Welcome to Frictionless 2.0



A little over a year ago I wrote the original version of Frictionless which was based around the idea of keeping your master to-do list in outline form then slicing that list by context. It wasn't totally original as the basic concept was originally implemented in a combination of Applescript and OmniOutliner at www.kinkless.com . I added a couple of ideas of my own specifically linking to Mail and QuickSilver. I got it working enough for myself and others to use on a daily basis, then got distracted because I had to search for a new job, then got distracted again because I had to get things going with my new job.

So now I've gone back to working on Frictionless again.

Over the last year, others had a similar idea, and so there are lots of GTD apps out there to choose from. They each have their plusses and flaws, but frankly, none of them have seemed that great to me. Most of them replicated the same problems I was having with Frictionless. Most of them want to charge money for their application, ranging from $19.95 to $39.95. The 500-pound Gorilla will be OmniAction, but that won't be out for awhile.

While many of the other GTD apps looked much nicer then Frictionless few of them were functional enough for me to switch.

So I immediately decided three things:

  1. Frictionless will be free. Too much competition to bother with charging, frankly.
  2. Frictionless needed to sync with iCal.
  3. Frictionless needed to sync with everything on the internet: Google Calendar, .
  4. Frictionless had to sync with Paper, i.e. it needed some great output templates.

So that led me to completely rebuild Frictionless in Ruby for Cocoa. I won't bore you with the technical details why, but that led me to the final item:

5. Frictionless would be open source.

So now here we are. If you're reading this, you've downloaded a development version of Frictionless. This means that the program itself is very much a work in progress. It will change a lot in the weeks to come. It's not yet feature complete. Basically, you've downloaded a version that can and will change as I try out new ideas and play around with things. You get to peer into my design process, hopefully in order to give me feedback as things go along. However, it should already be useable in its basic function: To keep track of what you are doing and what you still have to do.

In the menus on the left is a basic but rough guide to getting started with Frictionless. You'll want to read through that guide to get started as Frictionless is a fairly advanced GTD tool, so some of its features may not be obvious at first.