Card-based productivity software

Posted by MadaboutDana
Feb 2, 2016 at 10:24 PM

Thanks, Steve. It’s the one thing that’s driven me away from some really excellent task managers, from OmniFocus (which does at least support rich-text notes, but has such a clunky structure in iOS!) to 2Do (brilliant, but again - not enough note space) to The HitList (extensive support for notes, but no rich text and slightly clunky format) to Things (again, just not enough note support).

I’ve spent a lot of time with LetterSpace (excellent for notes, but slightly limited as a task manager) and even Ulysses (again, excellent for notes, bloody clever structure - ability to view multiple notes simultaneously, aggregate notes etc., but not optimised for task management).

Finally, I discovered Trello. And after not being super-impressed, I’ve gradually realised what a powerful model it is, especially for collaboration. The ability to link cards in particular is easy to under-estimate: very useful indeed.

I’ve been trying to set up a HackPad server on my own in-house machines (HackPad was recently acquired by Dropbox, and the server code was open-sourced), but haven’t had much success so far.

I’ve also been experimenting with the Wiki function in Apple Server. It’s really rather good, but not suitable for task management. Same applies to Synology’s Note Station, which does have a task management function, in fact, but is rather slo-o-ow. The next version (6.0) of the Synology OS may solve this. And Synology do publish iOS apps, too, which are actually quite good.

We used to share tasks in our team on a Kerio Workspace setup. Worked rather well, but alas! Kerio Workspace was discontinued, and the ghastly SamePage produced instead (only available as a hosted service). The latter is a desperately inadequate replacement for Kerio Workspace, and we’ve abandoned it. We do still run a legacy Kerio Workspace server, but the SSL component is so out of date that modern browsers don’t recognise it.

Frustrating. Maybe I’ll put together a visual spec for The Perfect Task Manager, and contributors to this forum can look at it and make rude (or maybe even constructive) remarks!

Cheers,
Bill