Review: Things – a stylish task management app for OS X

Posted on Apr 19, 2009 in Featured, Mac, Reviews

Things, a task-management application for OS X, debuted this year at Macworld after a lengthy public beta. Despite being Cultured Code‘s first foray into the world of task management apps, Things 1.x is an extremely polished, attractive app – but does it actually make you more productive? Read on to find out…

UI & Design

Cultured Code really nailed the visual presentation of Things: The UI is very “mac-like” and looks very nice. Features are easy to discover and UI elements are easily identified.

The list view Things uses to display your tasks feels as though it is very iPhone-inspired does a good job of displaying your tasks and metadata without clutter. Cultured Code make a point of not using the typical column-based layout you see in other apps, and only show the information you’ve entered – not empty columns.

You won’t find any revolutionary UI innovations in Things, but the UI works and is well thought out – far more important in this type of application.

Ease of use

One issue I’ve had with other todo managers in the past has been the barrier of entry: Managing todos is something you can easily do with a pen & paper, so a dedicated application needs to offer functionality beyond that. However: if entering todos is too convoluted and time-consuming, you may question whether it’s worth the effort – particularly if the task isn’t that important, time-consuming or complicated. Task managers can only help you avoid “I’ll get to it in a minute”-syndrome if entering tasks doesn’t become its own chore.

Extremely stripped down managers tend to be too simple – preventing you from adding supplementary information or tags to your tasks. At the other end of the spectrum you have todo managers that are too complicated, overwhelming you with sub-categories and scheduling features – so you end up spending more time managing your tasks than completing them.

Things manages to strike a nice balance between those extremes. You can use it as a simple notepad to scribble down a list of things you need to get done, but you can also set up projects, repeating tasks and areas of responsibility, if you’re so inclined.

Quick Entry

To allow for even quicker task entry, Things offers a Quick Entry hud-panel, that can be activated via a system-wide keyboard shortcut. Tasks added via the panel will be discreetly added to your Inbox, allowing you to continue working on whatever you happen to be doing.

Tagging

Things offers powerful tagging features, offering some features that cause clutter in other task management apps: You can of course just assign regular keywords, but Cultured Code also suggests assigning your tasks time estimates, difficulty ratings and priority levels. Using tags to add that sort of metadata is a very clever way of hiding complexity: Users that don’t need that kind of detail won’t be distracted by those fields cluttering up the task entry interface, but power users still get the features they need.

Adding tags to your tasks is also nicely supported: In addition to iPhone-esque tag autocompletion, Things also intelligently assigns each tag a keyboard shortcut. Just select a task and hit the corresponding letter on your keyboard to tag it. Shortcuts can be edited later on, but by automatically assigning keyboard shortcuts, Things removes another step on your path to productivity.

Syncing

Under preferences, you’ll find syncing options for iCal and a companion iPhone application, which I’ll be reviewing separately soon. Those two options make it simple to get your tasks onto your mobile device, but there’s no built-in support for Mac-to-Mac syncing. But Things does support selecting your own library location, so you can easily set up syncing using a free Dropbox account.

Suitability for students

Students will appreciate the flexibility Things offers: You can choose to create Projects for some more involved courses, or just add your assignments and reading requirements to a semester-specific project or area of responsibility.

For team projects, the ability to delegate certain tasks to teammates is also very useful, helping you to keep track of jobs and follow-up with collaborators if necessary. On campus the iPhone application has proven invaluable, as it allows me to quickly make a note of something I can later follow up with when I sync up with my MacBook.

(And if you think Things is a bit expensive on a student’s budget, be sure to check out Cultured Code’s generous educational pricing offer!)

Hidden gems

While preparing this review, I found myself frequently coming across little points of detail in the application, that just go to show how much attention to detail was paid by the development team:

Conclusion

Things has definitely helped me get organized and plan out my university assignments, work to-dos, personal projects and other errands. It’s easy to pick up the habit of adding even mundane tasks to your Things inbox and there’s nothing more satisfying than crossing off something you’ve completed.

The intuitive interface makes it easy to enter to dos, but also allows you to focus on certain tasks and plan out your day – something more basic task managers usually don’t offer.

But most important of all: Things stays out of your way and allows you to focus on your tasks and not on managing them, allowing you to get things done.

Things is available for $49.95 or $34.95 after educational discount. Be sure to check out the free demo!

OS X Bittorrent clients compared – 2009 Edition

Posted on Mar 30, 2009 in Featured, Mac, Reviews

There have always been a number of decent Bittorrent clients for OS X, however it’s only the last year or two that we’re finally seeing some competition in this area. For the purposes of this shootout I’ve decided to focus only on the clients that are updated semi-regularly. For that reason I haven’t reviewed clients such as BitRocket and Xtorrent, that haven’t been updated since the beginning of 2008.

The candidates

Based on the criteria outlined above, I’ve selected four popular clients that are under active development to compare. All of these clients are free and Leopard compatible.

Transmission

Transmission is a cross-platform client with a clean and simple interface that also boasts a small memory footprint. But underneath the relatively simple UI, there are a range of advanced features for power users as well, including an iPhone optimized web interface that allows you to monitor and manage your torrent downloads remotely.

uTorrent for OS X

uTorrent has been one of the most popular clients for Windows, largely due to its small memory footprint. So when the team announced a Mac version last year, it generated a lot of interest. uTorrent now belongs to BitTorrent Inc. and the Official Client is apparently at least partially based on uTorrent code.

uTorrent for Mac is currently still in beta, but it already supports most of the features that Transmission offers. The UI is sleek and performance is pretty good as well.

The official Bittorrent Client

As mentioned above, the Official Client is based on uTorrent code, so performance should be comparable. However: the UI of the official client is currently still Java based, and its feature-set is quite different as well.

Vuze (formerly known as Azureus)

Vuze easily has the most configuration options of all the clients featured in this roundup, boasting a Firefox-like plugin architecture and media transcoding for popular devices. But all those features do come at a price. The java-based interface stands out like a sore thumb on OS X and even when idle RAM consumption weighs in at a hefty 110MB.

Testing

The clients were compared by their memory footprint, (as far as can be ascertained by a user), feature-set and performance while downloading. The most important criteria – download speed – is also the most difficult to measure as factors such as number of seeders, network congestion etc. all play a role. So for purposes of this review, I downloaded the heavily-seeded Ubuntu 9.0.4 .iso torrent with each client to get an estimate if any app stood out. However the results are only a general indication of performance and shouldn’t be seen as absolute numbers.

The Results

As you can see, the speed results are close, so I’d call that a draw. Transmission and uTorrent are quite close when it comes to memory consumption. A lot of other features are quite comparable, so it mostly comes down to memory consumption and how picky you are about your user interfaces.

And the winner is…

For me personally, Transmission is the ideal balance between feature-richness and performance. Despite it’s cross-platform roots, it’s lightweight and fast, much like uTorrent, but has one or two features that the latter doesn’t. Vuze is great if you’re looking for a feature-packed client, but in my opinion it’s a bit too cluttered and tries to do too much. Both Vuze and the Official Client also a bit slow for my liking, but you might want to check out Vuze for some of it’s more advanced features such as automatic transcoding of video content.

Bonus tip: Be sure to check out Gizmodo’s article on how to improve your download speeds, – it makes a difference!

MobileMe users given another free extension

Posted on Aug 19, 2008 in Mac

I just received another email from Apple regarding MobileMe. It seems as though they’re giving all users (regardless of whether you experienced trouble or not) an additional free 60 day extension on their subscriptions.

Whilst 60 days might not seem like a huge deal, it does show a certain amount of goodwill on Apple’s part and a willingness to put things right. More importantly this comes at a point when most glitches seem to have been worked out, so this news should be received much more positively than the initial 30 day extension some members were offered previously.

Link to Apple’s Knowledgebase for full details.

How to cancel a MobileMe trial subscription

Posted on Jul 29, 2008 in Hints

Since a few people have asked me, here’s the lowdown on how to cancel a MobileMe subscription within the free 60-days trial period.

Apple accidently charges users for MobileMe trial

Posted on Jul 16, 2008 in Opinions, The web

And this is why forcing users to enter credit card details to test a free trial of your somewhat troubled online service is a bad idea – here’s one users experience after signing up for a trial:

“I have just checked my card account online and apple have put a £121 pending transaction on the card! that’s not even 1 years subscription.”

Link to the relevant Apple Support Discussion thread.