Russian Ninja

I am continuing to setup my work environment on the Mac and I am evaluating an app called Things to manage all my tasks. It has a companion app for the iPhone which syncs with the desktop app via WiFi, so this makes it pretty convenient.

Today I was investigating the possibility of Things to sync with iCal and what good this can do to me. It appears there is not much to it. The ToDos from Things appear as ToDos in iCal in a sidebar, they of course don’t get added to the main calendar view since only Events can go there.

This got me thinking. What’s the difference between an Event and a ToDo? It appears that a difference for me is very small. I definitely want to see my Events in the list of my ToDos for today. If I need to go to a shopping center today, I want this to be in my main list of tasks that are due today. Although it’s an Event and I have set a specific time when it should happen, I still need to know that it exists at all when planning my day.

So, to recap, it appears that an Event is just a ToDo with a certain date and time attached to it. Things and iCal don’t do a good job to realize this concept. But I think I definitely nailed it down here at least as my personal most convenient way to work on tasks planning.

I’ll keep this in mind for my future experiements with project management software.

Thoughts Mac, Project Management, Things

Yes, I finally made the switch to the Mac after 15 years of being a Windows user (a DOS user at first).

This is a late 2008 Macbook Pro 2.53Ghz and it is the best piece of computer hardware I’ve ever owned. I like the whole Mac experience so much that I even decided not to run Windows in parallel all the time for software like Outlook (that was the initial plan). I still have Parallels and Windows installed in a Bootcamp partition, but now I only randomly launch it for Windows-only software (virtual machine running in a dedicated space in OS X is a very very convenient thing).

PS. You got to love the built-in speakers here! I’ve always used my desktop computer with large speakers to listen to music — not any more. The audio quality on this laptop is absolutely great.

Whatnot Mac