Interview & Giveaway with Jesse Grosjean of TaskPaper
Two days ago, we reviewed TaskPaper, a simple GTD app. Being one of the most innovative GTD apps out there, we simply had to have a talk with the developer. So we tracked Jesse Grosjean down to his home in Bangor, Maine, and had a little chat with him.
He talks about OS X development and how he started Hog Bay Software. Jesse also shares his thoughts on the iPhone SDK. Plus, if you stick around, you’ll also find out about the two copies of TaskPaper we have to give away.
Marvin: First of all, tell us a little more about Hog Bay Software.
Jesse: I work at this full time and live in Bangor, Maine. Hog Bay Software is just me, my computer, and an upstairs office / playroom. (we’ve got a 2 year old). I try to run my business out in the open and involve my users in many business decisions. I release very early public beta versions of my programs and then work with everyone in the Hog Bay Software user forums to turn it into a shipping application.
For example I started work on TaskPaper this spring. I think I made the first public development release after about a week of work. Here’s the earliest screen shot that I could find, I think this was about a month in:
After 6 months of refinement and tons of public feedback we’ve now reached version 1.0. Here’s the current screen:
Marvin: Wow, that’s a huge change. What got you started with developing Mac apps? Any advice to novice developers?
Jesse: I was a computer science major, studio art minor in college. I always like the Macs that was back in the OS 9 days and I just didn’t want to put myself through the pain of programming in that environment. Mac OS X changed all that. I bought the public beta and have been working with it ever since.
Marvin: Are there any features for TaskPaper that we can look forward to?
Jesse: A big part of what I try to do is make my applications extendable by others via AppleScript and plugins. TaskPaper has some minimal applescript support and no documented plugin support. So my first plan is to work on that for a version 1.0. Though for the next week or so, I’ll be working on making WriteRoom and TaskPaper Leopard compatible, once I get my final copy of Leopard that is.
Marvin: Yea, I’m looking forward to Leopard too. What kind of Mac hardware do you use?
Jesse: I have a MacBook Pro with a gig of ram and 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo. And that’s hooked up to a (don’t hit me!) Dell 24 inch flat panel. It all still feels fast a year after buying so I’m happy!
Marvin: What are your thoughts on the (official and unofficial) iPhone SDK? Do you see yourself building iPhone apps in the near future?
Jesse: It’s certainly very interesting, but so far I’ve never owned a cellphone, pda, etc… in my life. I’ve done some cell phone programming work, but it wasn’t very fun and I didn’t see many possibilities for creating an app that I enjoyed on it. With all that said, something like the iPod Touch might be just enough to push me over the edge into gadget land. I’ll certainly be looking at the SDK closely when it goes public and then I’ll decide if I’ll be getting one or not.
Marvin: Jesse, thank you so much for joining us. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you.
Thanks to Jesse, MacApper has two copies of TaskPaper, each valued at $18.95 to give away. All you have to do is name a feature that you think will fit nicely into an app like TaskPaper. Leave a comment below with your answer; competition closes 29th October 9PM EST. Jesse and a couple of the MacApper folks will be judging this, so be creative.
Quicksilver integration. A simple way to see a list of projects, list the tasks in each and delete them, mark them as done etc.
Also a nice quicksilver shortcut for selecting a project and adding a task. That would be awesome.
One useful feature to introduce could be the colors!
Decide a color for a project so we can see quickly what’s the highest priority for example.
Many Compliments!
Thanks.
Angelo
I don’t know if this is already implemented: but syncing TaskPaper with TaskPaper.web would be great.
Great GTD app that actually helps get things done if only for the fact that it doesn’t tempt you to endlessly tinker with it!
Though amazingly simple, I would really love to see a screencast showing how you use and designed it to be used most efficiently.
What I would love to see in this app is a task priority support and maybe integration with some online services (oh yes, that would be nice!).
Hi everyone!
I am a German student and so one of the most important features for me is the (German) localization of an application.
I use a little device (Nokia N800) and I love it. It´s my mobile office and so it would be nice if you add the following feature:
DIRECT sync with a bluetooth device.
Besides I would love to have the possibility to communicate with other people: When a group of people work on something they should always know what tasks in the project are already done! So add the feature to send done tasks to people so that they know what the state of a project is.
And now the last feature I want to see in a future version of TaskPaper: In my opinion we should have the possibility to connect a task with a certain date because many tasks have to be done before a specific date and TaskPaper should show the tasks in the order of these dates.
Thanks and Greetings,
Phil
I’d love to be able to drag tasks between projects. And to be able to drag tags on/off/onto other tasks. Also projects should show how many tasks that belong to them are closed and open. ie. Project 1: (1 of 2), Project 2: (0 of 2).
Awesome work,
Lenard
I would like to see a GTD application like TaskPaper be able to use its very own “cloud” server that is configurable. It would also be great to be able to edit the file through a web interface. Truth be told, I could probably figure out my own web interface using PHP. I just would like to see Taskpaper be able to pull documents from the web and edit them (if you supply the FTP or webDAV user/password). If the website isn’t available, then it’ll revert to a local copy.
Other options that might make it more useful:
* Send the file directly to Mail to go to a recipient.
* SMS/Email reminders - having a default mailto/from address for each context.
* Integration with Leopard notes or Sticky notes (or both).
* Being able to create new calendar entries based on a task or tasklist.
* Change look and feel of COMPLETE tasks.
* Enabling TaskPaper to automatically link up email addresses, web addresses etc.
* Making task paper able to choose from a list of tasks for different contexts ~OR~ being able to link up taskpapers from other taskpapers (almost like a wiki)
* integration with Quicksilver.
* add option to only display Project titles on the “home” screen of a taskpaper document. Also, add a dropdown arrow below the home icon that enables you to jump to another project.
* being able to unarchive an item back to its original project.
* being able to create skins for optimizing the look and feel of taskpapers.
* being able to jump to a project directly from a search.
Would love to see it being able to run on an iPod or iPhone.
Able to display TaskPaper on the desktop like GeekTool.
Once Leopard is out and we’ll able to sync notes to our iPhones/iPod touches.
I’d love to be able to sync Taskpaper to my iPhone.
Personally, I’d like to see Quicksilver/Dashboard Widget/Remember The Milk integration.
Quicksilver integration is a must. Will speed up the whole utility of the app.
I’m a manager, so I have multiple tasks for multiple projects that I assign to multiple people.
When I call someone, I might be performing or following up on tasks across multiple projects.
So, my dream app (which extends the GTD paradigm) is to have an “Assigned to” field. That way, when I’m calling Joe, I can query “All tasks across all projects assigned to Joe.”
Regards,
Steven
Quicksilver. I’m ashamed to say that I don’t use quicksilver myself. But doesn’t it an a prepend to text file command? If so I think that could work well with TaskPaper. When a new task comes in prepend it to your TaskPaper file (call the front of your file the inbox) and then later when you are ready to process your tasks open TaskPaper and move the tasks to the appropriate project. For doing that note the Project > Move Selection to Project… command, it will move the current line to any other project, all from the keyboard.
I’d like to be able to keep tasks synced with online services like tadalist.com or remember the milk.
Anyway, great work, keep rocking!!!
I’ve been using TaskPaper for about two weeks now and I like it a lot. But I think it would be even more convinient with these feachures:
- a configurable hotkey to hide/open TaskPaper window
- an ability to minimize in menu bar item instead of sitting in the dock
- display Archived itemes in a separate tab.
And Jesse, thank you for a good work!
A better prinout of your tasks. Maybe prepend tasks with __ or some other checkbox.
Now that Leopard’s out, the ability to make an audio version of your to do list with the new “Alex” voice would be brilliant. Furthermore, synching these voice notes with iPods would be great also.
Right now with TaskPaper if you drag and drop a file into it pastes the file path into as a note like this:
/Users/moses/Desktop/image.jpg
This is nice, but even handier would be if TaskPaper could recognize such strings of text as being paths and make them clickable links to open the path. This would not involve any metadata in the TaskPaper file but just having TaskPaper scan for these things, as it does for projects, tasks, etc. now. Perhaps anything starting with a / would be seen as a path, or such.
Likewise, TaskPaper shoulk look for URL’s and make them clickable links.
This would be really useful as you could easily have links to files and sites related to tasks and projects right in TaskPaper, and it would not betray the text-only approach to the file.
Sub-projects would be helpful for organizing lots of projects. Perhaps it could be implemented by a “::” which Task Paper would then identify and make it a child of the project above it. If this worked, then maybe even “:::” could be used to make it several children deep and so forth.
cool sounds to pick from for completed tasks.
Graphite Pencil
Chalk on Blackboard
Applause
Revelry
Speech (good girl, atta boy, way to go)
*Sound that ascends or increases in tempo as tasks
are completed (locomotive)
Add a command to “Open all Projects in New Tabs” to quickly break everything down into bite-size lists.
TaskPaper definitely is about simplictiy, so adding a feature is a dangerous thing.
IMO, Quicksilver integration is something that won’t affect the app much.
The only thing I miss is priority management, be that through “Priority 1-2-3″ or using due dates.
Then sort the projects by what’s the next due thing.
Of course, you have to be able to turn off the feature, for people who still want it simple
I’d love to get taskpaper to sync to Google Calendar. There’s nothing better than SMS reminders!
Sync to iPod
Okay, this is kind of out there, but what about support for Twitter (and Jaiku)? When a task is completed it would get posted to your Twitter stream. That way, your friends (and your boss) could see immediately that you really are getting things done!
The ability to zoom the text via either key command or pop-up menu, or both. This is important so that you could keep the font at a nice small size printing, like 10pt, but still have large readable text on the screen. Not a revolutionary feature, but one currently absent from TaskPaper.
Quicksilver is an obvious feature, but how about some export features to format it for html or excel or outlook to-do (some of us have to use that junk at work on PCs)
I would love it if this could be triggered from the menu bar, so that it is not an app taking up space on the dock, but rather, a small icon up top that I click when I want to jot something down, when I finish a task, etc. That way it’s out of the way when I don’t need it, and very handily available when I do need it.
It would be great if Taskpaper could automatically parse dates.
Jesse has already said there will be support for a “due” tag, with dates in brackets. I think the next logical step would be that any date typed in the brackets should be automatically converted to a “standard” date format.
For example:
User types “@due(1/4/08)”. What does this mean? In the UK, this means 1st April, in the US, this means 4th Jan. Any scripts that want to interact with taskpaper would have to perform additional steps to work out what the user meant. Much better if Taskpaper could have its own localisation prefs, or look at the system prefs (preferred), and enforce standard unambiguous date entry, such as yyyy/mmm/dd.
So my implementation would be:
User types “@due(1/4/08)”. System location = UK.
Upon typing the close bracket, the text is rewritten as:
@due(2008/Apr/01)
This date would of course be stored as plain text, not a custom “date field”, thus preserving the open and human-readable file format.
The great advantage of such a system is that it is now trivial to support relative dates.
eg, if system date is 27th October:
User types “@due(tomorrow)”.
When the user closes the brackets, Taskpaper automatically replaces the text with:
@due(2007/Oct/28)
Inputs such as “@due(this sunday)” or “@due(next tuesday)” could similarly be replaced with standard dates.
If you wanted to take this a step further, the TP rendering engine could automagically recognise such dates within brackets, and display appended relative dates where appropriate. For example:
@due(2007/Oct/28)
could be displayed as
“@due(2007/Oct/28 - tomorrow)”
and
@due(2007/Oct/26)
could be displayed in large friendly letters as:
“@due(2007/Oct/26 - yesterday)”
Actually, having thought about it a bit more, it’s probably best to standardise on a format like
“@due(Oct-27-2007)”
rather than year-first. Spelling out the month will keep things unambiguous.
My original suggestion still stands, however! Enforcing a single standard date format makes all kinds of other magic possible.
Jim, I like the date idea. But I would lobby for @due(2007/10/27) to be the format as it lends to other possibilities like automatic sorting. For instance, what if the date text tag became clickable and went to a special find results page like the current tags do, but all the tasks were sorted alphabetically based on the info in the paranthesis. This would show the search results in order of due date from lowest to highest. That would be pretty handy to see what needs being done at a glance.
The ability to view lists and, more importantly, to print in columns. A lot more can be fit into the same amount of space with columns.
The competition is now closed. The winners will be announced sometime in the next few days.
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