TaskCard 1.6 Released

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.