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Accomplice, is it any good?

03 05 07 - 09:00 - Bookmark this post

On the dutch GTD evening I heard someone talking about Accomplice. As they say on their website:

This isn’t some trivial to-do list, and it isn’t an overweight project management suite. Accomplice has just the ingredients you really need to stay on top of your busy life, integrated into an intuitive and flexible system.It works online and offline, integrates with Outlook and other software you already use, and syncs with your PDA. Oh, by the way, it’s free.

I never heard of it. Is there anyone using this? Any thoughts?  Looks interesting enough to me...

I tried it a while back before finally deciding to stop playing with new programs and stick with one implementation for GTD (decided on OneNote & Outlook)
My observations at the time were:

1. A little buggy – was running it off a U3 USB drive and often had problems starting the app.
2. Limited Outlook intergration – categories not synchronised, hierarchical view in Accomplice became a flat to do list in outlook – very difficult to see what should be done when
3. PDA synchronisation relies on the Outlook file synching with the PDA rather than any stand alone Accomplice program – so all the Outlook deficiences still present.
4. Only allows you to view the Outlook calendar etc, of the computer you are using at the time, you can not take your Outlook data with you on USB.

I found MyLife Organized a better to do list solution as it had a stand alone PDA version which kept the hierarchical layout and categories – I’m not using either of these anymore
rob - 03 05 07 - 14:41

We are using Accomplice to keep our team in sync. It needs some work in order to be a GTD-style system. But it works ok – and makes it painless to do team planning once you figure out the idiosycroncies of syncing.

We aren’t running it off of the USB – but as a desktop app. The biggest indictment is that I don’t keep it open and only stop by every once in awhile to update it so that the rest of the team will know what got completed.
Tom Ransom - 04 05 07 - 02:37

I was starting the install process and saw in the EULA that it seems to store some amount of your data on their servers. The license seems to indicate that your keywords will be used to serve ads to you. I don’t have a real problem with this (advertising makes the Internet go ‘round), but I got concerned about security, privacy, and trojan horse issues. Is there any validation that Accomplice is legit? Especially with that name, it can be tough to do a search for malware reports.
Lee Grey - 18 05 07 - 16:39

@all: Thanks for your information. I don’t feel really comfortable checking out Accomplice, especially when I read the last comment from Lee. Maybe someone from Accomplice can respond here?
Frank Meeuwsen - 19 05 07 - 13:20

Hi. I’m the CEO of Accomplice. One of our investors just told me about this posting, and I hope I can shed some light on a few things mentioned above.

As far as how useful is the product, a lot of people love it and even swear by it, but to the extent that I’m naturally biased, I think the best way to know is to just try it and decide for yourself.

About the quality of the product…when we first released Accomplice in late 2006, the level of bugs among our customer base required some attention. Fortunately, in almost all cases the bugs were benign, but they probably tarnished the experience for some early users. By far, the most common quality issues were with U3 USB installations, rather than the desktop installations. As cool as running apps on USB devices is, USB devices by definition introduce further system level complexities. There are also different versions of U3 OS, different desktop configurations that affect USB behavior (regardless of Accomplice), etc.

I feel good about the improvements in quality, and today the product is very solid. Keep in mind that to the extent that like any reputable software company, we see support requests, they are more often than not U3 / USB related, rather than desktop version related.

As far as security is concerned, we’re very above board on this, and I stand behind that personally. We are after all making a world-class application intended for business professionals, and it is used in law firms, investment banks, consulting agencies, goverment offices, universities, etc. and by real people all over the world. The text ads that are in the free version come by sending keywords directly from the Accomplice application directly to the same advertising networks that you already use when you do a Google search, except that Accomplice does not use cookies. Our servers do not communicate to the ad networks, as that is done directly by the Accomplice application anonymously to supply the ads. If you want to understand this more, see our FAQ http://www.accomplice.com/faq.html and our privacy policy, http://www.accomplice.com/privacy.html .

We worked with one of the top naming agencies in the world to come up with the name “Accomplice”, Your Partner in Time™. It’s meant to be kind of tongue-in-cheek, and most people we talk to receive it in that way, saying it’s cute, cool, hip, edgy, bold, makes sense.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy Accomplice.
-Jason Feinsmith
Jason Feinsmith - 16 08 07 - 21:18

Nice to see Jason replying to this – seems my USB / U3 problems where not isolated. Not sure from the post if these issues have been addressed or not, my reading of it is that there are still issues around this. The website just says “you can install our U3 Smart version of Accomplice on any U3 Smart compatible USB flash drive” – i.e no mention of the difficulties you may experience. My problems with U3 / USB has unfortunately tainted my experience with this product and I don’t think I’ll be re-installing it anytime soon.
rob - 20 08 07 - 09:03

I installed Accomplice on my U3 using the built in program installer and had no problems. I was worried at first when I had to register an e-mail address and my companies firewall flagged the site as a spam site. I haven’t got any spam yet but the day is young. So far as I have used it it strikes me as relatively friendly, intuitive, and has about the right level of functionality I was looking for in an augmented task manager.

I do have 2 gripes relating to it’s behavior. It has a minibar that attaches itself to the top of the monitor or in my case puts itself between my primary and secondary monitors because I have a vertical arrangement (it would be nice if this behavior were configurable). Second, I would prefer that it appear as an icon in the system tray which I could access with a context menu that would show me the top ten tasks on my plate as well as giving me options to affect them.

Other than those it does seem to have a lot of interesting features revolving around teamwork which I will probably never use. It may just not be the tool for me. Ah well, the search goes on.

BTW; thanks you Jason Feinsmith for responding to the comments here. Not all that often that you’ll see someone take responsibility for their product and try to clear up misunderstandings. Just seems like good business.
Wyatt - 17 10 07 - 17:58

I’ve been using Accomplice for a month or so. I have just been forced back to the PC platform after using Mac OS X for a while and I was searching for something to match iGTD. Accomplice does a pretty good job at meeting my GTD needs – probably the best for me of any of the PC aps I’ve tried (though I also like MyLifeOrganised). GTD purists will complain about its lack of context handling (though there are workarounds), but it ticks most of my boxes. So far I have been using it in solo-GTD mode, but I am very excited about the possibility of using it to delegate to my research assistant and colleagues.
Craig M - 23 10 07 - 19:39