Tracks: Slick, Rubyfied GTD
Friday, July 21st, 2006
Tracks is a slick Ruby on Rails webapp for “Getting Things Done” (GTD 
). I didn’t include it in my Top Ten Mac tools for GTD post because I didn’t know about it.
It’s very nice. Highly flexible, the main page allows you to display all your next actions or just the next actions for a particular project. You can also drag and drop things around until they are ordered how you want them to be.
The interface has a pleasing 37signals-esque (or is that just “Web 2.0″?) look:
Click the image for a full-sized view
Particularly nice because it doesn’t always happen, it includes international date options in its preferences:
It’s overflowing with features, but I am not going to stumble through them here when the developer sets them out so nicely on the app’s web site.
Obviously, as a webapp the natural inclination is to host it on a server, although it comes with its own built-in webserver, WEBrick , so you can run it on your own computer.
Tracks is open source and freeware.
Setting it up could be traumatic, although Jacken has written a great walk-through to get Tracks up and running on your own computer with Locomotive.
If you still don’t want to go through all the steps he outlines or you want to “try before you buy”, Chris Erway is hosting it on his site tracks.tra.in and allowing other users to create accounts. The screenshots in this post come from an account on his site. Head over and try it out.
