This blog post/review brought to you by TaskPaper...(No seriously, it actually was.)

Once upon a time, I had something which people call "a work ethic". It's one of those strange things which you go back to the way you think back to an old relationship you look back on wistfully. Oh yeah. That was me. Wow, what happened? Coincidentally, I happen to be an avid Mac user, and, as always, as a testament to the tenacious creativity and pursuit of innovation we see in Mac developers, there's been something of a cottage industry of apps written by Mac developers for the sole purpose of trying to keep people like me sane, happy, and productive. With the promise of a special gratuity *coughs*, I wanted to look at one such tool, and mind you, it wasn't the gratuity which drew me, but rather, the philosophy behind it which intrigued me.

The philosophy behind TaskPaper (which I'll just shorthandedly refer to as "TP") seems to be almost antithetical to other "To-Do" list apps or even other similarly-themed "GTD" apps out there. When you boot it up, it's stunningly minimalist. Just a bar with some basic controls, and blank space. After being used to the UI of other GTD, crammed with checkboxes, columns, and text fields, I thought, "That's it?"

But oh, what it does with that space. The minimalist, almost zen-like UI belies what it can do. What especially draws me to TP's UI is that it provides something which no one to-do list app or widget that I've ever seen to date has ever even come close to doing - it gives you instant gratification, a Pavlovian reward as it were, for having accomplished something. When you enter that "@done" tag and see a nice black line struck through your item, a light bulb goes off in your head: yes, that's finally, totally, absolutely done. As if to provide further emphasis, the line goes right through not only your item listing, but the tags associated with that listing too. The line psychologically makes that bit of text harder to read - which gives your unconscious even more reassurance that that item can be completely shoved out of your mind. Okay now: what's next?

I don't get that with other apps. Check Off, like many, many other to-do list apps, uses check boxes to mark off a completed task. But if I take a quick glance at my to-do list, it takes an additional second of processing time to register the check box at the side and think, yeah, right that's done: I can ignore that. On top of that, because it's still clearly visible and legible, I'm temporarily fooled into thinking it's not done and still a priority when that's not the case at all. The same thing goes for DoIt - you can tell it to automatically reduce the priority setting of your items if you mark them as completed - but there's no immediately clear notion that they're finished without completely deleting them. With some apps, you can do that, however, if you've set your items to be automatically deleted upon completion, you have no visual progress to ascertain where you are, where you've come from, and where you're going with respect to what you're trying to accomplish. To be fair however, one GTD solution that does go a good way towards doing this is Tracks. Tracks uses a color based system with very slick fading effects to let you know you've finished what you've said you've finished.

Going back to instant gratification, the automatic formatting of your list is simply brilliant. Again just type in colon after a string of text, and -boom- it's a heading. Type in a dash before a string of text, and -boom- it's a subheading. You can of course, change the assigning of text strings on the fly, but this is substantially preferable to the idea of dragging and dropping things about the window to establish where they are in your task hierarchy. And of course, it also precludes the need to spend extra time remembering to format all of your items to make them visually distinguishable, in an internally consistent way no less.

I find these lacking in all of the solutions I tried to find to keep me productive, and this is another aspect in which TaskPaper excels - of the many, many things I looked at, only Tracks was something that fit my mode of thinking well enough to use on a long term basis. Unfortunately, due to its nature as a web app, it just was too complex to continue using as a fast, efficient way of keeping track of my tasks and projects.

I think about other apps I've tried, and looked at, like xPad, Sh-Out! My Brain, DEVONnote, myNotes, and even OmniOutliner, and the more I think about it, the more I realize that the issue was that I was trying to shoehorn a specific tool (i.e. a note taking or general information processing app) into a narrowly defined job for which it wasn't truly suited (efficient management of my to-do items). That's no fault of those other products, for I've used or use currently most if not all of those apps and heartily recommend them as excellent products (especially Check Off, which I use in tandem with Sidenote). In that sense, TP is special as an app of its type.

The only wrinkle in it all is the use of tabs. Even after some experimentation with the tabbed interface, I still haven't fully figured it out, and sadly, with TP still fresh out of Hog Bay Software's R&D the documentation for it is pretty sparse, last I checked. With the tabbed bar looking so much Apple's Safari, I found myself double-clicking the tab bar thinking I could make a new tab (and you can thank TwiceTab for that), or trying to drag/cut-and-paste tasks (still lulled into thinking I'm working in a web browser!) to other tabs only to find that it didn't work at all. The tabs almost remind me somewhat of a modal interface of sorts, where the tabs are stuck on the default mode of displaying all of your tasks on one sheet. Only then do you realize that the tabs work by directing your focus on a certain given project in situ; clicking on a heading devotes a tab specifically to that heading.

At the end of the day - I think TP is well worth it's price. Its minimal interface and directed, dedicated approach to its purpose makes its price tag seem excessive ("$x for just a to-do list app!?), and indeed I've seen the Cult of Too Expensive march up to Jesse Grosjean's door demanding he make it cheaper at places like iusethis. But the simplicity of this app is truly deceiving - it's an app with much hidden power, and uniquely enough, it's an app whose true value really rests on the person who's using it. For me, I feel that in my continuing, almost futile quest to woo back that fickle yet devoted lady back into my life that is my work ethic, it's a price tag worth paying.

EDIT: Added some links, cleaned up some grammar.