Card-based productivity software

Posted by Andy Brice
Feb 1, 2016 at 11:07 PM

@Hugh

I agree that it is pretty much impossible to have one system to cover everything and be usable. I put short term/transitory stuff on scraps of paper, longer term stuff in Hyper Plan and appointments in Google calendar.

Web based software is very much in the ascendant. But I still use a lot of desktop software and I think it still has a lot of advantages. I wrote about that here:
http://successfulsoftware.net/2013/10/28/is-desktop-software-dead/

Creating commercial software for iPhone/iPad is problematic for lots of reasons, including:
-low prices
-no direct connection with your customer
-lots of hoops to jump through
-lack of visibility in app stores
-different UI requirements (small screen+touch)

That’s why I haven’t produced a iPhone/iPad version of Hyper Plan (yet).

Card-based software seems to work best when you have tens or maybe a few hundred cards. The approach doesn’t seem to scale well to thousands of cards. I am considering adding hierarchy (cards within cards) into Hyper Plan to handle bigger plans. I still haven’t made a decision on that.

Omnifocus and Scrivner seem to be well regarded, I should have another look at them.

Some people have asked for more date specific features in Hyper Plan, but I am still deciding how far I want to go with that. I’m not interested in producing yet another weekly/monthly planner.

Hyper Plan gives card and tabular views of the same data. I have some ideas about other views. But there is a limit to how many types of views you can accommodate of a single data set.

>In any case, I do own a license for Hyper Plan, which in general terms I
>like, and I’m about to start on a project for which it may be suited…

I’m working hard on v2.0. So if you run into any issues with the current version, please let me know.