For Markdown lovers who wanted a little more of a visual planning tool out of Taskpaper and the likes.

wish it used taskpaper syntax and tags for the to-do's.

Worth a look?

http://noteplan.co/

It doesn't look bad at all. Does it allow folding?

Not that I can see Jaslar,

The due dates implementation and checkbox mods to shift things between dates are kinda nice. I'm kinda thinking youv'e already got 365 inbuilt 'folds' given how it works on the calendar.

I'd be way happy to see some hashtag action in there for filtering though.

So it's Org-Mode with a pretty calendar and only works on MacOS and iOS.

Well, it does indeed have tags, and they do indeed act as filters. In Notes view, you can choose between the default "All Notes" (in the centre of the menu bar at the top), or click on the dropdown next to it and view all the tags you've created. It's actually surprisingly neat and simple. Of course I'd love to see proper folding, but it's a very nice concept.

I'd be way happy to see some hashtag action in there for filtering
though.

HA!
So it does! I hope I'm not the only person to be caught out assuming simplicity of a tool. I guess I was looking for the conventions of other apps. This noteplan turns out to be kinda elegant.

A heavy borrow from TaskPaper going on here.

Early days -- but some features are odd. You can add a note and schedule tasks on the note, but then when you click on the task in the calendar it suddenly becomes part of another note. Not sure what's going on with that. But it's pretty to look at.

Yes, I'd have to agree that the scheduling is a bit confusing. I think it might be clearer if he made the whole scheduling thing completely transparent, using some kind of code (his use of @ is a good start). That way you'd know exactly what each task was doing. As it stands, it's all a bit hit and miss, and you can quickly find out that you've somehow created multiple entries for the same task.

But hey, it's a beta!

Hey all, creator of NotePlan here.

Awesome, that it's getting some discussion :)
It's a side project currently and I'm building the roadmap for after the Mac AppStore release.
My goal is to create a long term sustainable app, which I'm going to update regularly.

I saw the feedback for the scheduling feature and got some good ideas from other early users as well.
Outline of the improvement:

Once the task is scheduled and copied a clickable tag would be added at the end of the task:

* Wash the car @12/09-10:30

This makes it more transparent I hope. Let me know of other points, which are confusing or not very user-friendly.

Thanks!

Eduard -- welcome!

My confusion with the notes is that there are two kinds of notes. Notes that belong to a day in the calendar, and notes that are just general "standalone" notes. Lines in notes are sometimes tasks and sometimes not, but any line can be "scheduled" as an "event" on any calendar day. The lines that are scheduled on a day can belong to both kinds of notes. The notes view only shows the notes that don't belong to a specific day. While the "calendar" view is really just an index of the notes that belong to specific days.

So we can write a "standalone" note that describes everything that needs to be done with a project -- including tasks and other narrative elements. Or we can look at a day and see the tasks for that day. But when we look at the tasks on the daily note we have no clue that that task belongs also to one of the "standalone" notes. There's nothing visual, no links, tags, or other indicators that tie together the two kinds of notes.

It's an interesting design that takes some getting used.

Thanks Paul!

I understand. There is no way to link together notes as of now. I was just implementing a feature to make links between days (as mentioned in earlier post) and testing it out. Looks very useful when scheduling. Makes it faster to jump between the days. Will test it for a while, before releasing.

Linking standalone notes with daily notes is a bit more complicated. Daily notes have the comfort of being snapped to a date, which can be used as a short link. For linking standalone notes I will need to come up with another solution to add a short link. But I have some ideas.

Eduard, I have a suggestion. Standalone notes are like the rows in a matrix, and daily notes are like columns. (The metaphor works even if you flip rows for columns.) In Ulysses and some other apps we have what is sometimes called a "Scrivener view" (because the view is so popular there). If you select multiple sheets or documents in a view then you see an aggregated display of all those sheets -- as if they formed a single document. So why not just have one "kind" of document (standalone) and think of the calendar view as an aggregate of all the standalone documents that are referenced on that calendar date. So, we select a calendar cell. We see a composite of the documents containing the tasks in that cell, we can see the tasks in their original context (with notes etc.), you could add a divider between those documents to make it clear where one ends and another begins, and your could highlight the tasks that occur in that calendar cell.

Look at me -- inventing a bunch of coding work I don't have to do!! But this might make the UX more straight forward.

BTW -- from a data perspective, Ulysses does something like this. We can make a "filter" in Ulysses and the result is a list of all the documents satisfying the filter's parameters -- a list in which we can select one, some, or all documents and see displayed a view composited from the selection on the fly. In the case of your app, the "filter" is the calendar cell.

Eduard, I have no idea whether this would work with your program. But in NoteCase Pro, each node has a 22-character UID node property (node ID) that is URI-compatible (URI compatibility is important for HTML export). The UIDs are the output of a pseudo-random character generator. Hyperlinks have the UID as the link target. This works amazingly well for links to nodes. But there is a second linking method for inline link targets, where the user supplies the link target name via an input dialog that, inter alia, lists all the existing inline target names in the document.

Hi Paul, thanks for the tip. I saw this view first time in Ulysses and also thought of implementing it, but NotePlan was too "raw" at that point of time. Your comment prompts me to rethink how to integrate this the most useful. I have added it to my list and will think of a design around this. I definitely love this feature in Ulysses.

Thanks Marbux, I think for NotePlan the plain filename should be sufficient. The saving algos already take care that the names stay unique in the folders as long as nobody is changing them manually. So that the link or UID would not clutter the text, I was thinking of using a normal markdown link [name](url), but with a special name, like [#link](noteplan://my-backlog.txt), which would be folded, so that only a clickable #link stays.

Yeah! Folding is good!

Making NotePlan capable of folding headers would be dang cool, too!

Keep up the good work!
Bill

Congrats, Eduard; NotePlan has just appeared on the Mac App Store.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noteplan-lean-markdown-calendar/id1137020764?ls=1&mt=12

Maturing nicely ;-)

I bought the App Store version. Not ready for prime time.

Cannot add a ToDo to a note or "Send" (which I assume is the same as "Share") a note. A message pops up: This is not a ToDo ("...) [sic]. It's a great concept; one I really want to use, but needs work.

MadaboutDana wrote:

Congrats, Eduard; NotePlan has just appeared on the Mac App Store.

https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/noteplan-lean-markdown-calendar/id1137020764?ls=1&mt=12

Maturing nicely ;-)

Paul Korm wrote:

I bought the App Store version. Not ready for prime time.

Now, there is an update v1.6.0 that can pe purchased directly (not MAS). Unfortunately, there is an announcement of a new increases price:
"With this update, the price will be changed to $19,99 after 72 hours. So grab your copy now!"

Would v1.6.0 be ready for prime time?

v1.6.0 is available on the MAS too. Lots of "new" and "fixed" things in the release notes.

Ready for prime time? Regretfully the app keeps missing the mark for some reason. It's definitely being worked on aggressively -- which is a good thing, but there are little bugs everywhere that get in the way:

"Send To" is now an active command -- but it doesn't do what the command name implies: it means "Schedule this ToDo on a calendar (your choice). Interesting feature -- but the schedule dialog doesn't let us enter a time later than 9:59 AM! Try to enter "10:00" and you get "00.10" -- this is just sloppy and if the feature had been tested the flaw would have been noticed.

There's no apparent way to merely export a markdown file with the contents of the notes for a given day -- short of copy/paste.

Lots of other bugs and UI command inconsistencies and oddities.

Don't get me wrong -- the app is *totally* usable -- it could just be a lot better. Especially because the concept is so interesting and creative.

Bernhard wrote:

Paul Korm wrote:
I bought the App Store version. Not ready for prime time.
>

Now, there is an update v1.6.0 that can pe purchased directly (not MAS).
Unfortunately, there is an announcement of a new increases price:
"With this update, the price will be changed to $19,99 after 72 hours.
So grab your copy now!"

Would v1.6.0 be ready for prime time?

Thank you very much for the detailed comments!

Bernhard


Paul Korm wrote:

v1.6.0 is available on the MAS too. Lots of "new" and "fixed" things in
the release notes.

Ready for prime time? Regretfully the app keeps missing the mark for
some reason. It's definitely being worked on aggressively -- which is a
good thing, but there are little bugs everywhere that get in the way:

"Send To" is now an active command -- but it doesn't do what the command
name implies: it means "Schedule this ToDo on a calendar (your choice).
Interesting feature -- but the schedule dialog doesn't let us enter a
time later than 9:59 AM! Try to enter "10:00" and you get "00.10" --
this is just sloppy and if the feature had been tested the flaw would
have been noticed.

There's no apparent way to merely export a markdown file with the
contents of the notes for a given day -- short of copy/paste.

Lots of other bugs and UI command inconsistencies and oddities.

Don't get me wrong -- the app is *totally* usable -- it could just be a
lot better. Especially because the concept is so interesting and
creative.

Bernhard wrote:

>
>Paul Korm wrote:
>I bought the App Store version. Not ready for prime time.
>>
>
>Now, there is an update v1.6.0 that can pe purchased directly (not
MAS).
>Unfortunately, there is an announcement of a new increases price:
>"With this update, the price will be changed to $19,99 after 72 hours.
>So grab your copy now!"
>
>Would v1.6.0 be ready for prime time?