Today we experienced a service disruption, this is a rare event and we apologize for any inconvenience. Just like yourself we depend on this system and we require it to be up 27-7 too.

Here is a what happened. We host all of our servers with Amazon.com, we have found that they have the highest availability of any hosting provider and if there is an issue they fix it promptly. If the servers are good enough for Amazon.com, one of the highest trafficted sites in the world, it is good enough for us. This morning Amazon.com experienced an outage that also brought down our servers. As soon as we saw the issue we moved to our backup servers, no data was lost or damaged. We are still operating off of our backup servers and we hope to move to our faster production servers as soon as we finish our testing.

Here is the breakdown of what Amazon.com experienced (based off of their status page: http://status.aws.amazon.com/)

1:41 AM PDT We are currently investigating latency and error rates with EBS volumes and connectivity issues reaching EC2 instances in the US-EAST-1 region.

2:18 AM PDT We can confirm connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances and increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Increased error rates are affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We continue to work towards resolution.

2:49 AM PDT We are continuing to see connectivity errors impacting EC2 instances, increased latencies impacting EBS volumes in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region, and increased error rates affecting EBS CreateVolume API calls. We are also experiencing delayed launches for EBS backed EC2 instances in affected availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. We continue to work towards resolution.

3:20 AM PDT Delayed EC2 instance launches and EBS API error rates are recovering. We’re continuing to work towards full resolution.

4:09 AM PDT EBS volume latency and API errors have recovered in one of the two impacted Availability Zones in US-EAST-1. We are continuing to work to resolve the issues in the second impacted Availability Zone. The errors, which started at 12:55AM PDT, began recovering at 2:55am PDT

5:02 AM PDT Latency has recovered for a portion of the impacted EBS volumes. We are continuing to work to resolve the remaining issues with EBS volume latency and error rates in a single Availability Zone.

6:09 AM PDT EBS API errors and volume latencies in the affected availability zone remain. We are continuing to work towards resolution.

6:59 AM PDT There has been a moderate increase in error rates for CreateVolume. This may impact the launch of new EBS-backed EC2 instances in multiple availability zones in the US-EAST-1 region. Launches of instance store AMIs are currently unaffected. We are continuing to work on resolving this issue.

We hope this sheds light on what happened, if you have any specific questions please let us know.

-Mike

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike

Did you know that you can add tasks into Get It Done just by talking into your phone? There is a great app called reQuall which integrates nicely with Get It Done.

The first thing you will need is your individual Get It Done email address found in the settings of Get It Done. Remember this because you will have to use it on the reQuall site.

Email Settings

The next thing you will need to do is create a reQuall account:

• Sign up at https://www.reqall.com

Once you are signed up go into the settings of reQuall and enter your Get It Done address in the email field:

reQall Settings

Next go into the Notification category in reQall settings and make sure the ‘Send me a transcript of new auto items by email’ is checked off.

reQall Notifications

The final step is to download the reQall app for your iPhone, Blackberry, or Android device. This should be available in their respective app stores. When you add something through this app it will transcribe it for you and send the results to your Get It Done account automatically.

And thats it, is you have any problems setting this up let us know!

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike

Our 7th maintenance release of your 3.0 version is out today. This release is mostly bug fixes and some speed improvements. As always Android is available now as an update in the Market and we are waiting on Apple to approve our iPhone and iPad apps (this usually takes about a week). Here is what changed:

Change Log Version 3.0.7

Mobile Apps

• Fixed bug where we would not refresh the task list correctly when we add a task
• Fixed bug where we would not refresh the task list correctly when we would save a task
• Fixed bug where on some devices you could not click the Focus drop-down menu
• Fixed misc syncing bugs
• Syncing is now 2x faster in some situations
• Fixed  bug where sync would sometimes not finish
• Fixed bug where sync would sometimes duplicate tasks
• Changed back button in tag picker to save instead of cancel
• Changed back button to save task instead of cancel
• Fixed bug that happend on first sync

Web App

• Fixed an issue where project picker in Chrome was not working properly
• Misc bug fixes

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike

We have a small update today, you can now preview your Evernote thumbnails right from your account:

Evernote Thumbnails

If you missed our previous post, this is how you can view your Evernote notebooks in Get It Done

Hope you enjoy, if you have any issues let us know!

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike

We have 2 new features we would like to show off today.

Task counts in the web app

If you are using a modern web browser like Google Chrome, Apple Safari, or Firefox, you will notice you can get a quick view of your task counts next to each focus. We added this in the mobile apps already and it finally made it into the web app. The green box is the number of tasks and the red is the number of overdue tasks:

task counts

Evernote Integration

For those Evernote users out there, we have had many requests to have Get It Done import your Evernote notebooks into the app. If you don’t know what Evernote is, it is a popular app which makes it easy for you to collect notes and files.

If you are an Evernote user we make it quick and easy to view your evernotes in Get It Done.

To enable Evernote go into your settings in Get It Done and click plugins and click ‘Enable Evernote integration’:

Enable Evernote

You should now see ‘Login to Evernote’ and a new category ‘Evernote Notebooks’

Evernote Login

When you click this you will need to login to Evernote so that we can access your information:

Login to Evernote

After you do this you will need see your notebooks under the ‘Evernote Notebooks’ category along with your projects and focuses:

Evernote Notebooks

When you click on one of your notebooks you will see all of the notes in that particular notebook. If you taged any of the notes in the Evernote application you can filter the notes by clicking on the tab at the top of the page :

Evernote Notes

Finally when you click on a particular note you will see it in Get It Done:

Evernote Note

And that’s it. This is our initial push for Evernote integration, we want to see how people use this feature so we can plan a deeper integration with this and other apps.

Hope you enjoy!

Filed under: Getting Things Done by Mike