In this post I’ll share what I have learned in the course of my search for solid, simple, easy to use and manage todo list software for the Mac and the iPhone. I use a somewhat loose version of GTD to organize my todos which works well for me and jives best with my combination of Taskpaper and Simplenote which I’ll discuss further below.
I have yet to find a solution that meets my previously described criteria and syncs between the desktop and the iPhone. Currently I have elected to use a combination of Taskpaper for the desktop and Simplenote both on the desktop and on the iPhone. Why? I prefer the text based task annotation and drag and drop functionality of Taskpaper, unfortunately Taskpaper for the iPhone has yet to be released which means no syncing. Simplenote on the other hand is close to perfect in its convenient simple user interface on the iphone as described here by John Gruber but doesnt have the extra nuances provided by Taskpaper on the desktop. I have created a desktop app for simplenote with fluid which I use to paste my notes and todos into from Taskpaper and vice versa for iPhone syncing. In a perfect world Jesse the creator of Taskpaper will release an iPhone app which syncs seamlessly with his excellent desktop app, until then I’ll hobble along with Simplenote and Taskpaper to keep track of what I need to do.
Some of the other todo list applications I have tried but felt missed the mark mostly due to the heaviness of their task management work flow or cumbersome syncing:
Omnifocus from Omni Group
Things by Cultured Code
TadaList from 37 Signals
Gmail Tasks From Google
Todo by Appigo
If you have any suggestions for todo list software or a workaround for todo list management please share in comments.