How I haven’t seen this before, I don’t know.

Do It (formerly known as ToDo) is a very nifty, tricked-out task or to-do management app that features everything but the kitchen sink — Address Book integration, Quicksilver plugin, syncing, lists for each context, skins and more.

In the app’s readme file, the developer describes it as “a small application to manage categorized to do lists. Each to do item can be linked with a file on your computer, a URL, such as the address of a web site, or a contact from your address book. The linked file or URL can be opened directly from the Do It window.”

The interface is nicely done.

Clicking the orange arrows moves from one category (or Context for GTDers) list to the next, and items within each are ordered by priority.

If an item has a file or URL linked to it, clicking the small arrow on the right jumps to the file or web page.

Double-clicking the item’s title allows it to be edited. To edit other details of the item, you need to click the “i” button at the bottom or use ⌘-I:

The details are stored in a “MailTags-like” smoked glass pane.

Hovering the cursor over “To Do …” slides down a Notes field and the “Deadline …” (not visible here because it is expanded already) opens up options to add reminders for the task in iCal, use an alarm and something called “Auto upgrade priority”.

I couldn’t work out what that last options does, but it sounds pretty cool.

Dragging a file from Finder or a URL from your browser over the Linked Item box stores it with the task. Here you see the URL of Do It’s web site, but it could just as easily be the TextMate draft of the post.

Do It is designed to be skinned and the developer maintains a list of user-submitted skins:

Quicksilver nuts like me will love the fact that the developer has written a Quicksilver plugin for Do It.

Install it from the Do It menu, quit and relaunch Quicksilver and creating to-do is just a Quicksilver activation keystroke away:

After hitting return, a supplementary dialog appears allowing you to assign the new to-do to the category or context or your choice:

In another nice piece of integration, Do It comes with an Address Book plugin which offers contextual menu options to set reminders to email or phone people in your Address Book:

A similar additional screen lets the reminder be assigned to the category of your choice.

Syncing with .Mac options are controlled within the app’s Preferences.

As if all of that is not unbelievable enough, Do It is freeware.

You can get a copy of it from the developer’s web site .not apple mail, productivity, ical, to-dos, task management, quicksilver, syncing, address book, plugin, Jeepers this is slick

Ghost Park Software has released a simple, slick and polished app “for keeping track of your to-dos using the simple and stress-free Getting Things Done method”.

It comes from the “lean and mean” end of the GTD app market and looks more like Actiontastic than Midnight Inbox and other “eye-candy heavy” apps:

Context, Project and Action views provide powerful and flexible ways to carry your to-dos forward.

The developers give a lot of attention to syncing, which is good. Ghost Action has full two-way synchronization with iCal. It can also synchronize with any iSync-compatible device — a PDA, an iPod or a phone.

Syncing options are provided in the app’s Preferences:

One user provides Ghost Park with a full praise for its clever syncing:

I love the fact that Ghost Action recognizes the
project name in the to-dos imported from iCal (like “some task [Project 
X]”). Very handy, that means I can enter to-dos on my Palm and and they will be properly synchronized to Ghost Action through iCal. Cool! — Ksenia Marasan

Ghost Action is an universal binary and shareware (USD 19.95). You can get a free 14-day demo from the developer’s web site.

It seems like just yesterday that I wrote up “Ten Mac Tools for Getting Things Done“. Now it could easy be twenty Mac tools, all of them high quality solutions.

Ghost Action has the edge in sync options. Actiontastic gets brownie points for Quicksilver integration.not apple mail, getting things done, GTD, productivity, to-do, task management, getting organised, ical, syncing, isync

Mark/Space has released SyncTogether , the commercial version of the app formerly known as MySync, which syncs Address Book, iCal, Mail (and more) data between multiple Macs.

It’s quite clever as you can see from one, two, three previous Hawk Wings posts.

SyncTogether will interest two sorts of people; those with more than Mac and members of workgroups and families who need to keep data in sync across multiple Macs, whether they are on the local network or working remotely.

After establishing a main server and workgroup, registering other Macs to sync to and choosing what data to include, its interface allows for easy control of the sync process:

While it was in development MySync was freeware. SyncTogether is not; a licence for up to three Macs costs $49.95.

But make sure you read the list of known issues before parting with your money.

If you are very hardcore or frightened by the price tag, take a look at “Making your own .Mac“.

You can download a 14 day demo it from the Mark/Space web site .

UPDATE: Apologies. I could have sworn that I was rewarded with a screen mentioning a 14 day demo when I clicked “register later”, but I was hallucinating.mail.app, apple mail, ical, address book, syncing, dotMac, .Mac, apple

Spanning Sync has finally released a public beta of its Google Calendar-iCal two-way sync app, only to experience so overwhelming a demand for new signups that the beta was closed again.

Spanning Sync is said to offer reliable bidirectional syncing of user-selected Calendars in iCal and Google’s calendar (see a previous Hawk Wings post).

The interface in the beta looks promising:

In a post that went up on the company’s blog soon after the announcement of the public beta, relief was promised for those eager to try out the service:

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the re-opening.

[Via TUAW ]ical, google, calendar, syncing, two-way, beta, spanning sync, not apple mail

Making use of Yojimbo’s newly-expanded “applescriptability”, Steve Kalkwarf has knocked out an applescipt that copies notes and passwords tagged with “ipod” to an iPod.

It creates a sub-folder called “Yojimbo” in the Notes folder of your iPod and copies all the matching items to it. Of course, with a little bit of tweaking in Script Editor, you could easily set the script to transfer notes with a different tag.

A couple of things to note:

If the note is longer than ~4KB, it gets chopped up into chapters.

A poster on the Yojimbo Mailing warns that notes containing a colon in their title may not behave well in the transfer.

I don’t have an iPod to test this. I only buy Apple products that can run Mail.app. Still, by all accounts it works a treat. not apple mail, yojimbo, applescript, ipod, notes, syncing, PDA road warrior, mobility, productivity

Actiontastic is a “a lean mean” Getting Things Done app which is nice clean interface and no distractions from its main job of helping you manage your contexts and tasks.

An updated version (0.9) adds support for iCal syncing via OS X’s Sync Services and corrects a few minor bugs that make it faster and more efficient to use.

iCal syncing, like the iPod syncing added in the previous update, is handled by a new button at the bottom of the app’s interface.

The first time the button is pressed, you are greeted by an alert:

After a sync, you will find that each of your “contexts” has become a separate calendar in iCal, with the “actions” for that context added as iCal to-dos. (This is GTD lingo for the place in which you do things and the things that you need to do).

Additional options are handled by Actiontastic’s preferences, which among other things offer an option to remove Actiontastic from Sync Services.

Read the small print though, as this will require the removal of all the existing contexts in Actiontastic before the conduit can be activated again.

I really like the look of this app (although I use Mail.app for the actual GTD work Actiontastic does). It stands at the opposite end of the interface spectrum from Midnight Inbox which has a more “bling bling” approach to productivity.

Actiontastic is beta-ware (free) although time limited to 28 February, by which time another version will be available. You can get it from Jon Crosby’s web site .

UPDATE: Jon has released version 0.9.1 which corrects some iCal niggles in the 0.9 release. Get it here . ical, getting things done, gtd, syncing, context, actions, productivity, nice interface, task management, not apple mail

Jon Crosby has released a new beta of his Actiontastic “Getting Things Done” app (see earlier Hawk Wings reviews here and here).

There are now lots of GTD apps for Mac. This one doesn’t have all the eye-candy of GTD apps like Midnight’s Inbox which you will either love or dislike. Actiontastic also comes with a slick Quicksilver plugin that makes filling your task bucket extra easy.

The updated version features a very useful new addition — it can now sync to a iPod, allowing musical GTDers to take their projects and to-dos with them.

It also has a new tool for processing its inbox.

Hit F3 and a dialog appears which helps you to move quickly through your unfiled tasks, assigning them to projects and contexts with drop-down menus:

Normally, new betas come with a list of bullet-pointed improvements which I try to rewrite into something more interesting. Developer Jon Crosby has taken a different approach:

To get away from the industry-standard bulleted feature list, let’s just walk through a typical flow from idea to action — GTD-style.

His write up of the new beta in action is very fine. I won’t repeat it here. You should read it, even if you use another app.

The public beta is available from his web site and expires on 15 January, by which time I imagine there will be another beta or, if all goes well, a final release.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not apple mail, workflow, task management, quicksilver, ipod, syncing