International Mac Podcast

Edit: I neglected to mention that SimpleTask Mac is in Beta, and coming out of it as soon as Apple approves SimpleTask iPhone. Also, I previously stated that SimpleTask iPhone would be free, but it will be $1.99.

You may have noticed, although probably not, that I deliberately avoided the words “Getting,” “Things,” and “Done” in the title of this review. There is a reason for this. SimpleTask is not a comprehensive GTD app. GTD has a specific meaning with specific criteria, although it has drifted away somewhat from referring to David Allen’s book. There are at least two categories of task lists, and the one most people think of is the more complex one, which involves dates and priorities and tags and contexts and such. The other one that springs to mind less often is just a list, with checkboxes and titles. SimpleTask falls into this category.

Another category it falls into is the Delicious Generation. There are many interpretations of this concept, but I like mine the best. A delicious app is one which uses nonstandard GUI to great advantage. The most famous example is Delicious Library, which departs from the standard Finder-like way of presenting large groups of items, and uses the idea of a bookshelf. Others that fit in to this category are iVolume, The Hit List, Disco, QuickPost, Tweetie, and many more. SimpleTask succeeds with this model, which makes it a pleasure to use.

The first evidence of how well thought out it is you see when you first open the app. It begins with a splash screen that tells you the essentails of how to use it, and invites you to watch a screencast  about this, inside the application itself. This is also where you see the first signs of how new the app is, and the few inconsistencies that need to be ironed out. The screencast, instead of immediately playing in that window when you click the play button, insteads opens a new and surprisingly default-looking window. It’s a lot better than opening a web browser without warning, but fading out the splash screen and starting the video would give it the extra “wow” factor right up front. The other oddity here is the lack of a friendly “Close” button. I hunted around for a bit before cottoning on to the availability of the normal OS X “close window” button in the upper left. Minor kinks like these can bulid up and create a less-than-ideal user experience.

When you close this window, you are presented with a simple (hence the name) empty task list. The plus button in the bottom corner invites you to add a task, and from there you immediately see all the properites a task can have: Title, Description, Color, and Important. The Title field is the only required one, and the “None” color option is actually gray.

After you’ve loaded up your task list with all the tasks you need to do, you probably want to reorder them. In keeping with the rest of OS X, to do this all you need to do is drag and drop. However, this is where I found the first outright bug in SimpleTask. If you drag a task down, it falls underneath the task you dropped it on, even if the line indicating the drop location is above that task. The only other one I’ve found is that the color labels don’t extend all the way across if you make the window too large.

The second thing you may or may not want to do is edit tasks. You can change wheter a task is marked as “important” by clicking the flag underneath the checkbox. The checkbox obviously marks a task as done. To edit the rest of a task, double-click it. A somewhat iCal-like editor then appears, from which you can change all the task properties.

The purpose of a title and checkbox are evident, but what of the others? The description field, as far as I can see, is for holding any and all other pieces of information necessary for the task. As you can see, in my first task, the display of it is overflowing, and it doesn’t all fit on the one line in the editor. I’d prefer the editor to be a text box, not a text field, and for the text to end in an ellipsis (…) if it can’t all fit, as is the standard practice.

The color is there for whatever you want to do with it: organize into categories, sort by priority, make your task list pretty, and so forth. If the first two are to be explored more, I would consider putting a section in the preferences to allow users to change the names of the colors, as the Finder does.

“Important” can be an important checkbox (pun intended, my apologies). The default setting for SimpleTask’s dock icon is to show a badge of all the Important items. This allows you to have a more flexible, but still simple, prioritizing system; use the order of tasks to indicate what you intend to work on, and use flags to indicate what must be completed. This way you can easily see if you are running behind schedule, and rearrange your tasks accordingly.

SimpleTask is also pretty keyboard-friendly. Return while on a task opens the editor, and from there you can edit the two fields, and the rest if you have “Tab between all controls” enabled in System Preferences->Keyboard & Mouse->Keyboard Shortcuts. Escape then closes the editor again. cmd-N will add a task, and delete either mark an uncompleted task as completed or permantly delete a completed task. cmd-F allows you to search through all your tasks via the search bar at the top of the window, and cmd-1 and cmd-2 take you to your Pending and Complete section respectively. Reordering is not keyboard-friendly, though, and I would suggest cmd-down and cmd-up to move tasks. Mouse navigation is also very comprehensive, although The Hit List has gotten me used to double-clicking an empty spot in the list area to create a new task.

The preferences have options to automatically update the app and play sounds when tasks are completed and deleted, and whether to show nothing, important tasks, or all tasks in the Dock badge.

A companion iPhone app is in the works, which will sync with the desktop version, and one of the IMP team is a beta-tester and may have a review ready by the time it is released to the public.

The best part, however, is that SimpleTask Mac is free, and the future SimpleTask iPhone will only be $1.99, although donations are requested, and definitely encouraged by me. All three developers did a fantastic job, and deserve something for that.