The moment many of you have anxiously been awayting is now just around the corner. After months of tirelessly working on the Viira Outlook Suite and being burried in Outlook and BlackBerry OS development work, we are finally ready to launch the Outlook Suite beta.
Combined Outlook-BlackBerry environments can differ widely between installations though: some people rely on Exchange and a BES-powered company BlackBerry, while others are content with just having BIS and standalone MS Outlook. While the Viira Outlook Suite works without a problem in both cases (and actually doesn’t even need a BlackBerry data plan), we are still looking to extend the testing period for the Viira Outlook Suite in order to make sure the 1.0 version works smoothly out-of-the-box for everyone.
With that in mind, we are launching the Viira Outlook Suite Beta program. Are you comfortable playing with beta software on your computer and on your BlackBerry? Are you interested in making your opinion count in guiding the direction and feature set of the growing Viira Outlook Suite?
If your answer is yes to both, you should go ahead and give the Viira Outlook Suite beta a try. We would love to hear your thoughts on it as that would give us an idea of what works for you and what you think we can improve so that we can solidify the Viira Outlook Suite as the ultimate GTD solution out there.
Here is a quick glimpse of what the Viira Outlook Suite looks like:
Today has been a day of big announcements in the BlackBerry world. On the first day of the 2009 BlackBerry Developer Conference, RIM announced a slew of new technologies, APIs and partnerships designed to make even richer and more powerful applications a possibility on the BlackBerry platform.
Against this backdrop, we are very excited to be making our own big announcement: the public availabiity of Viira 2.0. Viira 2.0 contains many game-changing improvements that we are delighted to be bringing to you because we know that they will help you do even more with your BlackBerry and help you get things done in your day-to-day life.
Without further ado, here are the key new features in Viira 2.0:
- Next Actions. You can select the next task that needs addressing for any given project, context, in Tasks View and even for a particular day. Simply use the VolumeUp key to promote any of tasks for the project, context or day to the top position
- Email Tasks. Create a task from incoming messages so that you never forget to reply to important emails. Instantly add it to your trusted GTD system by classifying it by project, context or day. The email task will contain an embedded preview of the email to remind you what the email was all about.
- Priorities. Organize the task order for any project, context and day. Use the VolumeUp and VolumeDown key to specify which tasks come ahead of others.
- Overdue Tasks Display. A new area in the Day View displays in red tasks from previous days that have not been completed yet.
- Multiple Calendar Support. A unique, Viira-only feature is the inclusion of appointments to your GTD organizational system. Viira 2.0 seamlessly integrates with all calendar accounts on your BlackBerry (BlackBerries maintain one calendar for each configured email address) and appointments from all calendars will appear in your Day View.
We always provide a free trial, and Viira 2.0 is not an exception. For those of you who purchased Viira 1.x, Viira 2.0 will optionally import your Viira 1.x data when launched for the first time as well.
Buyers of the previous version also get special upgrade pricing - a tradition that we will continue with future releases. Buyers of Viira 1.x can buy an upgrade for $19.99.
So give Viira 2.0 a try and see for yourself what it can bring to your day-to-day life!
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 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”
“Simple, but yet with outstanding ability to get things organized”
“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!”
“Not exactly cheap, but worth every cent”
“Wow, with Viira you can do EVERYTHING all the little apps do”
“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 Someday/Maybe list is an important but often times overlooked feature of any solid GTD system. The list consists of all those actionable items that we want to get to at some later point but that cannot be acted upon now.
The idea is to record all the Someday/Maybe items and, while getting them out of our busy minds now, to review the list later and decide if the time to act on a particular task or idea has come or not.
The way I handle Someday/Maybe items with Viira is by using contexts. I have two contexts - a ‘Someday’ and a ‘Maybe’ - largely to keep a clean separator between things that I know I will have to get to eventually (”get going on tax return”) versus wish-list items (e.g. “learn French”).
Once I have assigned a task to the Someday or Maybe context I do not assign a project or date to that task. This effectively keeps the Someday/Maybe items cleanly separated from the other tasks in Viira. This makes intuitive sense: if a task has a due-date associated with it or is part of a larger work-in-progress project then it probably isn’t a Someday/Maybe item any more.
Once captured, the key is to do a scan of the Someday and Maybe contexts on a periodic basis - perhaps during the Weekly review. Here is a shared email to David Allen from a person who successfully leveraged his Someday/Maybe list in his GTD system and got things rolling at the right time - and was very happy that he did.
The topic of Someday/Maybe lists is a big and open-ended one and there are many tips on how to make the most of it while avoiding some of the pitfalls (like turning it into a procrastination list). Andre from Tools for Thought has posted a great article on dealing with some of the challenges and how to overcome them - an excellent read!
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!
