Deadline: Simple Reminders

Mike Gunderloy — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 19:00:00 +0000

There’s a new application in town for those who want a simple approach to maintaining their appointments: Deadline. They boast of being “the simplest calendar ever made,” though a variety of features are already in place or being planned.

After signing up for a free account, you’ll get a web interface with a box to type. Put in something like “Feed the cat next week” and it will strip off the “next week” part, parse it to get the date, and make the rest the text of your reminder. Then it adds it to the rest of your reminders on the web page. A search box lets you find reminders with particular text, and brighter white is used to highlight the more immediate tasks.

Other features of Deadline include reminders via email or Jabber-based IM, the ability to set reminders by sending email to a personalized Deadline address, and a mobile user interface. For the future, they’re planning an iPhone application, customization, and an API, among other things.

I found Deadline easy to use, though its parsing of English was less full-featured than I’d like (“in a year”, for example, seems to be giving the wrong results). It’ll pop up a box for direct date entry if it doesn’t see any date at all in your entry. Overall, Deadline has less functionality than the most similar service I know, I Want Sandy, but Deadline’s user interface is easier to navigate if you just want to track dates.

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Two Lighter-Weight Mac Todo Managers

Mike Gunderloy — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 18:00:00 +0000

There’s never a shortage of applications to track your task list, from online choices like Remember the Milk to full-blown GTD applications like OmniFocus and Things to simple lists like Today or the built-in tasks in Mail.app on OS X. Lately, though, I’ve found myself looking for a middle ground: something on the client side, not just a simple list, but not as complex as the high-end applications. I’ve found two OS X choices that fit for me: What ToDo and ActionGear.

Both of these applications supply ample organizational tools for treating your tasks in strict GTD fashion or reducing them to a flat list: they both allow having a hierarchy of groups and tasks, they both support contexts and tagging. Either one can help you keep track of what you’re intending to do, and remind you when you’re lagging.

What ToDo offers the easiest way ever to build a hierarchy: if you add a subtask, the parent task becomes a group. You can choose what to show on the left-side shelf, from whole projects to single actions, giving you easy access to whatever is important in your mind at the time. You can sort the overall view by project, context, or due date. It supports creating tasks by dragging links in from your web browser, and includes .Mac and Quicksilver integration.

ActionGear hides itself behind a menu bar item and a hotkey (unlike What ToDo, which is a full application). It includes groups which can have nested items within them, though there’s no apparent way to see all of the items in your entire database at once. It also supports embedding files or adding “reference notes” that are not action items. Integration with Growl and Quicklook makes it feel well-integrated with OS X. ActionGear also includes the ability to create smart groups, searching by due date or tag, among other things.

Of the two, I’m liking ActionGear slightly more, though its lack of decent documentation makes figuring out some parts of the interface a bit of a challenge. Both of these applications are available in limited trial versions, and either one can be registered for $29.

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Deadline: Simple Reminders

Two Lighter-Weight Mac Todo Managers