Small Steps Forward

Ahhhh. The hunt for the perfect GTD app may have just ended for me. I have been testing OmniFu, but it hasn’t been doing it for me. Before I got my invite to test the alpha version of Fu, a fellow geek who had already played with it shared his dissatisfaction with the program. I was surprised. How could you not like OmniFu? Everyone knew it was the second coming. Then I got my invite and started working with it. … It’s just not me. I don’t know what it is. I can’t put my finger on it, but I just don’t get that warm and fuzzy feeling from it like I do with OmniWeb, OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner.

After all the hype of OmniFu these many months, I’ve worked up a dissatisfaction with Kinkless. It’s a great program, but now all of its faults and bugs are intolerable. I can’t go back. So I’m in GTD limbo. Well, I was until this morning.

God bless Merlin Mann, our GTD prophet. After doing a grand search for all things GTD for the Mac, I read the 43folders post on TaskPaper and began to dream of my poor project refugees at last finding an application they could call home. According to the post, my personal lord and savior (well, one of them) Jesse Grosjean, creator of Mori, WriteRoom (which I use to create most of my blog posts) and some other software I don’t use (went to go get the links for these and it turns out that he’s sold Mori and Clockwork to another company), has created TaskPaper, a new GTD app. Reading it, I got a little excited. Could this be The One? Sure enough, after downloading and playing with it, I think I’ve found my GTD heaven. At least for the next 6 months. Which is like eternity in the tech field.

TaskPaper files are plain text files. Meaning you can create, open and work with them in your favorite text editor. They have a .taskpaper extension, and when you open them in TaskPaper, the file is formatted a little more GTD-like (projects are bold and larger, tasks are a smaller font, contexts are grey). Too bad you can’t open .txt files in TaskPaper, but that’s a small thing. And TaskPaper is still in development.

As you type new projects in TaskPaper or your favorite text editor, you follow them with a “:”. Begin a new task by typing “- ” at the beginning of a line. Follow tasks with an “@” and your context name to give them a context. (Adding “@done” to a task marks it as done. Simpliciity. Genius.)

Opening up your .taskpaper file in TaskPaper, you can mark tasks as done by clicking on bullets on the left (or using “@done” as their context). You can archive the done tasks to easily remove them from the project to the Archive section.

What I really like is that I can have multiple lists now. (Not that I would, but I appreciate the option.) After all, they’re text files. Just create another file. One file for home; one file for work.

Anyway, I gotta go. I’ve got to export all that stuff from OmniFu.

Update: I’ve been trolling through the forums and found out that the “@” aren’t just contexts, they’re tags. Meaning you can have more than one for any task. Meaning that you mark a task as “@internet @google @next” and the next one as “@internet @maps”. In future versions, each tag is a clickable link that shows other tasks which share that tag.

I tell you, this is a plain text lover’s dream.