Taskpaper (2007)
(The developer is offering a free license of Taskpaper to reviewers. The software costs $18.95, so in a way I'm getting paid $19 to exercise some creativity and get a good program out of it.)
Never have I become so dependent on a single program so quickly. I used to use a big Microsoft Word .doc for my to-do list, but that resulted in notes being scattered all over the place in clusters, organized only by date -- not good for my job (and many others I'd assume), where it can take days or weeks to finish a project.
Taskpaper's great advantage is in doing a very simple thing very simply. (Aesthetically it's like a red, glorified TextEdit, but in to-do list programs bells and whistles are a distraction, not a feature.) Type something and hit the colon button, and what you just typed turns into a heading. Underneath that, you type something and it becomes a task with a checkbox that you can click when you're done, turning the whole thing into greyed-out strikethrough. I like that it doesn't delete the task as soon as you hit the checkbox; I use that as my "pending approval" stage, so I can uncheck the box and go back into active mode if I get something back with tweaks requested. If I want to get rid of an item, I have the backspace key.
The other great thing is that you can click on a heading and Taskpaper will automatically clear the rest of your tasks off its window so you can focus only on that one job. If you're like me and always feel like there's 3 other things you need to be doing at any given moment at work, this is a really good way to see one job through to completion before turning your attention to other things. Going back to the master list takes just a click of the home button in the upper left.
I was using the free beta, which issued an amusing debug error in my console every time I typed or moved the cursor, but the current version has that problem licked. A less pleasant surprise that I discovered upon upgrading is that now Taskpaper automatically grays out any text that isn't part of a task. I had a few sets of notes that were just lines of text, not attached to a checkbox, and while they're still there they now look grayed out / completed.
You might be able to tell that I'm stretching for something negative to say. Taskpaper is easy fast, lightweight, and a big boon to my productivity. Win.
(The author of Taskpaper, Jesse Grosjean, also offers Writeroom, which I've been using unregistered for even longer. He's offering a free license for a review of that too. I may very well take him up on that.)
Never have I become so dependent on a single program so quickly. I used to use a big Microsoft Word .doc for my to-do list, but that resulted in notes being scattered all over the place in clusters, organized only by date -- not good for my job (and many others I'd assume), where it can take days or weeks to finish a project.
Taskpaper's great advantage is in doing a very simple thing very simply. (Aesthetically it's like a red, glorified TextEdit, but in to-do list programs bells and whistles are a distraction, not a feature.) Type something and hit the colon button, and what you just typed turns into a heading. Underneath that, you type something and it becomes a task with a checkbox that you can click when you're done, turning the whole thing into greyed-out strikethrough. I like that it doesn't delete the task as soon as you hit the checkbox; I use that as my "pending approval" stage, so I can uncheck the box and go back into active mode if I get something back with tweaks requested. If I want to get rid of an item, I have the backspace key.
The other great thing is that you can click on a heading and Taskpaper will automatically clear the rest of your tasks off its window so you can focus only on that one job. If you're like me and always feel like there's 3 other things you need to be doing at any given moment at work, this is a really good way to see one job through to completion before turning your attention to other things. Going back to the master list takes just a click of the home button in the upper left.
I was using the free beta, which issued an amusing debug error in my console every time I typed or moved the cursor, but the current version has that problem licked. A less pleasant surprise that I discovered upon upgrading is that now Taskpaper automatically grays out any text that isn't part of a task. I had a few sets of notes that were just lines of text, not attached to a checkbox, and while they're still there they now look grayed out / completed.
You might be able to tell that I'm stretching for something negative to say. Taskpaper is easy fast, lightweight, and a big boon to my productivity. Win.
(The author of Taskpaper, Jesse Grosjean, also offers Writeroom, which I've been using unregistered for even longer. He's offering a free license for a review of that too. I may very well take him up on that.)
posted by Jon @ 7:34 AM
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