Tagamac

Update Jan. 7, 2009: This screencast is many months out of date; to see a great overview of Things, check out Cultured Code’s official screencast. As if the public beta of OmniFocus and a sneak peak of iGTD 2 weren’t enough, I am pleased to reveal the first Tagamac screencast: a preview of an alpha version of Things, the upcoming Getting Things Done application from Cultured Code that uses a tagging system to allow you to get things done your way. Click below to view the screencast in all its glory. I hope you will enjoy it, and I apologize for any bad sound quality. It was an interesting challenge to produce. Please note that although both versions are relatively large, the small one is optimized for viewing on an iPhone (or so says QuickTime). The screencast runs a little over 11 minutes long.

What excites me about Things is the flexibility that it provides with its tagging system. OmniFocus appeals to me a lot (I used Kinkless for a while so it’s familiar, and, let’s face it, Omni rocks hard and long), but I’m not so much a fan of the way it structures tasks. Contexts make sense as a way to view tasks, but they aren’t terribly flexible and honestly don’t really suit me personally that well. iGTD 2 actually looks very promising, but that’s because it appears to be moving in a Things-like direction (that is, relying on tags instead of on mountains of metadata like the original iGTD).

The Things development team told me that they tried to remove as much complexity from task management as they could, providing the user just with the basics they needed in the spirit of “getting things done”, but that they added tags as a way for more advanced users to apply more powerful approaches to task management. Although what the final version is like remains to be seen, I honestly think that Things is on track to provide this kind of scalable power, and am very happy that I was allowed to play around with an early development version.

In any case, Cultured Code is hoping to provide a public preview of Things in the near future, so if you’d like to try it yourself soon (rather than watching me drone on about it), head over to the Things website and sign up for their mailing list.