At one point I had signed up for the Things alpha, a very nice looking To Do list app. I made some notes regarding it, and I thought I’d throw them up here for the general benefit. As it stands I’m quite happy with my plain text To Do list solutions. Portable, flexible, and cross-compatible.

So! My notes:

• Star icon looks out of place, looks anti-aliased when all the other icons have very fine details.
• Eyes try to gloss over the inset introductory text, try making all three points on one line each, widening the box if necessary…
• If Things is supposed to make things easier for users, don’t give them a huge white chunk of data entry when they create a new To Do. Tags and notes could perhaps be simple icons that expand when clicked on, or if the key is pressed.
• No import/export, though it is noted in the alpha notes that this is coming
• No right-click menu on the trash folder
• Would like to be able to minimize ‘collect’, ‘focus’, and ‘organize’ sections
• ‘File’ dialog box feels cramped.
• If no Projects or Areas are created, the only option in the ‘File’ dialog box is to cancel. Perhaps a warning if a task cannot be filed at all, or the file icon on the toolbar could not appear?
• Dragging a task to the root Projects section on the sidebar to promote the task to a project seems counterintuitive - I see how this could be beneficial, but perhaps some obvious mention of that ability would be good a Promote to Project button? I would hate to sully the interface with more buttons…
• What’s the difference between a Today task and a task in the inbox or some other area that is due today?
• I may be very oblivious, but I can’t seem to find a way to delete a project. Not implemented yet? (Finally found it. There needs to be a Command-Delete shortcut with confirmation.)
• My first instinct on wishing to create a new task was to double click in the main grey area of the window. I’m not sure how many other people have this impulse, but using that as a target to create a task instead of trying to aim for the (relatively) small ‘New task’ button on the toolbar might be beneficial…

It doesn’t do the Markdown extensions I use. Other than that, I’m enamored with it. The editing window stripped to the bare bones just feels so–friendly.

The blogging application MarsEdit has a new release. It looks like it might be up to snuff for what I want to use in this blog: namely, the use of Markdown for formatting, and WordPress image uploads. I’ll give the demo a shot and report back.