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Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 30, 2017 at 12:36 PM
Ah, call me Mr Changeable, but after an increasingly frustrating time spent in efforts to turn Bear and Outlinely into full-scale task managers, I’ve gone back to TaskPaper again.
The latest version 3 is, of course, a very powerful outliner.
But better still, it allows you to build and save searches in its left-hand navigation bar (which also acts as a top-level outline).
The function is not immediately obvious, because it’s not described in the user guide. But if you right-click on “Searches” in the navbar, a little context menu springs up, allowing you to create new ones. The syntax for these *is* detailed in the user guide, fortunately, and you can put all kinds of powerful searches together very easily.
Combine this with the various highlights, formatting options and so on available in the .less style files, and you can build your very own task management app that keeps a close eye on stuff you’re doing, about to do or have scheduled for any number of days ahead, lighting stuff up as it becomes immediately relevant (my @today and @urgent tags both colour to-do items red, for example, whereas my @waiting tag colours them grey).
Sadly, TaskPaper is not available on iOS, and the various clones have not seen any further development since 2015. But fear not: Editorial has excellent support for much TaskPaper functionality, although it’s not the perfect answer - I use it via Dropbox. Let’s hope Jean-Pierre eventually gets round to producing an iOS app!
So far, with my modifications to the various files included, TaskPaper is turning out to be much more powerful than I realised it was. And much more suitable for managing tasks than the excellent but less specialised Bear and Outlinely. I’m henceforth reserving them for the almost equally honourable post of joint Notetaker in Chief.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Paul Korm
Jan 31, 2017 at 11:22 AM
Bill, if you stopped changing your mind about software you would lose your CRIMPing license!
I agree, TaskPaper 3 is pretty good. BTW, I think the developer is “Jesse”. He also announced today he was going to create v4 of WriteRoom, his “distraction free writing” app—not sure why the world needs another of those, but it’s a sign of continued life at HogBay Software, which has had a reputation for abandoning products in the past.
Posted by jaslar
Jan 31, 2017 at 07:09 PM
I use Editorial on iOS and like it alot. But there is or was an iOS app: Taskmator. (I liked the Editorial version better, although it’s been awhile since I’ve looked at Taskmator.)
Posted by MadaboutDana
Jan 31, 2017 at 10:33 PM
You’re right, Paul - you’ve quite cheered me up! CRIMPing lives!
Oh yeah, Jesse. Whoops.
Mind you, TaskPaper is vastly improved over its earlier incarnations. I’m actually very impressed by how easy it is to track down specific tasks. I’ve tried all kinds of outlining solutions; the closest equivalent is probably Todoist, but TaskPaper is much easier to use for rapid input, and is actually much easier to quickly reconfigure (your “projects” appear as the folding outline in the left-hand navigation bar, and you can create/delete them very easily, as well as drag them around to reposition them). The archiving function is very convenient now that it automatically assigns the host project to each completed task. And the handling of dates and other variables is seriously impressive - it’s now possible to put together highly sophisticated filters that can be used either spontaneously, in searches, or saved into the “Searches” section on the navbar, or you can simply click on tags to find all related entries (shown in their hierarchies - such a simple concept, but something many, many other apps don’t do, or don’t do well. Outlinely, I’m looking at you…).
TaskPaper’s stability is also much, much better. If you complete a task and archive it, all subtasks and notes are automatically moved with it (this was somewhat dodgy in earlier iterations). You can add and edit tasks even when you’re looking at a filtered list, which makes high-speed task management much much easier.
The contrast between this text-based approach and the database approach of other task management apps (I think of something like OmniFocus, for example, with all its tiny little fields and buttons) is very dramatic, especially in terms of sheer speed and convenience. No, TaskPaper can’t really be shared (or not without creating lots of conflicting files!), but as a task and even project management app it’s extremely powerful.
Now all it really needs is support for basic Markdown, and maybe a simple date sorting function for filters, and it would be pretty much perfect!
@jaslar: you’re thinking of the very good TaskMator, but alas, the latter hasn’t been updated since 2015, so hasn’t kept pace with more recent TaskPaper developments such as folding. Editorial does fold, and also allows you to assign colours to tags, which means it’s the closest thing to the desktop TaskPaper currently available. But it doesn’t handle tags very well; you’d have to write your own workflow to build any complex search functions. There I do draw the line! Well, for the time being, until some impulsive bout of CRIMPing suddenly overcomes me.
Posted by Larry Kollar
Feb 2, 2017 at 02:07 AM
Paul Korm wrote:
>He also announced today he was going to create v4 of
>WriteRoom, his “distraction free writing” app—not sure why the world
>needs another of those…
Agreed, especially when many of us already have a distraction-free writing environment
waiting to be used… at least on Mac and Linux. Blog post from August:
http://farmanor.blogspot.com/2016/08/tech-tuesday-distraction-free-for-free.html
Doze 7 doesn’t have EDLIN, it seems. Pity. But you can use the clone shipped with FreeDOS.