I use Things, both on my Mac and my iPhone, as my GTD management app of choice. In case you missed the reason why, be sure to read my review. Things is awesome and guess what - it’s fully integrated with OS X. It’s got Address Book integration, it can display the iChat status of team mates, it’s got iCal support. iCal, probably one the default Mac OS X tools I use less. It’s not that I don’t like the functionalities or its purpose, I don’t like the interface and the fact that it’s not a minimal and simple way to get daily notifications. I just want an app that quickly tells me everyday what I have to do, importing stuff from Things.
Meet Today.
[Disclaimer: Today and Secondgear are sponsoring MacStories. This review is based on my personal experience, that’s it.]
Today is one of those apps that once you try it, you can’t live without it anymore. It basically displays in an elegant and uncluttered window all the events and tasks you have in iCal. The cool thing is, iCal doesn’t have to be running for Today to work.It can run both in dock and the menubar only, you can assign a shortcut to invoke it, you can adjust the window’s opacity. It’s all there, in that tiny yet powerful window.
Now, pay attention to this: Today can also create iCal events and tasks without actually opening it. This means, no more iCal for you, you’ll just use the “integration” with iCal to make Today your personal daily assistant. (It uses the CalendarStore framework to talk with iCal. Now, I wish there was a way for Things’ tasks to be automatically converted in Events, but it seems impossible unless you drag and drop ‘em with..iCal). The interface of Today is sweet: there’s a top bar that displays the day and arrows < > to change days. This was one of the big new features of the 2.0 version, “you can know the future” by knowing what’s coming next. Also, you can get more control over your upcoming events by clicking on the calendar icon in the toolbar and go to a specific date.
Today allows you to customize a lot of things in the Preferences: first, you can decide which calendars you want to import, and you can even import more than one. The events will just have a different color. Then you can tell the app how to sort tasks and when to remind you (alarm) that you have to do something. Last, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to the app itself, or for creating a new task / event. There’s one thing I don’t like about Today, and that’s how it handles events. I mean, you can’t mark something as complete, and double clicking on an event just opens it in iCal.
Overall, I like Today. A lot. It’s simple, fast, easy, useful. The shortcut option also was a game changing for me, as it provides quick way to have my events just a click away, packed in an elegant and basic UI. Bye iCal, we’ll meet again on the iPad (probably). I’m staying with Today from now on.
Go download.
