Blogger Leo Babauta rounds up five great GTD applications for the Mac, then finishes off the post highlighting his own homespun setup, which uses a combination of the Quicksilver append action and the text-embedded desktop tool, GeekTool. When all is said and done, this setup will allow you to quickly and easily add tasks to your to-do lists through Quicksilver without losing focus on what you’re doing, then display those items on your desktop for easy reviewing with GeekTool. It’s a simple but effective setup, so if that sounds appealing to you, head over to Zen Habits for a full introduction. 5 Amazing Mac Apps for Getting Things Done (Plus a Custom-Rigged Setup) [Zen Habits]
Windows only: There’s no shortage of sticky-note-style reminder apps out there, but Hott Notes offers a lot of handy features in one package, making it worth a try on your desktop. The notes themselves can be coloured, sized, and set at custom transparencies, of course, but the notes also come in three flavours: Standard, text-style notes, to-do notes with built-in checklists, and scribble notes that let you draw with your mouse cursor. Hott Notes also rocks a portable version, so you can bring your reminders from desktop to desktop, and an alarm can be attached to any note you create. And for fans of “zen applications” (not our phrase, we swear), Hott Notes offers a “Note Desktop” that shades over everything except your notes. Pretty handy notes, overall, in nice-looking packages. Hott Notes is a free download for Windows systems only. Hott Notes [via Digital Inspiration]
Can To Do lists really change the world? Well if they can we’re off to a great start with the publication of the 14 Great Engineering Challenges of the 21st Century. A panel of engineers, futurists and technologists, including Google co-founder Larry Page, made the list which aims to promote environmental sustainability, health, reducing our vulnerability and adding to the joy of living. The list includes fusion energy and reverse engineering the human brain!
New voice-to-text reminder service reQall is more than a little bit like the better-known Jott, but stands apart with wide accessibility and support for users in the UK and Canada. As with Jott, the primary feature is a phone number to call and speak a reminder to, which is then transcribed and made available a whole heck of a lot of ways—on your reQall and iGoogle pages, by RSS, through a standard iCal feed, a text message alert, or in a daily email agenda. As you might expect, the transcription isn’t perfect (see screenshot above), but fairly accurate and able to both time-shift and set reminders into categories. reQall is currently a free service (and the founders have stated that a free version will remain after beta), and can be signed up for by phone or at the web site.
reQall [via MakeUseOf.com]Free note-taking web application Springnote offers a method of jotting down thoughts and organizing projects that require more than just a little text. Its markup-friendly text editing resembles a TiddlyWiki in some ways, but the Ajax-y interface allows you to drag and drop pictures, import and export files in nearly any handy format (HTML and Word docs included), and there’s a wealth of nice-looking templates for creating to-do lists, calendars, and the like. All the now-standard features, like 2GB of file storage and collaboration, are there, along with a growing number of mashups utilizing Twitter, Firefox, and other tools. Springnote requires a free sign-up to use, but OpenID users can log in with their existing accounts.
Springnote [via Download Squad]Mac OS X Leopard only: Despite its unfortunate name, task manager Anxiety is a slick, good-looking, lightweight way to keep track of your to-do lists. Since Leopard now includes a “calendar store,” or central repository of tasks from both iCal and Mail.app, Anxiety taps into those lists and displays the items on your desktop. Add, change or check off a to-do in Anxiety, iCal or Mail? And the info updates across all three applications. Neat. Anxiety is a free download (donations encouraged) for Mac OS X Leopard only.
Anxiety [via Hawk Wings]Windows and Mac OS X: Task manager Sciral Consistency tracks to-do’s that don’t have hard and fast deadlines, but need to be done on a regular basis. Keep on top of when it’s time to clean out the fish tank, balance your checkbook, get a haircut, an oil change, a teeth cleaning, or simply when too much time has passed since you called Mom with Consistency, which creates a time-based horizontal grid of days. You enter a task and the minimum and maximum amount of time that should pass between each time you do it, and Consistency marks which tasks need doing and which you’ve still got time on for a given day. Sciral Consistency is a free download (with limited use) for Windows and Mac OS; a licence will set you back $25.
Sciral Consistency [Sciral via 43F]If you live out of your inbox and don’t have the luxury of a human assistant, check out newly launched webapp Sandy, an information tracker you interact with via email. Register for a free account and you’ll get an email address you can send your to-do’s, contacts, bookmarks, notes, and appointments to in keyworded messages. Sandy receives the email, parses, stores, and organises the information, and emails you back reminders and agendas only when you need ‘em.
One thing that Windows and Outlook have always had up on the Mac’s default email and calendar apps, Mail and iCal, is Outlook’s integrated to-do manager. Today the game changes. Leopard’s new Mail and iCal applications introduce their own take on the email- and calendar-integrated to-do list. So now the question is: Is it any good? The answer: Yes. And no. But probably yes. The To Do manager, at the moment, is a bit of a mishmash of some very good and a few bad—or at least unrealized—features.
The Mail.app To Do feature resides in the Reminders panel of the Mail sidebar below Notes. Mail to-dos can be organized by due date, priority (high, medium, low, or none), title, and calendar (that’s right, they also integrate with iCal). You can create a new to-do in a couple of ways.
First, click the To Do button in the toolbar. You’ll jump straight to the To Do window, where you can enter the details of a new item. Alternately, you can create your to-dos from Notes (another new feature in Mail). Once you’ve written a note, you can convert any line of the note or the entire note into one or several to-dos. The strange-yet-interesting thing about to-do notes is that the new to-do will appear in the To Do screen as well as the note, and you can check it off in either place. In fact, you can check off to-dos in a third place as well: iCal.
iCal’s organisation of to-dos is much more convenient than Mail’s To Do view, if only for its more prominent focus on due dates and priorities and its sidebar display (so you can view to-dos along with application content). To get a look at your to-do list within iCal, just click the thumb tack button on the bottom right of iCal. From there, you can check off your to-dos, re-prioritise, or change other information by double-clicking the item.
My biggest gripe about Mail’s implementation of to-dos is that you can’t create a new to-do from an email (or anything else, for that matter) via drag and drop. Also, the Notes integration is completely bizzare since Apple dropped the ball on supporting iPhone-to-Mail syncing of notes. As is, it comes off like a pointless appendage to Mail.app.
Another little bug I ran into: I couldn’t change the due date of a to-do from Mail when iCal was open. Instead, I had to change the date inside iCal—though I would assume this will be fixed with an update.
In the end, to-do lovers have a promising addition to Apple’s email and calendar apps, but considering the breadth of full-featured alternative to-do list managers that have popped up in the absence of one from Apple (including ones that integrate with iCal in one way or another), it’s tough to say whether Leopard’s To Do feature will catch on for the hardcore list keeper.
Web-based application Famundu is a one-stop calendar, to-do list, contact management solution and more with a focus on family. With it you and your family members can collaboratively schedule everything from soccer practice to family fun night or build to-do lists and shopping lists from the comfort of your browser (be sure to check out their video demo for more). Famundo is free to use, but a premium account with a few more features is also available. If you’ve been looking for a centralised way to organise your family’s schedules and beyond, Famundo looks like a promising solution. Then again, if shared calendaring is all you want, Google Calendar would work nicely. Thanks Nancy!
Famundo
