I have some good news for a number of you out there that have contacted me about this recently and in the past. I have just finished up the foundation for TodoPaper 2 support on Linux desktops! I plan to support Ubuntu fully out of the gate, but my goal is to get TodoPaper 2 on as many platforms as I can. For Linux, this means really any distribution that runs Gnome or KDE (or X in general *fingers crossed*!)

Happy Spring Break!

P.S. For those of you wanting to purchase TodoPaper 1 right now, feel free to use this discount until April 15: springbreak

One of TodoPaper's strengths has been the ability to fold/collapse projects, similar to the functionality found in outliner software. Two of the things that I've disliked most about the TodoPaper 1 implementation of folding was the distracting indicators and the fact that folding was limited to projects.

I've completely revamped collapsing in TodoPaper 2. You can now collapse any text hierarchy, including projects, todos, and notes, so long as the line being collapsed has children (lines underneath it with a greater indent). This makes collapsing extremely flexible.

You may have noticed that I've removed the left margin where checkboxes and folding indicators used to live. This helps clean up the interface: checkboxes are now the todo hyphens, and indicators only display if a line is collapsed. 

Collapsing can be achieved by holding the Control key and clicking on a line that has children, or by right clicking and selecting "Collapse" from the context menu, or by a simple keyboard shortcut. 

Let me know what you think:

I've released a new version of TodoPaper 1 that fixes a couple of issues. You can download it here: http://widefido.com/products/todopaper/update

Fixes an issue with Windows style newlines and .taskpaper files.

Users who use DropBox to sync their documents with TaskPaper and TaskPaper for iOS were experiencing an issue with the wrong style of newline character sequences in the documents. This bug caused incorrect rendering of projects in TaskPaper for iOS, as well as some crashes in that software. I've worked with HogBay Software to address the issue, and while they are working on an update to ensure newlines are correctly converted on document load, this update will resolve the issue by saving the correct style newlines for .taskpaper files. 

NOTE: This will only work correctly with .taskpaper files, as I assume that the .taskpaper file extension is going to be used on the Mac and iOS. If you are using .todopaper or .txt files with iOS, you will need to re-save them as .taskpaper files for this fix to work correctly. 

Fixes an issue with printing and font sizes.

Some printer drivers were interpreting the TodoPaper fonts incorrectly, causing printing to draw the characters in fonts that were unreadable. This fix addresses this issue by sending a correct font size and layout to the printer. 

In other news...

I know a lot of you are also wondering about TodoPaper version 2. I know it's been a long road, but I am getting very close to a public beta release. I was expecting to release this week, but some issues that popped up need to be resolved first. I want to deliver to you a quality product and hope that you understand the delays. Thanks for your support!

I've been working on cleaning up the plugin system for TodoPaper and wanted to share an idea I had. Basically, I've been wanting to have a simple timer for some of my todos, so I had been running a separate application when I started/stopped work. Then I thought how interesting it would be to add in some tag extensions to TodoPaper that became little interactive widgets when you add them into the document. So, in the instance of a todo timer you would type @timer and a little timing widget would be embedded. Clicking the little widget would start and stop the timer, and it would accumulate the minutes and hours the timer was running. When you saved the file, this widget is automatically converted to text, like "@timer(00:45)". 

What do you think? Would a plugin like this be useful to you?

Many of you have asked for advanced searching (-a excludes the display of ancestors/parents, +d includes the display of descendents/children) and I can finally say that it's arriving to a "TodoPaper 2.0 near you". Even though TodoPaper 2.0 is still wrapping up final beta testing, it is taking shape to be a pretty awesome improvement over version 1. (I know it has been a long road, but I am sticking to my gut and delivering a quality product!)  

Let me know what you think and if you have any other suggestions for improving TodoPaper!

So why did I go this route? Well, after talking to a number of customers and testers, there were very few people actually using the toolbar buttons. Most of you opted for either keyboard shortcuts or just typing into the edit area. This is because TodoPaper makes creating todos, notes, and projects incredibly easy with the keyboard. (Sometimes as simple as pressing a single keystroke to quickly create a new, properly indented todo.)

I think this minimalistic UI is what you'll see in the final release. I feel it really promotes what TodoPaper is all about:

Provide you with a simple tool then get out of your way so you can actually get stuff done.

Thoughts?

What do you think of these hyphens and todo alignment (which is similar to how taskpaper aligns todos)?

But I need your help. I'm running into a problem with TodoPaper 2. I am having a terrible time finishing up the last few UI touches. In particular, I'm trying to figure out which icons to use in the toolbar. I love the simplicity that TaskPaper takes, "+", "P", "@", but I also am fond of simple grayscale iconography. 

Do any of you have any suggestions, or perhaps know a freelance designer I could get in touch with to help push this last bit along? 

Also, I'll be posting some more screenshots over the next few weeks to help keep everybody up-to-date with the progress of the app UI. Feel free to send me your comments and suggestions too.

Let me know if there is anything I can do for you in the meantime!

While it diminishes some of the aesthetic appeal, this was free and took me all of 30 seconds to develop.
Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.