International Mac Podcast

Because so many people got The Hit List as part of MacHeist, I’ll do a special series of posts on it. This was supposed to be one long post, but got over 5000 words. If you want to read the entire thing in all its glory, you can do so here. We now return you to your regularly scheduled post.

The Hit List. Not the most impressive of names, but quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with in the world of simple to-do lists almost through full-on project management. The simple design of the application, basically a computerized notebook pad, allows you to use it in nearly any way possible. A task can be as simple or as complex as needed.

For the purpose of this series, technical terms relating to THL are in bold.

Anatomy of a task

Tasks are the main unit of any GTD application. Standard things tasks can have include a title, date, tags, and notes. Here’s what a task in The Hit List can have.

Tasks can have any or all of these, although only a title is required.

• Title–The description of what you need to do, as if you were to write it down on a paper to-do list.
• List–A task can either reside in a list or the Inbox (covered later).
• Subtask(s)–If there are more than one actionable items required to complete a given task, it can be given subtasks. (The reason you’d want to do this, in a nutshell, is so you don’t have to think about anything when you sit down to work.)
• Priority–How important it is that this task be finished. In THL, higher priorities are more important. Useful for seeing which task to complete first if they’re all due Today.
• Tags–Do I really have to explain these? Tags are keywords you can apply to a task which you can sort or search by later. To add a tag, type a / either when the task is selected or when you’re editing the title. Then, as you type a list of suggested tags will appear, and you can either press return to accept the first one, keep typing to narrow it down or finish adding a new tag, or arrow down to the tag you want to add. To add a multiword tag, add another / at the end. (Instead of /The Hit List, use /The Hit List/.)
• Contexts–Similar to tags, but rather than being used for organization they are used to note what resources are needed to complete a task, usually like @Mac or @Phone. Due to what is probably a bug, this is Beta software after all, you cannot add a multiword context yet, but when you can it will probably look like @The Hit List@. Because a context is a tag preceded by “@”, to add a multiword context use /@The Hit List/. Thanks to Andy Kim, the developer, for pointing this out. As you can see, there is a context field in the Information panel, indicating that the developer meant tasks to have one context only, however more can be added. The major advantage to these is that via the Search bar (again covered later), you can see what tasks you have the resources to do at the moment.
• Start date and Due date. These are independent of each other, and can have both, one, or neither set. The input field will take dates in human-readable formats. T expands to Today, Tom to tomorrow, 2d sets the date in two days, abbreviations for weekdays and months work, and even dates like “oct3 10″ correctly expand to “October 3, 2010″. You can also set the date by clicking on the day on the calendar that pops up when you click into one of these fields. See my post for the difference between the two dates.
• Estimated Time–One of the more interesting features of THL is the ability to track times. You can plan how long you think a task will take, and then time it using the built-in Timer. This field in the Information panel also shows what percentage of your estimated time you have been working on the task. You can edit it by typing it in, or using a lovely slider that pops up.

  

• Actual Time–One of the few fields in THL you cannot edit, although so many feature requests have been made for it that this may change. The actual time shows how long you have been timing the task. Not one of the more often used features, but nice to have for some. It is important to note that THL counts eight hours as one day.
• Completed–A task in THL can either be not completed, meaning you haven’t done it, completed, meaning you have done it, or canceled, meaning you’ve decided not to do it.
• Added and Modified dates–Similar to these properites for files in the Finder, this keeps track of when you added and last modified the task. Simple, but useful if you want to set up a Processed smart folder (covered later).
• Repeating (not shown)–Tasks can repeat at almost any given interval. The Repeating date is set using natural language, and you can then customize further whether you want a new task to show up only when you’ve checked off the last one, set how long after the tasks are created they become due, and have the repeat end after a certain number of times or after a date.

Quite a full-featured application, as you can already see. However, we’re still not done with tasks. There are several states a task can be in, even discounting Not Completed. These stages are denoted by changes in the checkbox icon, or the weight of the text in the case of Today.

• Today–A task with a start date or due date set to Today or earlier shows up in the Today list (covered later), and has the title and tags show up in bold print. These tasks are supposed to be worked on ASAP.
• Overdue–Tasks with a due date that is before today are overdue, and get a small yellow triangular warning sign in place of their checkbox icon. When you mouse over the icon, it changes back to the checkbox so you can mark it as completed.

  

• Timing–When a task is being timed with the timer, the icon changes to a small stopwatch. Again, it reverts to a checkbox on mouseover.

  

• Completed–As you would expect, when a task is completed it has a check in the box. The title is also slightly greyed out.

  

• Archived–When a task is archived (which we’ll get to later), the checkbox and the title are greyed out.