Goldin++

I’m a big fan of productivity and GTD tools. After posting my previous article someone on DZone has mentioned Nozbe, an on-line time- and project-management application.

That sounded interesting as I’ve switched a number of approaches already, trying to track all my various online and offline activities. My last attempts were “Remember The Milk” and doc/excel files, kept in Zoho. Somehow, it just didn’t work. I guess a big part of that “didn’t work” problem had something to do with self-discipline, but my technical side was blaming the tool ..

So I didn’t mind trying out a new one! To tell you the truth, after watching the course I was overwhelmed and sold on the spot. Wow, what an amazingly cool tool, I have to try it!

…

Two months later I was running out of capabilities offered by a free Nozbe version: 5 projects and 5 “contexts” (“tags”). First of all, it worked! All my TODOs have finally stopped to pile up and actually started to get done. But, secondly, working with Nozbe was always a pure joy. It was fast, easy and sexy, anytime. Alas, as I said, I was running out of free version capabilities: adding new tasks, issues and ideas was so easy and fun now. Obviously, I had to start paying.

But then I stopped.

The thing is I was about to start using YouTrack issue tracker from JetBrains for my personal projects. Since I’ve already purchased a YouTrack license, can it be my Nozbe replacement? Not an easy task, as you can see, I was in love with Nozbe.

But after initial period of trying it out I switched and migrated all my Nozbe issues to YouTrack, now running at evgeny-goldin.org/youtrack.

I believe most people really need a task management tool like Nozbe. Otherwise, how would anybody get anything under control? But every software engineer knows there’s a thing called “issue tracker” so why not using it instead?

Not to be mistaken, issue trackers are built for a different purpose. At the very least, their basic language is:

• “Issue priority”: major, minor, critical, show-stopper
• “Issue state”: submitted, fixed, won’t fix
• “Issue type”: bug, task, exception, feature

This professional lingo will surely confuse and distract those not dealing with “bugs” on a daily basis. But it’s a mother-tongue for me. I don’t mind assigning “priorities” to “tasks” and changing their “state” to “fixed”, when done. So I decided to stay with YouTrack and use it for all my needs for the following reasons:

• Feedback. Nozbe has a good forum but somehow, I wasn’t able to get any response to a question or feature suggestion. It’s a totally different story with JetBrains, normally I get a quick response when opening an issue. This is the standard for JetBrains and I’m not surprised: I know this company and use its flagship product, Intellij IDEA, for more than 8 years already.
• I paid for YouTrack already. Running two similar tools just seemed awkward to me, not to mention the extra money involved: I would start thinking too much about whether an issue belongs to YouTrack or Nozbe.
• Features. As always, it is hard to beat JetBrains in this area:
  
  • Search Box – a super-duper, keyboard-friendly way to search and filter issues.
    It comes with text completion but can also be ran from an address bar with keyworded search.
  • Tags – finally, tag is tag and not a “context”.
  • Saved searches: “priority: Critical“ is my equivalent to Nozbe “Next Action”. After all it’s just another saved search which I can have quite a few in YouTrack, something that can not be done in Nozbe: “Next Action” and “filter by context” are the only searches it provides.
  • “Create Issue” Bookmarklet – I don’t even need to visit YouTrack to create an issue! Sending e-mail to create an issue is not possible, though.
  • Subsystems, custom issue attributes, linked issues, …

• Text note is an issue. Nozbe merely attaches text notes to an issue while in issue tracker, a text note is an issue. There’s no need to switch between the two, something that annoyed me quite a lot in Nozbe.

All in all, YouTrack is superior to Nozbe but rightly so, it’s an enterprise-class software development issue tracker and not just a simple task management tool. But it can’t be used by everybody:

• There’s no SaaS version available as of today, one would need to setup and host it somewhere.
• It can’t be used by non-developers, it would be too powerful for many people.

But if you are a developer and you don’t mind running your own YouTrack instance hosted somewhere than I highly recommend to give it a try. After all, most of us probably know how good JetBrains product are so I’m all for making this one #1 in its class as well!