Review: TaskPaper
As a long time user of KGTD I became one of the first alpha testers of Omnigroup’s new GTD application OmniFocus. I spent months downloading daily versions and spent hours on the OmniFocus forums. I had eagerly anticipated OmniFocus since the first rumors of OmniGroups collaboration with KGTD author Ethan Schoonover surfaced.
Recently Jesse Grosjean of HogBaySoftware introduced TaskPaper. A fan of Jesse’s other projects (Mori, WriteRoom) I decided to give it a whirl. I’m very glad I did (as are others).
TaskPaper is basically a text file on steroids. End a sentence with a colon and it becomes a project in bold. Precede a sentence with a hyphen and it becomes a task. Append an @ symbol to the end of your task and tag it with a context (home, work, etc). You can add comments by simply using plain text without any added markup.
Click on a tag and the view switches to every task with that context. Click the bubble to the left of a task and a line is drawn through it marking it done. Archive done tasks and they vanish to the very bottom of the text file to form a ‘done’ list. This can all be done by the keyboard or a corresponding button in the tool bar.
Add a search function, and that’s basically the application. It’s beautifully simply, yet very powerful. There’s almost no learning curve. It took me 5 minutes to put everything I had in OmniFocus into TaskPaper.
The greatest feature of TaskPaper is that it’s simple text. It’s lightning fast. It’s stable. It’s light-weight. It’s straight forward and doesn’t get in your way. The author is receptive to requests and actively supports his applications.
It doesn’t come out of the box with all the bells and whistles of OmniFocus. It doesn’t support subprojects, there’s no quick entry box, and it doesn’t sync with iCal. A big challenge for the author will be deciding what to add to TaskPaper to enhance it and what would take away from its core strength of simplicity. Subprojects, which would be easy to implement, and a simple task flagging feature that would then send it to iCal would be my biggest requests.
Even as a 1.0 release, I’ve gotten more done with TaskPaper than I ever did with OmniFocus. I constantly fiddled with OmniFocus. With TaskPaper I spend much more time working out of iCal, which is preferable, while using VoodooPad for project planning.
I’ll still buy OmniFocus. It’s a solid product, and I’d like to get the early bird discount. But unless I reach a point where TaskPaper doesn’t meet my needs, I’m sticking with it.
note: Jesse Grosjean is offering a free license to anyone reviewing TaskPaper. There’s no requirement for the review to be positive, and considering that HogBaySoftware is a one man company, I see no problem with his attempt to get the word out on his wonderful application.
