Simple Lists

Keeping a list of things to do is something most everyone does. I certainly do. Crossing something off those lists is one of the most satisfying things I encounter in a day. Traditionally, I keep these lists on scraps of paper and consolidate to a larger, heavy (to signify importance), piece of paper every so often. This works, but it certainly has disadvantages.

• Tough to share it with others or between home and work


• Tough to save large archives, unless you want a box of scrap paper


• Can't search it


• Easy to lose

I've tried to take my todo list digital many, many times. Microsoft Outlook tasks, Microsoft Project, Google Notebook, _todo.txt in the root. These are all as capable as paper, but they all had drawbacks that never let them stick. I always went back to paper and pen.

Over Thanksgiving, I took some vacation. I've found that I enjoy my vacation far more when I have a nice list of things to do, (and get them done). Otherwise I find myself watching the Today show until mid-morning, doing nothing of real value all day, and next thing I know, the family is walking in the front door.

So one of my todos for my last vacation was to check out the software that I got in the last MacHeist bundle (listing here) that I never got around to trying. One of those apps happened to be TaskPaper.

I went in pessimistic, expecting to be deleting the app after a day or so. After a few minutes of checking it out, I decided to give it a go for the week with my vacation todo list. By day 2 I was hooked. The digital todo list was finally a reality for me.

I love the simplicity of the app. I love the tagging and tag based filtering. I love that it still feels satisfying to cross off a task. I love the amazingly simple data format rules that let the app style the data appropriately.

TaskPaper seems to have a good buddy in TodoPaper. TodoPaper has essentially the same design, but for Windows systems. I'm now using TodoPaper at work and TaskPaper at home. I'd love to see them add a way to sync them.

TaskPaper recently bumped to 2.0 and got even better. The interface got even cleaner and they added a great query language (not @done is a favorite).

The only real holdback on these apps is the price. $30 for each seems a touch much to me but I'd still buy it at that price. I'm very happy to have gotten my TaskPaper license in MacHeist and work bought the TodoPaper license. Free trials are available, as well as discount codes every now and then. Be sure to check the site blogs and the TaskPaper screencast for a discount.

Quick is Key(words)

Tagging your photos is a grueling process, but the end result is magical. You feel so great when you type your friend's name into the search box and up pops all the pictures of them.

As an iPhoto user, I previously used KeywordAssistant because the tagging tools in iPhoto were just too slow. iPhoto '08 has fixed that. The new keyword tools are amazing. You can now easily enable keywords and tab between photos to fill in the keywords. I suggest using the View menu to enable keywords and disable everything else so you can quickly tab and type.



Even better, you can promote your most used keywords to your Quick Group. This will assign one letter quick keys to your keywords. Hit the letter to add the keyword, hit it again to remove it. You can tag hundreds of photos in minutes, all from the keyboard. I will use this a ton.

Game for Google's Benefit

I stumbled on to Google Image Labeler (Beta of course) the other day. It's a service offered by Google that lets the users tag images with appropriate keywords. What do you get out of it? Well, you get to have a little fun, and perhaps better search results.

Google says you need...
Just an interest in helping Google improve the relevance of image search results for users like yourself.

Google is smart. They've arranged the tagger in a way that makes it feel like a game. You get a partner and a time limit. You score points based on tags that match.

The points are just there to motivate the folks doing the tagging. The clock is there to get you tagging as many as you can, and perhaps they are just aiming at general classifying tags, so they don't want you spending a lot of time. The partner is probably there to make sure you can't muck up their database with a bunch of bad tags. Your partner is random and it seems that you'd need two malicious users with the same malicious tags to inject bad data in the system. I think they've effectively prevented that.

Even though I don't get anything out of it, I've still gone back a few times to play. I wish you could get a few cents here and there. It would be much like Amazon's Mechanical Turk system where you get small amounts of money to apply your human brain to problems that are easy to us, but hard for a computer.

What's next for Google Games? Spot the Spam? Add the ads? Appointment juggling?