…found it much better than the other task/getting-things-done applications that I have tried”

“It truly helped me ‘get things done’ “

“… and (big plus) appts entered in Viira show up on my today view!”

“Love the product”

“Love Viira!”

Thank you everyone for the wonderful words! We are really appreciative of all the encouragement we have received and it makes us all very happy to hear that Viira is a productive addition to your day-to-day lives.

We promise we will keep up the hard work on our end and continue delivering productivity-enhancing features so you can always count on Viira to get things done with your BlackBerry. Stay tuned!

A while back Isaac Bowman wrote a great post on how to implement a system for Getting Things Done with BlackBerry by using just the Tasks application that comes standard on every device.

Isaac’s idea is a very ingenuous one, works reasonably well for small-scale GTD implementations (30-40 tasks or less and a handful of projects and contexts) and cleverly pushes the limits of the BlackBerry Tasks application pretty much as far as possible in my view.

Actually, in the early days of Viira development we used his post as our internal benchmark: if we wanted Viira to be successful, we realized it needs to be able to provide much more than what can be eeked out from the Tasks application.

At its core, Isaac’s idea of implementing GTD on a BlackBerry is fairly straightforward. To flag a task as belonging to a project or a context, encode the project or context name in the task name and use the search function to find all outstanding tasks for a project or context.

Another slightly more technical variation on this idea comes from Mike at Clutter Free Mind who uses the task names to encode a larger category of tasks, like work relating to specific clients for example.

A key problem with relying exclusively on the Tasks application for implementing a system for Getting Things Done with a BlackBerry is that the native BlackBerry apps don’t do a good job of combining tasks and appointments together. This makes having day-specific tasks, a requirement of any solid GTD system, that much harder to achieve.

Another problems with implementing GTD with BlackBerry this way is that a lot of extra typing is needed to get even the basics going. Switching between contexts or projects requires typing every time, and if you are a more involved GTDer your thumbs will start feeling it after a bit. For someone with a BlackBerry Pearl or Storm this can become an even bigger problem.

Also, when it comes to re-assigning tasks from one project to another or renaming projects or contexts the limitations of this approach of Getting Things Done becomes more obvious. Changing the project or context a task belongs to requires editing the task’s name, and renaming a project makes it necessary to re-edit the names of all tasks in that project.

If you are like me and have 30+ projects and start forgetting the exact wording of the projects’ names the entire process will become daunting in a hurry (in Getting Things Done David Allen talks about 30-100 projects being the norm). Mistyping a project name in the task field can cause that task to “fall off” the projects’ radar as well.

At the end of the day, the BlackBerry Tasks application was just plain not designed with GTD in mind. While some hacks can be used to augment the Tasks functionality it is hard to make them scale effortlessly to a larger, fuller and intuitive GTD implementation that works smoothly all the time.

Just a quick note to let you all know that the Viira free trial is now available for download through the berrystore. Berrystore is a cool BlackBerry application store that allows you to browse, download and rate various apps in different categories. The apps range from the useful and fun to not so useful ones (like the ones that just redirect you to an online site). My personal favourite? Pacman for BlackBerry by Benny Chow. Talking about the ultimate anti-productivity BlackBerry app!

The Viira free trial will be available from the berrystore as long as it offers free apps and trials to be available for free. The berrystore is currently in beta, so the usual “try it, but be careful” warnings apply.

As I was browsing around looking for some tips and tricks on implementing Getting Things Done in a mobile way, I stumbled on a number of articles devoted to low-tech GTD solutions. Perhaps in a frustration with the current set of GTD tools at the time or their low portability, many people came up with stripped down versions of a GTD system using simple items like notepads and PostIts, and adapted them to work in their day-to-day lives.

One such way of implementing a mini-GTD system is the series of Moleskine GTD hacks. The idea is fairly straightforward - use a standard Moleskine notepad and dedicate various sub-sections from it to tasks, projects, etc. There a several posts on 43folders dedicated to Moleskine hacks as well as a very stripped-down version of GTD called Hipster PDA that uses just some 3 x 5 file cards and a clip.

Jerry Brito also describes an ingenious way to make a notebook more GTD-friendly by adding write-on tabs, which in my mind is almost a necessity as notebooks tend to be somewhat awkward when it comes to  looking things up. My personal favorite though was the student Moleskine hack that took the Moleskine and adapted it to the student lifestyle, which indirectly brought back some fond memories (I wish I was that organized in school!).

Many of these solutions are fairly cheap and easy to set up, with the total cost varying from about $20 to $40 (Moleskines are reportedly expensive in some parts of the world). And although each touts the simplicity of the model, many followers admit to needing a PDA for other aspects of GTD, like appointments and contact information (Palm PDAs were en vogue back when these ideas first came out).

As I was reading this I realized how glad I am that we now have all these sophisticated BlackBerry models like the Bold, the Curve and the 8800 series, not to mention the Storm. Implementing GTD on BlackBerry is now not only so much easier and hassle-free but lets you have a truly mobile productivity platform that is always there when you need it.

Getting things done with a BlackBerry using a tool like Viira is not only effective but is also elegant and lightweight. For one, you don’t have to carry a somewhat bulky Moleskine everywhere you go (would you bring a Moleskine to a cocktail party?).

I am the kind of person that forgets his umbrella in a cab or restaurant on rainy day, so not leaving a Moleskine behind would be a bit of a challenge for me to say the least. But after years of cell phone and later BlackBerry use my brain seems to have learned to never leave my BlackBerry out of reach or unaccounted for. There is no leaving my ‘berry behind, no Sir!

Looking things up by Project and by Context from a notepad can be somewhat challenging and it can get downright tricky as the number of projects and contexts grows. In fact, David Allen mentions in Getting Things Done that it is not uncommon to have 30 to 100 projects. And a Moleskine clearly falls short of keeping track of appointments, contacts, let alone day tasks.

Last but not least, I like to have a trusted GTD implementation on which I can rely no matter where I may be. Maybe it’s just me, but when I am at a social event like a party, a wedding or just dinner with friends and someone mentions an interesting book or a web site I would think twice before whipping out a Moleskine to jot it down (assuming I even brought it with me in the first place). With my BlackBerry, I can quickly open Viira and file the new task idea or jot down the tickler item within seconds.

In short, GTD with BlackBerry and Viira is an intuitive and natural fit that, thanks to the amazing technological advances in the last few years it is now within the reach of many productivity enthusiasts. And I am truly excited about the new and upcoming BlackBerry devices, their power and their elegance, and the new era of mobile productivity that they are ushering in.

After talking to some of the people using Viira as the GTD system on their BlackBerry, a few ideas and potential enhancements came up in our conversations. And what better way to make those ideas and enhancements available to everyone out there than a point release!

So here is what’s new in Viira 1.1:

• Notes field for Tasks. Several people mentioned the usefulness of being able to write a few extra words about a task, and we promptly added this to the Viira feature set.
• Enhanced BlackBerry Bold Day View.The BlackBerry Bold has a unique and very beautiful theme going, which Viira now embraces.
• Viira imports BlackBerry tasks. We heard from many people who are migrating away from using the BlackBerry Tasks application for GTD. With them in mind we added the ability to import all those tasks that they have already typed in the first time Viira gets launched.

And here are some screenshots from Viira 1.1:

Viira 1.1 comes as a free upgrade to everyone who has purchased the full version. Just sign-in and you will see a link to download the 1.1 version on the left.