Agenda 的歷史故事：開發者一週年分享

I noticed most people didn’t use any method like this, despite how simple it was. I started advising the people I saw struggling to do the same as I did and told them: “Just keep a TextEdit document open where during the week you capture the things you want to discuss with me. And when we have our 1-on-1 we can simply go over that list”. When it seemed to work for them as well, I started to slowly think of turning this methodology into an app. At the minimum I would have one customer: myself.

While his very first reaction was “another note taking app?! There are thousands of those already!”, he seemed to like the idea for this date-focused note taking app in the end.

We received some very good feedback from a number of testers. However, when we say “very good”, it refers to the quality of the feedback; what was said about the app itself was actually quite bad. The testers did not understand the methodology, nor what all those boxes were supposed to mean, what determined their sort order, etc.After a year of work, that was a bitter pill to take to say the least…

In a lot of the discussion I see a lot of focus on the tool, what A can do and B cannot, but B can and A cannot etc etc. I personally think we should focus much more on the process, which often can be done in any app. I wrote about it in my “Next Box” post; while I “live” in Agenda and love it as my tool of choice (duh!), the workflow I have today isn’t much different from the one I originally set up in TextEdit and Simplenote. Agenda makes it (much) nicer and adds a lot of power, but the basics are the same.