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The misguided distinction between events and tasks
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Posted by Dellu
May 30, 2018 at 04:13 PM
steve-rogers wrote:
> Pagico brings some
>potentially useful graphical tools to the task manager. It’s
>pricey and I can’t find many reputable reviews (mostly sponsored
>product placements). Does anyone on the forum have experience with this
>software and can comment on its functionality compared to better-known
>software (e.g. Things, OmiFocus, etc)? I downloaded the demo version and
>it looks complex.
>Steve
Bill has answered your question on the functionality. it is great application indeed. I totally agree with his assessment.
The best part of Pagico for me is its cross-functionality; its omnipresence: android, ios, windows…it is everywhere with good sync.
As for the price, it was a sale a couple of weeks ago. You can search in this forum. right now, your best choice is to buy setapp which contains Pagico and a number of other great applications. Setapp seems on sale this week; you can check Paul’s recent post in this forum.
Posted by Hugh
May 30, 2018 at 05:38 PM
It’s seldom that I disagree with Bill’s views, but this is one occasion, at least to some extent.
Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its paces. I don’t regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.
I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I still felt that aspects of the application’s user interface were awkward and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI, and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter when you visit an application many times a day.
Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to operate or engage with, and steps that didn’t quite work as one might have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).
I don’t wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was important to me (it isn’t), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the moment.
Posted by Dellu
May 30, 2018 at 06:57 PM
Hugh wrote:
It’s seldom that I disagree with Bill’s views, but this is one occasion,
>at least to some extent.
>
>Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant
>upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and
>devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its
>paces. I don’t regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge
>improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.
>
>I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have
>praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I
>still felt that aspects of the application’s user interface were awkward
>and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and
>lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI,
>and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter
>when you visit an application many times a day.
>
>Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to
>operate or engage with, and steps that didn’t quite work as one might
>have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long
>list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my
>screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).
>
>I don’t wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was
>important to me (it isn’t), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire
>eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then
>quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in
>the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the
>moment.
>
Pagico is a little clunky. It looks like a java application—not as fluid as Things and OF. Personally, I find Pagico much more functional than OF. Swamp of features: waste lots of time to get things right the way I want, and then I always find something is missing; most importantly the inability to plan. OF is very annoying app to me: I have tried it many times, watched tutorials, I just decided it is not for me.
it is just interesting how we could be different.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 31, 2018 at 08:25 AM
I take Hugh’s point entirely - and it’s an interesting reflection on people’s differing aesthetic preferences, too. As you quite rightly remark, when you’re using an app every day, it’s got to look good!
To deal with the overview issue: this is a problem in any and all task managers. The thing about Pagico is that even in the Timeline view, each project can be “folded”, in which case all you see is the name of the project and a bar extending over the dates scheduled for any tasks within the project. This makes it remarkably easy to gain an overview of all your projects. My own preferred approach is to fold projects that aren’t due immediately, and keep projects with urgent/imminent tasks open so I can see the individual tasks. This generally fits in a single screen.
But Pagico has other advantages: you can use Collections to focus on specific groups of projects, whereupon they are displayed in their own Timeline (as if they were the only projects in your Timeline). Collections are like smart folders: you define rules/criteria (based on tags, search terms etc.) for each Collection, and that’s all each Collection displays. So for example I have tags such as LIVE, INVOICING, WAITING etc., and have put together Collections based on these tags, making it very easy to focus on specific sets of activities. It’s worth mentioning that OmniFocus has only just (in the very latest release) gained the ability to assign multiple tags to a task! Pagico has always had it.
No, Pagico isn’t perfect, but unlike Dellu, I don’t find it clunky or slow at all; it used to be, a couple of years ago, which is why I didn’t take to it then. The developers are nothing if not passionate, however, and the latest versions run very well. As for the aesthetics: well, I find them appealing, but they certainly won’t appeal to everybody. If I was the lead developer, I would probably modify the layout of project pages a little (less intrusive text, maybe columns etc.), and I’d certainly want to be able to put rich-text notes in Tasks (you can, mind you, if you copy and paste!) - at the moment, only Notes support rich text, which is okay if you’re prepared to link Notes to your Task (easily done; it’s also easy to link files to any Note or Task). So yes, like all task managers, it needs further work. But as an overall project manager, it does the job for me!
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by Skywatcher
Jun 12, 2018 at 07:34 PM
I have to agree with this. I’ve been trying hard to like Pagico, but I just fail to. I gave it a try a year ago, and was discouraged by the number of serious bugs and the odd UI.
As I’m trying to move away from Merlin ( which I’ve been underusing as a simple Gantt task planner ) because it has unfortunately now moved from a one-time purchase/upgrade to a rather expensive yearly subscription model, I gave Pagico another try since it is included in my Setapp subscription. Alas, on top of the clunky interface, I still find it full of bugs, some of them rather unacceptable for an app that has been existing for so long. Things like adjusting the time slider in the Gannt view can have tasks suddenly shifting to the wrong place in the timeline ( a task that’s labeled 3rd August find itself showing under 15th February for example ) and other rather not-so-subtle bugs…
Unfortunately the choice of Gantt-based task planners is rather limited on the Mac, at least affordable ones…
Hugh wrote:
It’s seldom that I disagree with Bill’s views, but this is one occasion,
>at least to some extent.
>
>Two or three months ago when Bill (I think) signalled that a significant
>upgrade of Pagico was available, I updated my copies (macOS and iOS) and
>devoted a lot of time and effort into putting the upgrade through its
>paces. I don’t regret the time and effort. The upgrade was/is a huge
>improvement on what went before. But I was still unhappy with it.
>
>I liked all the aspects of its functionality that Bill and others have
>praised. In particular, I have always liked its Gantt-ish chart. But I
>still felt that aspects of the application’s user interface were awkward
>and inelegant. There were all those eccentric combinations of upper- and
>lower-case typefaces that I always found - well - ugly in the Pagico UI,
>and as far I could see not amenable to modification. Such things matter
>when you visit an application many times a day.
>
>Also, there were still functions that I found it awkward or difficult to
>operate or engage with, and steps that didn’t quite work as one might
>have expected. And little things: for example, I customarily have a long
>list of projects. In Omnifocus the list can be made, just, to fit on my
>screen. In Pagico, not (as far as I could see).
>
>I don’t wish to damn the application. Perhaps if collaboration was
>important to me (it isn’t), I might have stuck with it. I usually admire
>eccentricity, and it was the combination of tasks and scheduling, then
>quite eccentric though not unique, that first attracted me to Pagico in
>the dim and distant past. But not now enough to stick with it, at the
>moment.
>