[Beckes]

Speaking of "alternatives" and "the competition", let me point out TaskPaper. For the likes of myself, this is much more of a competition to OF. I never have been able to embrace iGTD, which too closely resembles a Japanese video game for my liking: gazillions of buttons and fields, control over everything, but an embarras de richesse, and no guiding principle.

IMHO, OF has a guiding principle: sequential projects, world-class filtering (I will, for the instant, cease and desist to bicker about my ceterum censeo, the "all actions" filter in context view) and other features that let you _reduce "next action" clutter_. This is OF's raison d'être (according to this user), and it is very GTD. I actually do not have parallel projects any more, even if I might perform the actions in parallel -- if I can, I use sequence to prioritise and just enjoy the super-short lists that this entails. I also love that if you check something off, something else from the same project takes its place.

TaskPaper also has also something special: that it is just a parser for text files. As somebody who also appreciates LaTeX and the possibility of general cross-platform data exchange that text files give you, I can see the beauty of this concept. There are excellent tools for working with text, such as TextMate and Nisus (the word processor whose native format used to be text, and which still has the most intuitive implementation of regex on the planet), that let you mangle it into something else almost without looking. Text files are well nigh cross-platform -- completely so if you use utf8 encoding. In TaskPaper, every paragraph in a text file (such as an email) can be turned into a task by prefixing it with a dash, and be given a context merely by typing @context into the para. The format naturally integrates with MarkDown and, as such, can be translated into everything: rtf, latex, html, xml. Heck -- my LaTeX article can _be_ my todo list!

But TaskPaper does not scale very well. My LaTeX article may well be my todo list _for the project concerned_, but OF easily has the upper hand if it comes to handling my commitments to several projects at once. I love both pieces of software as they have a soul (metaphorically speaking), which the vast majority of titles has not, and am exploring ways of combining them.

One more article to finish, and then I'll delve into applescripting OF. I hope there's a way to export projects to, and import projects from, text files.

Cheers,