Viira 1.0 is now officially released and I would like to start this post by thanking all of you that took part in the beta program. It was encouraging to hear your positive feedback and get to know the ways you were putting Viira to use to get things done in your day-to-day lives.

Thanks for the many great suggestions too. I managed to include many of them in the 1.0 release because I believe they will make Viira a better piece of GTD software and ultimately add more value and functionality to your BlackBerry.

Without much ado, here is what is new in Viira 1.0 (w.r.t. the Beta):

Viira 1.0 Shortcuts

• Shortcuts. (thanks to Garry for making this suggestion)Adding a new task or an appointment can now be done quickly by pressing ALT-N and ALT-A on your BlackBerry keyboard, respectively. Opening a task can be done by pressing enter and deleting can be done by pressing del. As always marking a task as complete (or not) is toggled by pressing space. For a full list of the available shortcuts have a look at this screenshot on the right. Shortcuts are available in the master task list (Task View), in the to-do lists for each project and context, as well as in Context View, Project View and of course in the Day View.

• BlackBerry Calendar Integration. (thanks to Rick for making this suggestion)As before, appointments from the BlackBerry Calendar also appear in the Day View. Now appointments created in the BlackBerry Calendar (or pushed down to your BlackBerry through MS Exchange) can also be edited in Viira. Similarly, appointments created in Viira immediately appear in your BlackBerry Calendar.

  
  

  Viira 1.0 Appointments

  With this tighter calendar integration you can assign projects and contexts to your existing BlackBerry events and meetings. You can also create appointments from Viira and leverage the BlackBerry Calendar’s reminders (more on reminders below) and MS Exchange data syncing. Now an appointment created in Viira can make it all the way to your desktop Outlook calendar (if your BlackBerry is appropriately configured to use MS Exchange of course).

• Feature-rich appointments. Viira appointments have been visually redesigned to include a number of new fields. My personal favorite is the reminder field - I can never seem to be able to remember when my appointments start and being able to set an appointments reminder with Viira should hopefully save me future embarrassments.

So grab the Viira Free Trial and check out the new features. The Free Trial available with an Over-The-Air (OTA) install following a quick 30-second registration. If you have already registered, just sign-in here.

Viira 1.0 is now out the door, thus marking the official launch of what we hope is the most easy-to-use and complete Getting Things Done tool for BlackBerry devices.

Viira 1.0 provides full support for all the essential elements of any GTD implementation. To-do items, or Tasks, as well as Appointments can be organized by projects, contexts and by day. Pulling out the next action is quick and easy, be it the next action for a particular project, in a given place or when just looking at what needs to be taken care of before the end of the day.

Getting Things Done is all about dealing with rapidly changing priorities and quickly refocusing on the next task. Using GTD on a BlackBerry can be a definite advantage. Viira 1.0 makes the process of dealing with those changing priorities easy, intuitive and as accessible as your BlackBerry.

With Viira categorizing and re-categorizing a given task or an appointment is one pearl (or trackwheel) click away and many of the most common activities like creating, deleting or opening tasks, projects and contexts have quick shortcuts to make the entire process fast and fluid.

So check out the Free Trial, and happy GTDing to everyone!