Hog Bay Software's topics

Changing the @ tag controls in V53

Glen McKeown — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 03:56:09 -0500

There appears to be a real problem with changing the @tags. It is not possible to actually amend the @tags when they are place. Not only is this impossible, but the effect, which is slightly erratic, is to amend the actual Note itself. I then started to totally delete the @tag if I wanted to change the tag, but now I am finding that even this is causing the note to be changed - here is an example below

- Ray Wagner: Housing Associa@May08May08.

When the new @tag was inserted there was a gap between the word Association (which was complete) and the @sign, yet the tag has managed to travel backwards.

Print Out 2

Glen McKeown — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:48:02 -0500

I also notice on Version 2 (Rev53) that the header now shows "Personal2007.taskpaper". Version 1 showed @"topic" which I found rather more useful

Print Output

Glen McKeown — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 02:41:52 -0500

The search facility is highly useful. But I then print out the result onto A5 paper (for the FiloFax, which is a little easier to carry around than the computer!). If the output is longer than one page the @header separates from the items under it. It would be useful if at some stage you can do something equivalent to Word which allows paragraph headers to stay connected to next item

Refinements

Cary Gold — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:41:55 -0500

I purchased TaskPaper for the obvious reason of trying to maintain some semblance of order in my life. With expectations of an update that would address the ability to embellish ( Color, Highlite, bold, italic, etc.), a Project, Task, character, word, or sentence. Not only can't this be done but when an attempt is made the entire page reverts to a standard textedit document. I then have to go through the tedious process of recreating the page, this is not a time saver. Is there a possibility you will be adding this ability to the program in the immediate future.

Is Focus (Hoist) broken in v53

Matthew Crider — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:51:15 -0500

Jesse,

I thought hitting command-projecthandle focused/hoisted the project and all its children. In v53 it only focuses/hoists the project name and none of the children.

Is this right?

Matt

TaskPaper searching, trade some potential power for more transparency?

jesse — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:00:19 -0500

And gain some power as a result?

A cool thing about TaskPaper is that it turns your plain old text file into an actual model that you can query against in complex ways. Because of this I decided to base my search system on NSPredicate, which allows you to create arbitrarily complex searches, all in a nice iTunes style predicate editor. The problem with this approach is that it isn't very transparent, and it's hard to present the searches in a compact form that is humanly readable. Predicate searches do have string representations, but they look like this:

The search that defines (focus on inbox) looks like this:

topLevelProject.content == "Inbox"

The search that says find all entries that are tagged with "priority" and have a value of "1" looks like this:

SUBQUERY(tags, $tag, $tag.name == "priority" AND $tag.value == "1").@count != 0

So doing search this way gives the ultimate in power, but it's not really transparent how things are working. The searches don't have an easily understood text form. (an area that you would expect taskpaper to be strong in). They also are not very hackable, the only way to create or edit a search of any complexity is through the visual query builder.

The more I think about it the more I think I might have headed down the wrong path with TaskPaper's search. Jordan's TodoPaper app takes a different approach that is starting to look more appealing to me. Instead if using a visual builder for complex searches he's defining a TaskPaper specific query language that currently works something like this:

find this - finds all entries that contain the text "find this"

@today - finds all the entries that contain the text "@today".

@today NOT @done - finds all entries that contain the text @today and that do not contain @done

<Inbox> - finds all entries that are in the Inbox project.

<Inbox> find this - finds all entries in the Inbox project that contain the text "find this".

I'm not sure about TodoPaper's exact syntax right now, but the approach seems to be more in the TaskPaper spirit. Besides "text based" and hackable, another big benefit is that all searches would be "Visible". Currently TaskPaper makes it clear that you are in search mode, but it doesn't have a good way to let you know what you are actually searching for.

The two drawbacks would be:

Potentially harder for new users.
Potentially less powerful.

It would be harder for new users because instead of a nice visual builder they would have to figure out the search syntax. But I'm not so worried about this for two reasons. First TaskPaper users are really smart! :) And second I think that it's a fairly small group of TaskPaper users who are building up complex searches themselves. Most common TaskPaper searches (such as focus on project) will still be built automatically for the user when the user clicks on a project link, or clicks on a tag.

Potentially less powerful is more important. For theming to be useful we need the query language to be powerful enough so that it can describe what we want to theme. Because of that I think that TodoPaper's query language needs to be modified (or I need to understand it better) so that it's powerful enough to describe the themes that we want to build. Off the top of my head lots of our current themes need to match against entry type (project, task, note). Etc.

So what do people think? I'll talk with Jordan more about TodoPaper's query language, but if anyone has suggestions for making it more powerful (and also human readable) please send in some comments!

Clicking is inconsistent in v53

Matthew Crider — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 09:01:51 -0500

Jesse,

You can single-click a tag and it will open a search on that tag. But, if you single-click a file link, it only takes you to the finder; it doesn't open the file. Please change this, so that a single-click on a file hyperlink opens the file. This will make it more consistent within TaskPaper, not to mention making it more consistent with normal hyperlink behavior in other programs, such as web browsers.

Matt

Strike-through in v53 for done

Matthew Crider — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 08:56:30 -0500

I can't remember. Did v51 strike-through even the tags when @done was selected? I don't know if I'm noticing a change or if it's the changing of the cursor to a hand when hovering over a tag that's throwing me off.

Matt

Dev 53: file links not working

Matthew — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 05:18:02 -0500

File links don't work. They appear without a hyperlink underline, and can't be clicked on as hyperlinks.

Message links, on the other hand, work as expected.

And what about Address Book links? Will they be supported sometime in the future?

This is evolving into an impressive little application.

TaskPaper 2.0 Development Version 51

jesse — Thu, 08 May 2008 17:20:41 -0500

This release has been replaced by version 53

I'm running out of time before I head of on vaction for a month... so this is a hurried release.

I'm trying to get all the "major" pieces for 2.0 in place before I leave. This release has a lot of new stuff to play with (themes being the big new part), but I'm sure it also has more then the normal number of bugs and not quite complete features. Please try it out as soon as you get a chance, and let me know about any show stoppers. I'll try to get those fixed in the next day and will then get a new release out that will hopefully serve everyone using the development version well until I get back on June 5th.

Here are the changes to look for:

Added menu item and keyboard shortcut for replace all in selection Command-Shift-A.
Added Clean up line endings when reading file so that you can once again edit your files on Mac and Windows without things getting messed up.
Added Selection is restored after canceling search and after revealing search result.
Added Command-F (Find) should work when the search field has focus.
Improved group by tag search results. Projects no longer scattered in with results.
Rearanged search menu items, hopefully it makes more sense and the keyboard shortcuts are easier.
Added menu item with shortcut to "Go Home".
Added first try at preferences... Highlights include
- Setting for global quick entry shortcut.
- Themes panel