the blog of jim graham

Last week when I decided to move my life over to the Mac laptop for good and just use the PC for work the window opened to give Things a shot. I downloaded the trial Mac version and plunked down $9.99 on the AppStore for Things for iPhone. It had been taunting me for months with great reviews, but at $9.99 it was on the higher end for an iPhone application and I already had several ToDo apps. Also, I didn’t use the Mac companion version so why would I need the iPhone version?

Setup was easy on both, syncing worked perfectly the first time. I added some projects and tasks and off I went…

Fast forward a couple days and I’m not really liking it. The first day was so good, the interface was so nice and easy. Getting information in was no problem, I really liked being able to tag things so easily. So what happened? The easy answer is that it just doesn’t fit my workflow. My tasks are small do this items and rarely part of a bigger project. And when I do have projects I rarely break it down to the smallest components. Also, I like to track things like grocery lists and wish lists in my todo app and it didn’t work particularly well for that. I often found myself clicking around looking for a task that I knew was in there somewhere, maybe I’m an idiot. Another issue I had was reading tasks via the iPhone interface. My work tasks are usually long, descriptive sentences of something to fix or change on my web applications. On the iPhone you can only read the first few words of a task and must click through to see the full description. So if you’re looking at a list you need to click on each one to read the full description, not fun. There needs to be an option to make the font smaller or word wrap the description to multiple lines. You also have to remember to sync the two; I would prefer it sync in the cloud like my calendar, contacts, and notes.

So where to next? Back to TaskPaper for tasks on the Mac and hope like hell the iPhone version is coming soon. As a read-only solution for now I keep the TaskPaper text files on my iDisk and can read them on the iPhone that way. TaskPaper is so simple, I should’ve realized it was perfect for me but Things was so shiny and hip.

Also, this morning I signed up for a trial at FogBugz. It’s becoming apparent that for work I need a bug tracker more than I need a todo list. There’s a free option for startups and since I’m a 1 person shop that fits. If I decide to continue to use it and have clients submit bugs straight to the interface then I’ll sign up for a pay account.

Tags: fogbugz, gtd, mac, software, taskpaper, tasks, things, todo

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 11:32 am and is filed under default, photo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.