TaskPaper: Syncing and Saving
My review of TaskPaper for the iPhone was quite positive. I continue to use the application on my phone and on my Mac, and am still quite happy with the experience. There are however a couple issues with the Mac version of the application that could do with some improvement, namely syncing and saving. The two deficiencies are also fairly intertwined.
On the iPhone one thing you never have to do is save the document you’re working on. There really isn’t any concept of unsaved work on the iPhone. I think for most applications this is actually ideal. Certainly with something like a todo list manager, if I add a new todo to a list I’d like it to be saved without any intervention from me. An application like Things, which isn’t structured around documents, has this behaviour by default. TaskPaper is essentially a tricked-out text editor, and as such behaves like your typical text-editor: you have to manually save your work.
TaskPaper does have an auto-save feature, but it’s behaviour is a bit archaic. (I believe it’s purpose is to protect you in the event of a crash. Your changes are stored in a separate ‘autosaved’ document.) TaskPaper can also automatically save your document when you quit, without being prompted to do so, so its certainly not the case that you are going to lose your work because you forgot to save. The problems with not saving come from the way documents are synced to the cloud.
The SimpleText application will sync a folder of documents to the cloud service SimpleText.ws whenever it detects a file has changed. If you forget to save your todo list it won’t get synced to the cloud. This is actually easy to do if you use TaskPaper’s Quick Entry Window, since you never actually see the document you’re editing. Conversely, the open unsaved file can be changed by the iPhone application, causing problems when you do eventually save. It’s actually fairly easy to make tasks disappear or munge up your text by adding tasks on your iPhone while making (unsaved) changes to the same document on your Mac. This isn’t too problematic since it’s a simple matter to grab pervious revisions of a document from SimpleText.ws and merge things yourself, but it’s certainly a far cry from seamless syncing. To be fair, syncing documents is a pretty hard problem to solve.
The latest version of TaskPaper has some new functionality to help address some of the issues I’ve outlined above (“Show unsaved changes”), but this is not a good solution to this problem. I’d love to see a real autosave feature added to the Mac version of TaskPaper, and improvements to the sync system. Regardless, I continue to use TaskPaper. More often than not, it just works.
