Midnight Inbox Review

Midnight Inbox at $35 is a great application, but think before you buy!INBOX.jpg, it can become addictive.

“Midnight Inbox is a list, note, file and to-do manager. It includes automatic collection of incoming items such as new email, documents and calendar events, guided and automatic processing of those items into projects and next actions, as well as gentle reminders to keep you on top of your world, stress free. Anyone who wants to get organized and especially fans of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology will love its intuitive implementation.”

Personally I am a sucker for this type of stuff – which is really bizarre as a) I have never actually stuck to any one system in my entire life and b) I have very little need for applications like this as I don’t exactly work that much these days.

But …….. I really like this application! It is smart, intuitive, cleverly thought through and laid out and does exactly what they say it will:

“Because Midnight Inbox is 100% Cocoa and is optimized for Mac OS X Tiger, version 10.4, it plays nice with all of the standard Mac applications. In fact, Midnight Inbox is a sort of meta-application, allowing you to organize your data from iCal, Mail, and Safari, yet work with it in those environments you’re already used to. Inbox is a Universal application for both the PowerPC and Intel Macs, incorporating Spotlight, Core Data, and other key Apple technologies.”

This is sort of where my issue starts though. It can actually take you longer to set up the project than it saves you in time, although this is actually a view that I have on pretty much all time management, project management and personal organization applications. In no way is this a criticism of the application though. Inbox is as good as anything that I have looked at. Personally I turned off the two preferences that notify you of stuff as I found the beep a little irritating, and the option to carry on working on another task didn’t always work as far as I could see.

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I particularly liked the structure of the Collect, Process, Organize, Review, Work and Reference sections as this really made sense intuitively for the natural work flow of the things I do.

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It was great for collating information for, and the creation of, reviews and articles and I would suggest that anybody that does that type of activity take a look at this product. In the past I have reviewed other applications like this, and a number of higher end project management applications, and this sits up there with the best of them.

3 thoughts on “Midnight Inbox Review

  1. pete

    There’s promise in this beta (although I have what’s known as version 1.0.1). The integration with iCal and Mac Mail is very good. On the down side is the poor documentation, and unintuitive workflow. The real dealbreaker is the constant crashing that happens. I cannot work more than 15 minutes without it crashing. Really! I’m surprised the reviewer has gotten it to work.

  2. MyAppleStuff Post author

    A matter of taste/preference I guess. As I said, I actually really liked the workflow and it hasn’t crashed on me at all. I accept that there are a few bugs, like the alert system, but tht was about all that really bothered me.

    I was going to point you to the positve comment over on version tracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/31401) but I see that you have left pretty much the same comment as the one above there 🙂

  3. Wayne LeFevre

    I’m digging it. I never heard of it before you mentioned it, Chris. I’ve got absoluetly no clue exactly how to make it work, though. I think, though, that I’ll have to have some more of those movies before I would think about purchasing it. It’s never crashed on me, however, so I guess I’m lucky.

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