[tweetmeme]I get obsessed with things. Whether it be women, games, tv shows or software, when I get an itch about something, I take it all the way. I fall for a chick and I start thinking about baby names. I like a game, I’ve gotta play every game in the series and all its weird off-shoots. When I got the idea to watch Star Trek, I watched every single episode ever made starting with the S01E00 Pilot. But for software, it’s different. I’m not gonna use old versions of software. When I got my first PC, I didn’t go installing old versions of Windows. When I switched to Mac in 2002, I didn’t start off with System 7. But I play with new software incessantly, even if I’m not really doing anything productive. It’s a bit of a conundrum, but even with GTD-styled task managers, I play. I create projects and tasks, tagging them and adding notes, completing and uncompleting them, until I’ve spent three times as much time creating tasks as it would’ve taken me to do the tasks that I actually didn’t even need to get done in the first place. And I do this all while watching episodes of Star Trek and flipping back and forth between Twitter and gaming feeds in Google Reader. (That’s right, I gave up on Fever.) I suck at GTD sometimes.

I bought into GTD. I believe in the system, and it’s worked quite well for me. I went with Omnifocus at first, because like a good little sheep, I was following Shepherd Mann like the rest of the Internet. But I could never get the hang of it. I think it was the start and end times on every task; seemed superfluous. Not to mention, I hated the color scheme. I was ready to give up on GTD. If I couldn’t do it electronically, I wasn’t going to do it at all. And then I found Things. I started using it while it was still in beta, and bought it the day 1.0 dropped. It was and still is my favorite task manager. It’s pretty simple as far as task managers go. And it’s had a great iPhone app since the early days too. And because I do the majority of my task management on the train, a great iPhone app ensures my loyalty. (It’s why I don’t use Fever anymore.) I’ve tried The Hit List, but it looks cartoony. You might as well have marker fonts to go along with it. And all the other to-do apps lacked projects, tags, or areas of focus. Things fit my style of GTD.

I know what makes a good app for GTD purposes. I’d go head-to-head against any Lifehacker or Merlin Mannite in a GTD debate. And I’m going to tell you right now that TaskPaper is not a good GTD app. In its attempt to strip away what its creator deems the unnecessary clutter of most task managers it creates more problems than it solves. What TaskPaper for iPhone does well are the same things that the desktop version does well. It gives you a blank slate on which you can create any kind of list you like. Because I believe TaskPaper is a list/outline creation tool, not a task manager as its name implies. But it’s a great list maker. It’s replaced my previous simple list maker, Quickie. TaskPaper adds a couple extra abilities; projects, notes, tags, and search. You can switch between project, task, or note by tapping return, and space and backspace control indentation. It’s a rigid structure, but since its meant to be a list maker, it suits its purpose. And it’s the structure that it provides that is TaskPaper’s selling point. Because in all reality, TaskPaper is a glorified text editor. It creates plain text files. If you create a list in TextEdit, but follow TaskPaper’s formatting for lists, TaskPaper will lay it out as if it were created in TaskPaper. I’d almost rather Hog Bay Software combined Writeroom and TaskPaper and just charge a little more. It feels unnecessary to have two separate apps that differ mostly in that one applies special formatting. As it stands, you can open files created in either app in the other one. I feel like I’m in murky waters here though, because even though this is supposed to be the positive comments section of my review, it’s coming across fairly negative. The thing is, I want to like TaskPaper more than I actually do. I like that it’s different; taking a chance on creating a different kind of to-do list. You do feel like you have much more control because you’re not jumping back and forth between different entry fields. You just tap on the page and start typing. That part is great. But it starts to fall apart when you try to use it like Things or Omnifocus.

That’s because TaskPaper doesn’t work well as a task database. It’s a list maker. You create individual text files. These text files can’t talk to each other. You can create multiple projects and even nested projects all in one text file, but you’re still not working in one cohesive environment. I feel very limited when I use TaskPaper in that I can keep track of everything because things start getting lost. You can’t put things in a Someday area. You could create a separate file labeled Someday, but then it would just get buried in the lists list. You can’t schedule things to pop up on a certain date. Tagging requires typing an @ symbol followed by text every time unless you have TextExpander installed and can create snippets. It’s far easier to pull up a list of tags in Things and quickly tap on a bunch of tags. And it’s way too cluttered when keeping a log of completed tasks. After completing a task, you can send it to an Archive project at the bottom of the text file. It’s functional, but feels messy. Nothing else you can do with completed tasks though since there’s no central log in the app. The simplistic nature of TaskPaper makes managing a lot of tasks and projects too difficult to be useful.

The menus in TaskPaper are a whole other problem too. Because you are editing the list directly, with no entry windows, it has pretty cool pop-up and drop-down menus. There’s a Play button (like a VCR) that will let you jump to a specific project and hide all others. That works fine. There’s an @ symbol that let’s you jump to a tag. That’s fine too. Next is a magnifying glass that jumps to search but isn’t needed since you could just use the OS’s built-in search at the top. The magnifying glass just jumps up there anyway. Again, adding unnecessary clutter to an app that’s supposed to be about simplicity. Lastly, there are three dots. These dots used to be a bullseye-looking icon in an earlier beta, and fit the look of the app and seemed more intuitive. This is your “everything else” menu. Hold this button, and you can select a bunch of items in the list without jumping to that batch edit view all other apps use. It’s really a good solution. A single tap on the dots will let you batch add tags, change item type between project, task, and note, and gives you cut, copy, and paste. You can also bring up cut, copy, and paste by swiping right to left over an item in the list. (Inversely, a left to right swipe completes an action.) But there’s no delete. Meaning, if you cut something, but wanted to delete another item before pasting, you’d have to backspace through a whole line of text unless you wanted to lose the text you just cut. It doesn’t come up often, but there’s a chance you’d forget and lose a string of text accidentally.

My last set of whines exist only because of other Hog Bay Software apps. By this I mean, there’s no sense of cohesion between the desktop TaskPaper and the iPhone one. On the TaskPaper site it says the iPhone app was “inspired” by the desktop app and I believe it because there’s no direct synchronization. Instead, you sync OTA with SimpleText.ws. While the transferring of files is fine, I’m also syncing text files that I’ve created in Writeroom, and task lists are mixed in with my regular writing. TaskPaper for iPhone attempts to fix this by letting you tag documents as a whole and filter them out in the file list. (Again, you have to type the tags in every time; you can’t select them from a list,) The problem is, TaskPaper for Mac doesn’t support tags for filtering documents the same way that the iPhone app does. If you create lists on your Mac, you can’t filter them on the phone without tagging them all individually on your iPhone. It’s a nuisance I could live without. And because the iPhone version of TaskPaper saves as .txt files by default, not as .taskpaper files like the desktop app, double-clicking a list created on the phone opens your Mac’s text editor. You could edit the extension on the phone, but changing the extension every time is infuriating.

So those are my thoughts on TaskPaper for iPhone. The task manager that I refuse to delete from iPhone even though I don’t really need it. For all its attempts at being simple, it makes my workflow harder. I could never recommend it as a replacement for Things or Omnifocus. If Quickie was more to your liking, TaskPaper is a more powerful alternative. But ultimately, even for the Quickie crowd, I don’t know if I could justify spending twice what Quickie costs for TaskPaper. It’s an interesting approach at lists, that if you are already happy with your GTD app of choice might be an additional list maker for those lists you don’t want polluting your more permanent projects and areas of responsibility. If you’re a productivity junkie, you’ll love playing with TaskPaper. But if you’re not the kind of person who makes hipster PDAs and reads about different kinds of stationary in your free time, $4.99 for a sometimes frustrating user experience would be a waste.