Midnight Inbox: An easy-to-understand GTD system for the Mac?

If you haven’t gotten around to implementing David Allen’s Getting Things Done, system, because of a lack of clear and easy-to-use programs, you may now be in luck. Midnight Beep has just released a public beta of Midnight Inbox, a new GTD application for the Mac.

I have been using another system, Kinkless GTD, for a little while. I like it and many people swear by it, but the setup is not user-friendly. It took me long time to even understand conceptually how it worked.

Midnight Beep’s interface, on the other hand, makes the most sense out of anything I’ve seen so far. I love how the major buckets on the left are called “Collect, Process, Organize, Daily Review, Work, Reference, and Trash”—very clear to a person who might be just getting familiar with GTD. Even the organization of the help menu offers a concise introduction and overview of GTD.

Midnight Inbox is also a traditional application unlike KGTD (which is really an OmniOutliner document on steroids.) For people who aren’t power-users, Midnight Inbox might be the most promising new addition to the GTD space.

Download it here:

• Midnight Inbox

This is a pre-release beta, so beware of bugs. Make the application better by sending feedback to Midnight Beep.

[via Daring Fireball]

Update Aug. 30: After testing out the beta some more, here’s a longer review:

What I like

• The ability to collect files and emails as well as notes
  Although it’s unclear how to get files and emails into a Collection box, Midnight Inbox has “Recent Emails” and “Desktop Files” as default Collection groups. This is perhaps the most compelling part of the program, because it can consolidates all of your inboxes into one program. Right now, I have separate Inboxes for e-mail, computer files, and notes. Not by choice, but because there’s nothing out yet that can combine them together. Perhaps, Midnight Inbox can fully address this in it’s next release.

• Structure of left navigation
  I mentioned earlier that “Collect”, “Process”, “Organize”, “Daily review”, “Work”, and “Reference” and “Trash” are clear labels. I still like them, although the “Daily review” should be just be named “Review”, since you can have reviews of different intervals.

What I don’t like (bugs)

• Can’t do anything to items in the Collection boxes.
  Once you put an item into a collection box, you can’t do anything to it. This is an upcoming feature that will be implemented, but I wish they had released it with it working.

• Delete doesn’t work
  Can’t delete items in “Collect” or “Organize”. Normal key commands such as Delete and Command-Delete don’t work.

• Can’t drag and drop items
  Dragging and dropping between different buckets doesn’t work.

• Adding an item to the collection is hard
  It’s difficult to add notes. You have to press the Plus icon to make a new note, instead of just clicking in the window or use a key command.

• Crashes and hangs
  Even with “Automatic Collection” turned off, the application hangs and has many redrawing issues. Sometimes it won’t even let me select the window of the program.

• Misleading “Beta” title
  This feels more like an alpha or proof of concept than a working application.

Features I want

• Integration with other apps
  Quicksilver, iCal, Mail, AppleScript, and Growl integration

• Smaller footprint
  Currently some of the icons are too big, and the chrome of the window takes up too much space.

• Typographic customization
  The ability to choose your own fonts and sizes would be nice.

Conclusion

Conceptually, the application is off to a good start. It’s a decent proof of concept for what could be an amazing program. Midnight Inbox has my endorsement in that regard. The current implementation, however, has too many bugs to make it useful as a real day-to-day system. The term “beta” is used very loosely since all the major features are not implemented.

If you love checking out pre-release software like I do, then this program will certainly entertain your curiosity. If you want to replace kGTD or your existing GTD system, now’s not the time.