Bit likes buses, wait for ages then 2 come along within minutes! I’ve been using this for about a year on my device, and as I’ve finally had a bit of time to work on it and get rid of some rough edges, I thought I’d put it out as a public beta and see if there’s any interest in it.
This takes the opposite approach to PaperTrail, as I struggle to type and manipulate text on a small device. It takes the TaskPaper items and presents them in a graphical manner, with the drag and drop, context menus, search, etc typical of a typical mobile app.
It uses the UIDocument framework, so data synch & merge over iCloud should be solid. But it is still a Beta, so I’d always say have a backup available (always good advice anyway )
Ah, yeah, sorry about that. I wondered about supporting back to 18, but decided I didn’t have the bandwidth to do optimise for both pre- and post-liquid glass design. And as I’d been forced to go to 26 for other reasons, I took the easy option
This is interesting and will be fun to compare. @flanker what are your favorite apps that take this approach? I’m not much of a phone person and don’t keep up with phone apps. Clear (the task lis) is the one that really clicked with me. Never really used it for real, but in testing. I liked the way all editing happened in one place at the top of the screen. Clear 2 changed that, which I also like, but I think not as well.
Yes One of the (many) open issue I have is to consider other UTI file types that might be appropriate and could reasonably be a taskpaper document. Text files are the obvious ones to add. Hopefully get that into the next drop.
The bit that needs a bit more thought is how to handle ones selected that won’t parse as taskpaper content.
I’m thinking of various other iOS Task/Knowledge managers; ones that spring to mind are NotePlan, Obsidian, Thing, ToDoist, … All to various degrees and with different approaches. To me it’s about being usable on a small screen, where I struggle working at text level and would rather work with “objects of lines of text” (to coin a poor phrase!)
I looked back to Palm OS (Bonsai, Shadow Plan, BrainForest, Thought Manager, Progect, Arranger, ListPro, ToDo+) and also classic Macintosh (ThinkTank/MORE).
Arranger on Palm in particular has drag and drop moving that I’d like to do something similar to with PaperTrail.
As well as working on small screens (postage stamp compared to iPhone) those devices had very limited CPU, so you know if your code to do the same things is slow on an iPhone you must be doing something wrong.
[…] To me it’s about being usable on a small screen, where I struggle working at text level and would rather work with “objects of lines of text” (to coin a poor phrase!)
What about going fully down the ‘graphical’ route and building a mindmapper with all the goodies of TaskPaper (tags, saved searches, focus in/out, duedates, Import/export plaintext etc.) to visualize and group ideas? I always additionally use ‘SimpleMind Pro.’ iThoughtX (RIP) was—at least to my knowledge—the only mind- mapper for iOS that had a ‘saved search’ feature. That alone would already be a unique selling point.
Thanks for the input. I’m also someone who misses a decent mind mapping tool that is about functionality rather than drawing pretty pictures!
Longer term, it’s definitely on the cards. Along with calendar and gant chart views that extracts start and due dates and presents them graphically. The challenge will be achieving these things within SwiftUi’s limitations!
However at the moment it is very much an early beta, and there’s some core functionality (and some visual polish) that I need to add to get to MVP stage.
But happy to have any and all ideas. I’ve got a nice taskpaper doc where they all go
Next Beta is out in TestFlight. Some additions, some refinements, and the odd fix.
v1.1 — 2026-04-30
New Features
Settings panel — new Settings view with Display and Documents sections. More to come.
Configurable file types — toggle support for plain text, Markdown, and OPML files. The app requires a full restart (i.e. kill the app and relaunch). This is an iOS requiremet after changing supported file types. I wanted to allow the choice of file types, otherwise every .txt and .md file on the device gets listed for opening.
Welcome text — customise whether welcome message shown in new documents
Note icon toggle — option to hide the note icon on note rows for a cleaner look
Improvements
Quick Add — more reliable behaviour when the document is empty or contains only a single project
@donetag — choice whether to add the current date when an item is marked done
Editor view —unnecessary UI items removed for a cleaner navigation experience
Item list — removed divider lines between rows
Version numbers — corrected for Beta program!
Bug Fixes
Fixed incorrect UTI declarations for Markdown and OPML that caused a launch-time warning
Plenty more enhancements in the pipeline. Let me know what you’d like to see next.
I was slightly preemptive, and you won’t yet. It’s stuck in review, which is unusual for a TestFlight build. Usually they breeze through in well under an hour. I’ll dig into it tonight…
But I’ve got an idea why it’s taking an age. I forgot to bump the build number I didn’t think you could submit twice with the same build number, even for testflightt. Apparently you can.
I’ll cancel and resubmit later, which will hopefully fix things
)
I didn’t think you could submit twice with the same build number, even for testflightt. Apparently you can.