I was a satisfied TP user a few years ago, before being lured away by the siren songs of a couple of dedicated task manager apps. They were never a great fit for me, though, so I’ve purchased TP 3.5 and am starting to move my workflow there. Feels good to be back.
There’s one issue, though, that’s going to be problematic for me. I move from device to device fairly often during my workday – desktop to laptop to iPhone – and am used to keeping my task lists open on all three devices all day long. Most of the dedicated to-do apps can handle that pretty transparently, either with a proprietary or an iCloud sync, but that could be a problem with a TP-based system. Taskmator seems to be pretty good about keeping its list in sync with a Dropbox file, but unless I’m missing something obvious TP makes no effort to do this. In order to be sure I have a current file open on one device, I have to manually save on the others, give Dropbox a couple minutes to sync, and then reopen the file on the current machine.
The above paragraph leads to an obvious feature request, but in the interim I’m wondering if other folks with similar workflows have developed solutions or workarounds. Would it be possible, for example, to create a script that regularly checks open TP files for unsaved changes, and then does a save when changes are found? Or to check the Dropbox file for newer versions of a working file, and reload the file if one is found?
I’m assuming TP’s behavior with Dropbox and iCloud files is identical in this regard.
Anyhow, any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks!
I keep several computers at different locations running Taskpaper. I keep my files in dropbox and as soon as a change is detected, it updates all the other computers. No problems whatsoever. It just happens smoothly and discretely on the background.
Thanks, Victor. I did some fairly careful experimenting this morning and that definitely did not happen for me – there were no computer-to-computer updates at all. I’ll have to play around with it some more tonight, to see what I might be doing wrong.
Maybe dumb question… but did you save the document to Dropbox in the first place. Unlike on iOS you’ll need to explicitly save your TaskPaper document to a location before it will autosave and update as you want. I say this because it’s possible to just create an “Untitled” document. Never save it. But it will get saved to some special (non dropbox) location and reopen when you reopen TaskPaper.
OK, this is nuts. I deleted the initial test file, created a new one in the same Dropbox folder, and it syncs perfectly.
The only difference in my process was that the non-working file was first opened in Taskmator … but that shouldn’t have made a difference either. I think I’ll just be glad the issue is gone, and not worry about the reasons!
Some time ago I was working on a script (modification of nvremind, available somewhere in the forum) to automatically add events and reminders based on tags in my files. The script is based on Ruby and it would modify my files after changing tags within the documents, but it was causing some issues. I learned that I needed to change how Ruby modified the file and then everything worked. I think that you can search the forum for the details. The problem wasn’t TaskPaper, but my script. Maybe taskmator is not saving the files correctly. I would do some work and make sure that when you are editing files in other programs, your files stay in sync.
I have used Google Drive(Tp dir and files on local machine GD) with a number of people sharing a TP file, it worked very well much as a google doc would. 5 or so of us tried to cause a conflict, but really really tried we only managed to once, and the conflict was very minor, and kind of clear what had happened. That was TP2. I have not tried it on TP3 as yet.