Tasktop - Managing the Contex related to a Task

Posted by Alexander Deliyannis
Aug 23, 2008 at 07:42 AM

I thought I’d post an update on my experience with Tasktop as I’ve been using it for the last couple of months or so, since the Summer 2008 version (1.20) was released.

The killer feature that acted as an incentive for me to integrate it in my workflow was the automatic time recording / reporting integrated in the program. Read more about it here: http://tasktop.com/blog/?p=33

The concept of a task-focused workspace is brilliant. Tasktop can provide a place to do many things from—especially if one works a lot within a browser- while recording addresses visited and files opened during the time a task was active. The internal browser uses most of IE’s plug-ins that I have installed, e.g. Surfulater and Evernote, and now offers (limited) OLE support that works fine with MS Office applications.

Several enhancements have been made since Tasktop was first discussed here, including multi-level tasks. In fact, I found that Tasktop does many of the things I wished it would do, though this wasn’t quite apparent to me at first.

The program’s support is top class, even for users like me who don’t have the patience to RTFM. In fact, the developers are currently doing a round of phone calls to users to discuss their experience with Tasktop. I wish more companies would do this kind of thing.

The main issues I still have with Tasktop are:
(a) it’s a memory hog and rather slow in my year-old machine; I would attribute both of these to its use of Java
(b) it’s clearly aimed at software developers as can be seen by the kind of external connectors contemplated: https://tasktop.com/support/survey/integrations.php

The developers are aware of both of the above; from our phone discussion it is clear that they are working on the speed / performance issues (indeed v.1.20 should be better than its predecessors) and they are looking into ways that the program’s target public can be expanded.

That’s it for the moment
Alexander