A wholehearted +1 from me on almost all of those - I never ever use them.

One exception: 3) "Show one, show all" - I do use that one sometimes when I want a quick "summary" of my Next list. In the absence of proper handling of non-actionable tasks in Next, it is one - admittedly awkward - workaround. I do sort my tasks with this view in mind and try to have the "most actionable" task at the top of each Project.
Unfortunately, "One" also only shows only one of the standalone tasks, which makes no sense at all (Feature request - show all standalone tasks even when selecting "One")

+ 1

I really like Doit and feel this is the right app for me. However I do feel like sometimes the team is develop features that are not core GTD features. I would rather get the basics solid and then add "nice to do" features at a later time.

I'm using Doit.im only for 2 days now, but I agree with you on almost all points. One feature is very handy, though: 6.) GCal upsync to Doit.im calendar. This is one of the features, that many people (incl. myself) miss in Nirvana. The reason is simple: for a quick overview of today's meetings AND tasks you only need to open one app (which is GCal).

However, I would not agree on removing any features. While feature bloat is a problem of many applications, Doit.im certainly isn't one of them.

@darekkay

I agree it is good to be able to see today's calendar actions in the same list as my non-calendared tasks. My solution is the exact opposite, though. I have set up my calendars to send email reminders to Doit's inbox 15 hours before each meeting. For me it makes more sense to use Doit as the only list I need to look at during the day, because I need to go to Doit anyway to star and unstar tasks all day long as my situation changes, whereas my appointments are quite firm.

I would happily have used Doit's reverse sync instead of email reminders, but as I said in #5 above, if I trash such an event in Doit then Doit deletes it in GCal (and if I mark it as complete it either deletes it or puts a checkmark on it). I cannot have any of this, because I want my calendar as a log and also because most of my calendars are shared. Just because I am not going to a particular team meeting and therefore trash the item on my side in Doit, it is not OK to delete the meeting for those people who need to go to that meeting. But email reminders work just fine, too. I can trash those as I please ;-)

@Folke
Hi,
I don't know which platform you refer to in your second passage. In web, you can deactivate deleting the event in GCal when completing it in doit. You find that option at the end of "account info". (I don't know, if this is also possible in the other platforms, would be useful, I guess.)
cc

@tinetante - yes, I played with that originally, and it sort of works works for completion of tasks (except it puts a funny checkmark that makes other calendar participants wonder what the heck is going on), but more importantly it does not work like that at all when I delete (trash) a task in Doit, which is the typical thing to do if the event is a meeting between other team members only, that I will not participate in. In those cases the event will vanish completely from the GCal calendar, too. (http://help.doit.im/topics/1534)

@Folke
Oh, I see. That's not really handsome, you are right. ;-)

+1 @Folke 's comments and I think his 2nd paragraph is very important to state at the beginning. We can no more force other user's feature preferences than we can force Doit to develop the way we want. I accept this without any emotion. I disagree with all the hand-wringing on the Nirvana forum about the way the Nirvana developers communicate. While I wish Nirvana devs communicated more... they don't. And while I agree that the product is great as is and has great potential, observable development is non-existent. That's it. Use it if you like it. Use something else if you don't. No "Scorched GTD" policy for me.

I would add that I'm less concerned with bloat than I am that Doit spent time creating useless (for me) features when they could have spent that time on things more important to... uh... me! Haha.

@folke

While I still like Doit, I have a friend to uses Nozbe and told me that they have made a lot of updates in the last 12 months and they have another update scheduled for release next week. I checked it out, and they have a lot of the things I use or need for my version of GTD. Have you looked at them recently? What did you think of them?

@hntopper - not sure yet, no love at first sight. It seems a bit awkward; e.g. it does not seem to make any distinction between next, waiting and someday/maybe; the list that Nozbe calls next is actually the starred list. But it does have some nice context icons, and it does have a project grouping feature that would serve the purpose of goals/areas. Nothing for me, though, I think. It seems nozbe are charging an awful lot for some Evernote/Dropbox/email/collaboration features that I do not need.

One really sad (or should I perhaps say pathetic) thing about Doit's V4 release is the combination of the "show one - show all" feature and the manual sorting of the Next box. It is pretty obvious what they have been trying to do. They have tried to respond to previous user pressure for auto-sequential projects, and for some reason they did not know how to do this properly. So what they did was they destroyed the previous and very popular automatic priority sorting and now force all users to sort the damned list manually whether they want to or not, just so that that when selecting "show one" you will in fact have a one-at-a-time sequential task flow. What they totally overlooked or ignored when decing on this approach was the two facts that

1) most real projects are not strictly one at a time (you often have more than one next actions, and waiting for actions, too), and
2) people use the project feature as plain folders, too.

So, a proper solution for projects must allow the user to select, in each project individually, exactly which tasks are to be shown and which ones (subsequent tasks) are to be hidden from the main lists. And manual sorting would primarily be required for the subsequent actions, especially if they plan to automate it one day.

@folke

Thanks for your thoughts on Nozbe. They have a trial month period before you have to pay so I'm going to tinker with it. I have thought that not having a traditional "Next List" would be problematic. However, what my friend has told me when we discussed this is that after the initial week using it, he really liked not having it. He said that they have a Labeling feature for their projects (you referenced it above) and he created 5 or six different labels to break his work down into his AoRs and he used the Label filtering feature in Projects to focus on the the key projects he wants throughout the day. And then goes into each project to review actions that need to be starred or unstirred throughout the day. I challenged him on it being awkward but he said after the first day or so he realized it was really no different than reviewing a traditional "Next List" in other GTD apps. He said that he thought he had more flexibility as Nozbe let's you add multiple Labels to projects so he could really get a "view" that he wanted. He says they still don't do the sequential task function, so you basically see all the tasks.

I'm not sure sure about it as well so like I said I'm going to tinker with it. I'm just so tired of not having what I want or need in one app. Doit has a lot of features, but as you've stated in other posts, their take on GTD via Time management is just awkward to say the least. They really need to get a better fundamental understanding of GTD and then figure out how to get there on their development roadmap. The one positive thing is that they are "active" developers and seem to some extent to listen to their customers. I'm hoping that over time that translates into a more pure GTD system that is flexible in meeting a very broad group of people's needs.

You have a lot of passion for this topic and you've intentionally or unintentionally have built yourself a "brand" over various blogs on this topic. I'm surprised some entrepreneurial investor / developer hasn't just reached out to you and used you and your ideas to build a truly GTD / fantastic app. Hell if I had enough money I would pay for it to be built myself.

@hntopper - thanks for the kind words. Yes, it would seem to be perfectly feasible to make a simple and good app without half-baked bloat, all carefully thought through and rock solid. Please let me know what you decide to do with nozbe. I agree you can keep it all (next, someday etc) in one long list and differentiate them using tags etc to the extent you need to. Both ways have their pros and cons. I think I'll probably give nozbe a pass, but I agree it has some nice features, e.g. the three-pane approach, the project labeling and the context icons.

I am a reasonably happy user of Doit. What Doit allows me to do, which I value a lot, and which is not a common combination of features, is:

1) I can keep a clean left menu, because I can use Goals as the top level of my task hierarchy, and can keep the long projects list closed all the time. Beautiful. http://help.doit.im/group/topic/92

2) I can use the nicely colored priorities as my "review priority" for each task. This allows me to see very quickly what things I need to look at in particular in the long main GTD lists (Next, Waiting, Someday). http://help.doit.im/group/topic/55

If the app has a lot of unnecessary bloat I can certainly live with that. It is easier to ignore bloat than to be lacking important features. I agree with @darekkay that there is no need to clean out the bloat. And I agree with @rbclark that the main disadvantage of bloat is that it uses up valuable development resources that could have been used for developing something more useful that is truly lacking.

The V4 release as a whole contained one good thing. The graphic design was a bit more up-to-the-present-date. But all the other changes were actually either just cheap bloat (e.g. collection triggers) or even a step backwards (e.g. the ill-advised approach to projects - with show-one-show-all and manual sorting, which has no chance of being particularly useful overall for projects and which totally sabotaged the very convenient and popular priority subsorting that used to make Doit stand out as an unusually good app.)

One factor that has always contributed to bloat in Doit is the fact that, as @hntopper so aptly put it, ".. their take on GTD via Time management is just awkward to say the least." The whole approach that you should schedule and optimize your work in advance was popular about half a century among Western management consultants and Eastern communist regimes, but has since then lost popularity in favor of more dynamic approaches, such as GTD, which is more natural to humans and brings about efficiency through providing clarity concerning your choices rather than by nitty-gritty time planning and discipline. For example, Doit's famous "death star" (Start Time = Today) in combination with the historic check-off monitoring really gives me the shudders - an old and counterproductive approach; definitely not GTD. Is Doit ever going to try to support the GTD mindset wholeheartedly, I wonder, and let go of old Time Management precepts?

@wendy_only

In V4 you have made so many changes that were not important, even detrimental in some ways. And on top of all the questionable feature changes, the new version seems to have caused an awful lot of unintentional technical bugs.

Is there any way you can simply revert to the 3.9.x version and try again later with a more stable v4? A new v4 that also has some more well-considered feature changes than the ones you introduced in December?

As it stands now, the sad fact is that Doit is not nearly as good as it was, neither in terms of its actual stability nor in terms of its intended functionality.