Category: TaskCard

I’ve decided to put TaskCard on a huge sale before the release of 2.0 which will be released sometime this summer. You can now purchase TaskCard for $4.99 via PayPal on our website or on the Mac App Store.

TaskCard reached a reasonably stable version at 1.6.2 and since I was working on other projects this year I didn’t have time to make any updates. It looks like the next feasible update will an entire 12 months from 1.6.2 (in July ’11) so I decided to make this the big 2.0 release (I’ll post what features will be included closer to the release date). The most important part of the release will be an iOS companion app along with many other long overdue features.

Thanks for supporting TaskCard!

It has come to my attention that snap to grid broke around version 1.6 and is causing cards to move around erratically when being dragged and possibly even offscreen which makes them appear to have disappeared.

If you have had turned on this option please turn it off in the preferences until it’s fixed in the next version. Sorry for the inconvenience!

Today I decided to install a new bug tracker on the site so concerned users have a public place to file bugs and view their status. I chose the Mantis Bug Tracker because I have used it before with the Free Pascal Compiler but I honestly it seems a little confusing and I’m not seeing there is a way for non-registered users to view bugs.

I’ll be adding some outstanding bugs to the tracker and try to find a way you can view the bugs without being logged in since I’m sure users would like to know if the problems they’re experiencing are being taken care of.

After days of painful bug testing with a few very helpful users I was able to find the cause of a bug that was causing some Macs to crash directly after launching. I learned some very valuable lessons in remote debugging in cases when there is no crash report so hopefully  this won’t happen again!

This disaster prompted to make a mailing list for TaskCard which you can join directly from inside the app and I highly recommend all users to do so. I will be using it only for contacting you when there are serious bugs which you should be aware of or beta versions you may be interested in testing. Your email will be kept private and you’re free to unsubscribe at any time.

Besides the crashing bug there were numerous other little fixes to problems introduced into 1.6 making this a pretty important release actually. Noteworthy is also a new Carbon version of the Sparkle.framework which was causing crashing for some users on and off for a long time. I hope as of 1.6.1 we won’t be seeing any more Sparkle crashes. If you purchased from the Mac App Store you’ll have to wait a few days until it gets approved however.

In addition to fixes there is one new important (but small) feature I neglected for a long time. TaskCard now has 3 editing modes which affect the way tasks are edited. The default of return ends the editing sessions was not very natural for many users I think and non-standard compared to other apps. Please see the manual in Tasks > Editing Modes for more info.

A few users have reporting after upgrading from older versions TaskCard 1.6 is crashing shortly after launch. I have not been able to determine what the problem is as I can’t reproduce the problem on my Mac but I think it’s related the auto-update framework Sparkle.

If you experiencing any problems please send me an email and a crash report if you have one. I’ll be working on finding a solution and hopefully release a 1.6.1 update soon.

Thanks for your patience!

I mentioned that 1.6 is no longer a PPC binary but I just learned there is a bug in 10.5 which causes crashing. I would fix this right now but I my 10.5 testing partition just crashed and my old system disks are not with me either so I’ll need to figure something out.

If any users updated TaskCard to 1.6 on a Mac running 10.5.x I’ll be happy to send you a link to downgrade to 1.5.2 but it’s also advised that you upgrade to at least Snow Leopard 10.6 as TaskCard will likely not able to support 10.5 for other reasons in the near future.

Sorry guys!

This was the biggest release of TaskCard to date withs lots of new features, bug fixes/improvements and probably some new bugs. 😉 Here are the most important of the new features (see the rest in the manual version history section):

• TaskCard is now 10.7 ready which should be out any day now.
• iCal support is finally added after a year of me making claims and actually doing most the work. The system is not like you may expect as events in iCal are synched, not tasks. This is because the task feature is really limited and doesn’t even sync with iOS so I didn’t see the point. There’s more information in the manual on this feature.
• All new GUI for cards, sheets and task/date info windows.
• Cards can be nested within other cards.
• Cards can be dragged to the screen edges to become tabs.
• Reminders and repeating dates.
• Saving/opening card files.
• Renaming sheets within TaskCard (finally!)

In my last post I said there were going to be some other features developed which didn’t make the release since I couldn’t finish them in time for Lion and 1.6 was already getting pretty full. These were: timers, native synching and note cards. Timers will make the next version for sure and synching will be given some serious consideration. Dropbox sync is working well now and actually supports a new “helper” in the preferences for setting it up but the problem of overwriting files still exists. I started on the feature to merge sheet files, preserving the changes in both but I didn’t have time to complete it. It may be the case Dropbox remains the main method to sync TaskCard but I’ll implement a way to merge the changes so it’s safer. iCloud is coming out also which may be an option.

The note cards features may become another app of TaskCard style plain stickies with some other slick features that you don’t see from other sticky note programs, like pages, tabs, and cloud-colloboration with other users. I’m still not sure if I should add this into TaskCard but I bet in the end I will.

This version marks some regressions also:

• I’m very sorry to German, Japanese and French users because I had to remove the localizations from TaskCard, which means all English now. There were too many new additions to the menus/windows and I can’t get help from the previous supporters so I just had to remove them. If anyone wants to help please contact me so and we can pick up where they left off.
• TaskCard is no longer a PPC binary since I don’t think there are any users left and I don’t even have a PPC Mac anymore for testing. I hope that didn’t screw anyone!

Some plans for the future as usual:

• The Archiver. Will allow you to save cards by date into a big grid within TaskCard where you can review past tasks and when they were completed etc… This will be the first feature to break the card-only interface of TaskCard but it seems really important to me.
• Cloud collaboration. Sheets will be able to be uploaded to a server (using Dropbox or your own private server) where other users can download them into TaskCard directly into their sheet browser in real time. This could be used so 2 users could see each others cards as they worked and I bet the system could be tied into the TaskCard Helper nicely so you’d get updates even when TaskCard was not open.

For the first time since releasing TaskCard over a year ago I haven’t released a monthly update. This is because I have decided to take a little break for other project development and spend the remaining time to overhaul some of TaskCards long running problems thus making it more solid (like you’d expect from a 1 year old app).

I was prompted to do this after getting lots of bad feedback on the new Mac App Store basically stating TaskCard is hard to use and confusing. Who knew? But the users have spoken and many of whom may even be new to the Mac and/or computers so I need to review all the non-standard behavior in TaskCard.

The issues being tackled by the next major update (I’m not sure if this should be 1.6 or even jump to 2.0)

• Hidden Commands.  TaskCard features numerous hidden commands (i.e. without menu item) for adding tasks, setting dates, editing etc… which can be confusing. They are stated clearly in the manual but who ever reads those? 😉 In the next version all commands will have a menu equivalent with command in addition to the usual short key.
• Synching. Admittedly not having a native sync solution inside TaskCard has even made me hesitate to use the program at times because I don’t want to worry about changes getting lost between my 2 Macs or data being overwritten. DropBox is now an option which is great, but not ideal. In the next version there is a native sync solution which will merge the contents of sheet files and transfer them bi-directionally on the 2 remote sheet folders you select (your Macs must be connected via network and mountable in the Finder). This means tasks will never get overwritten when transferring sheet files and TaskCard will transfer the files automatically as you work.
• iCal. Yes, this feature will finally be featured in the next version without doubt. This feature also somewhat satisfies the need for an iPhone version since you can now add events in the iPhone calendar app which will sync into TaskCard. It’s not ideal since the 2 programs deal with tasks differently but it’s at least an option if you need to make your tasks mobile.
• Notes Cards. Often times when using TaskCard I have found myself going back to Stickies.app because I just wanted to take some notes. TaskCard is still a sticky note program so in the next version there are real note cards which work just like Stickies.
• Stacking Cards. You can nest tasks together to make hierarchies so why not cards? As a way to help manage clutter of cards you now “stack” cards together like tasks so a single card can contain any number of other sub-cards. The stacked cards are also collapsable like tasks (in fact they behave exactly like tasks) so you can keep cards you seldom use tucked away until you need them.
• Better Task Info. There is a new task info window which is easier to use and has more options including task status which is common in other task managers and notes for each task.
• Better Date Picker. That date picker I put together in the first version was pretty useless. The new one is more complete and easier to use.
• Efficiency. I made some important optimizations to the drawing engine which means TaskCard is faster, more responsive and uses less CPU than before. Also TaskCard will now use 0% CPU when the application is not active where in the past it could use 1-2% just idling.
• Timers. TaskCard now has an option to count the amount of time spent on a task, like a stop watch. This was a popular feature in other task managers so I felt like TaskCard should implement it since it fits the design of the program anyways.