Tagamac

As if the choice wasn’t difficult enough already, yet another Getting Things Done application entered the wild today; Potion Factory today released a public preview version of The Hit List, a GTD app that treads a middle path between OmniFocus‘ high-powered outlining and Things‘ beautiful minimalism, with a dash of TaskPaper‘s text-based tagging for good measure. By combining outlining-style task management with the concept of lists and robust text-based tagging, The Hit List is an application that will likely appeal to those who love OmniFocus’ flexibility but are yearning for an application with a little more visual pizazz.

Some of my personal favorite features of The Hit List include the tabs (which essentially allow you to save snapshots of the sidebar and navigate between them, something which Things is sorely lacking), the wonderful notebook-paper inspired themes, and the in-depth and easy to get into keyboard navigation. If OmniFocus or the recently released Things don’t quite scratch your task management itch, The Hit List will be well worth checking out. According to its early testers, The Hit List is stable enough for daily use despite being in beta and not yet feature complete. If you fall in love with The Hit List you can preorder it for $49.95; the price after release will jump to $69.95, and it is completely free during the public preview. For more information and to download the application, visit the Hit List public preview announcement.

Big news for those interested in file organization! Devon Technologies yesterday released a public beta of the long-awaited DevonThink 2.0. Among other things, DevonThink 2.0 offers the ability to open multiple databases at the same time, a completely revitalized interface, a web interface to your database, saves files to its database as-is (thus allowing them to be edited by external programs), smart groups for sorting your files, and at long last adds tagging (sort of). DevonThink has always been one of the most feature-rich file libraries available, and with version 2.0 it at last is a bit more friendly. If you need a lot of power and automation (particularly sorting/grouping automation) and don’t mind sacrificing the Finder-friendly approach of Together or EagleFiler for a database, then you’ll need to give DevonThink 2.0 a serious look.

The downside to the first public beta is that it doesn’t actually have much in the way of tagging support. There’s a place for tags in the Get Info window, but you can’t edit them (the contents currently defaults to the groups for a document). However, tagging (and presumably auto-tagging, given DevonThink’s long dedication to auto-sorting) is definitely on the radar for the final release. For more information about what’s new in DevonThink 2.0 and to download see the release notes and DevonThink 2.0 page. The first public beta will expire at the end of January, and upgrade options will be made available at the DevonThink website soon (they have announced, however, that users who purchased DevonThink 1.x after July 1, 2008 will receive a free upgrade to 2.0). DevonThink 2.0 requires OS 10.5.

Evernote, the access-anywhere application for storing notes and images, is now an open beta (no more needing to be invited!). Among other changes, this release also finally reveals the Evernote revenue plan: there are now free and premium accounts. Although both accounts can store as much stuff online as you want, the free account only lets you upload 40 megabytes a month while the $5/month premium account allows you to upload 500 megabytes a month (along with a few other perks).

Evernote is very cool, and well worth checking out. Although I’ve been slightly underwhelmed with the Mac client (hopefully I’ll get a preview/review up here soon, although it’s been on the burner for months) the service has a lot to recommend it (for details see the Evernote website or the numerous places around the web where people have been lavishing praise on the service). For details about the recent public beta release, check out the Evernote blog post on the topic.

Things, the beautiful tag-based task manager that I’ve mooned over before, has been updated to version 0.9 (beta). This version adds recurring tasks, the ability to choose your Things library location (just hold down option while launching Things), hierarchical tags in the tag drop-down menu, and numerous welcome bug fixes and performance enhancements.

I can’t recommend Things highly enough. I’ve been using it since shortly before I recorded the screencast in November, and my opinion has only improved. Things is simply the easiest, most flexible solution to task management that I’ve found, I have a lot of respect for the developers’ creative vision, and the burgeoning Things community is great. For more information about the 0.9 release, see the blog posts on recurring tasks and the 0.9 release announcement or the release notes. Things is, as always, free to use until its release, and I’ve found it to be extremely stable. Bugs tend to be cosmetic rather than data-threatening.

Thanks to a tip from a reader, I just discovered Evernote 3.0 beta, a web service for storing notes, images, and clippings with clients for Mac, Windows, and mobile phones alike. The screencast featuring the Mac client makes it look very, very cool, and with tagging support and super easy searching and tag-based filtering, this looks like it may be a strong competitor with more traditional desktop-only file libraries in some respects.

I’ve sent some questions to the Evernote press people, and if they’re willing I’ll try and get a preview of the Mac client up here on Tagamac in the near future. Just seeing the screencast, I’m really excited about the possibilities Evernote seems to offer.

Punaka, the free file system tagging solution from nudge:nudge, has been updated to version 0.4 (technically beta software, but very stable). Punakea now requires OS 10.5, but if you’re running Leopard it’s well worth a download. Features include the ability to edit tags from directly within the tag browser, a Tags folder that automatically generates a folder structure corresponding to the tags you attach to files (complete with file aliases; this ain’t no smart folder, folks), a new Drop Box folder that will automatically attach tags to any files saved there (by default “untagged”), and numerous interface brush-ups and under-the-hood improvements.

Punakea is an excellent choice if you’re looking for file system tagging, but there is one major caveat: Punakea uses a very unfriendly syntax for Spotlight comment tagging. Although this means you can use spaces in your tags, tagging files by hand using Punakea’s syntax is difficult at best. The program provides workarounds (an excellent, unobtrusive sidebar for one), but to tag with Punakea you generally have to have the program running all the time. For more details about this update, see the release notes. Punakea 0.3.2 is still available for Tiger users.

Another MailTags 2.2 public beta has been released, this one marked as release candidate 1. Included in this beta is the option to uninstall MailTags if your trial has expired, a reset to the 21 day trial period for all you who want to continue to play with it without registering, various IMAP bug fixes, and a number of new preference fixes and new options to help with managing your tags.

As always, keep in mind that this is beta software (and won’t run on OS 10.4). For more information and to download the beta, see the MailTags for Leopard beta page.

The MailTags 2.2 beta for Leopard has been updated to public beta 4. This release removes Gmail IMAP tagging support (tags on Gmail IMAP messages will only be stored locally) because of Gmail’s nonstandard IMAP implementation, adds red tags back for tags which are not synched to IMAP accounts, and features a number of other improvements and interface tweaks.

For more information and to download, see the MailTags for Leopard page. As always, keep in mind that this is beta software and will not run on OS 10.4.

If you’ve been waiting to shell out for OmniFocus in the hopes that you could try the competition, you’re in luck! Things, the hot new GTD app from Cultured Code, is now available as a completely public preview. Head over to the Things website to download it if you want to see for yourself how cool tagging and GTD are together. Additionally, pricing info has been announced! Things will be released in Spring 2008 for $49, or $39 for members of the mailing list who sign up before January 31st. Keep in mind that Things is still not feature-complete, but the latest preview versions are very stable; I’ve been using it as my primary task manager since shortly before the limited public preview was released and have been very happy with it.

I’ve written a page in the now-public Things wiki with a real-world tagging example if you would like some help designing your tag cloud for Things. Additionally, you can still watch my Things screencast if you’d like to see it in action before diving in yourself. Please note that some very cool features have been added (particularly the ability to link to email messages and other documents) since I recorded the screencast, though.

The third public beta for MailTags 2.2 has been released, bringing the venerable Mail.app plugin ever closer to a Leopard release. This version of the beta is much more feature-complete than past versions and is well worth upgrading to if you’re running Leopard. It also provides a new, modular approach to some of MailTags’ features (notably calendar and event handling). The developer expects to release the full version around the middle of January after squashing any outstanding bugs in this beta.

For more information and to download the update, visit the MailTags for Leopard beta page.