Bliss

Competition

This page will track the competition to Bliss.  I’ll avoid the obvious things like using excel or numbers to achieve part of the Bliss solution instead focusing on those apps that mirror Bliss functionality in some way.

1. Telelogic (now IBM) Doors

PC Software that uses a data structure more primitive, but similar to Bliss.  I’ve used Doors (working for BSkyB) and have written extensive modifications for Doors using their DXL language (c-like).  I understand that later releases of doors now use vb script instead.  Doors has the versioning, the repository and the data entry components of Bliss, but in my opinion, Doors is very weak on data visualisation.  There is also at this point, no mac version of Doors.  Doors is a good tool, not perfect, but better than nothing.  When I worked at BSkyB, Doors was chosen as the requirements management tool, as I was part of the process of choosing the requirements management tool, I can say that the tool was chosen as the lesser of many evils, it didn’t achieve all of the requirements that the Sky analysts desired for a requirements management tool, but it was a good bit of the way there.

2. Journler
A mac program that in effect is an application that could be created in Bliss. It shows examples of a nice user interface that has lots of built in GTD concepts. It’s kind of like hypercard was back in the day. Journler works on the concept of sending emails to yourself and allowing those emails to have tags and datestamps. Journler as the name suggests is all based around maintaining a journal. I use this software for daily gtd inbox management and I quite like it’s interface, it’s not perfect, but imo better than anything else around today. The fact that I use it makes it competition for Bliss, ideally I want to be able to use bliss to do everything I do in Journler. Problem I have with Journler is that it’s not configurable. It’s simply not possible to use it as a requirements management system without major surgery.