NinerPad

Ninerpad was a task management application for Palm OS handheld devices.

First released in 2008 and with frequent updates over the following 6 months, it acquired a small user base who shared thoughts on how they used the application to try and "maintain control".

Game Over

NinerPad was doomed from the start. Apple had introduced the iPhone the previous year and sales of both NinerPad and Palm OS devices in general plummeted while everyone, myself included, opted to see life through the lens of the new smartphone. I brought the project to an end the same year I had started it.

Key Concepts

The core elements of NinerPad are notes, folders, tags, reminder actions, and spaces.

Notes are stored in folders.

Notes can be tagged.

Notes can be assigned reminder actions.

Reminder actions are set to a future date and time. Once triggered, they can send out a system-wide alarm, change the tags of their target notes, or both.

Folders can contain other folders.

In ninerpad, operations such as browsing, viewing, and editing take place in a workspace which is populated with a subset of your notes.

Where these notes come from depends on how the workspace was populated.

Opening a folder populates a workspace with the contents of that folder.

Running a query (finding notes) populates a workspace with those notes satisfying the parameters of that query.

You can create as many workspaces as you want.

Each workspace can correspond to a context.

to be continued...

Rule Breakers

Some users, attracted to (distracted by?) NinerPad's quasi infinite drawing canvas, just... drew, leaving aside most of its core functionality. In a sense, they too were "getting things done", in their own way, and I like to think of that as one of NinerPad's greatest achievements.

Thea Hardy (1945 - 2008)

Daniel Melvin

Downloads

• User Guide PDF
• Final version of NinerPad, published on Oct 6, 2008