I was originally thinking about jumping straight into developing my major idea. I even wrote up a list of features and have a screen layout sitting inside my head. Unfortunately, it’s probably a little too big for me to tackle this early on.
There’s also a little problem: I tend to be terribly unorganised.
Writing up the feature list got me thinking about how I would manage the list itself, and everything else I set out to do. What I needed was some sort of task-management (other wise known as Getting Things Done) software. I know, I know, there’s plenty of them out there, but I either have to pay for them, or they don’t work the way I like work (usually both). Having other people solve my problems also doesn’t help me improve my programming skills.
So we have an idea for a first project: task-management.
This project will be fairly simple. Tasks will belong to groups, and groups to sections. The sections will be things like “Projects” and “Home Tasks”. Groups will be things like major projects or planning for our next holiday. These can be split into any number of levels: individual projects could have task groups for interface design, development, testing, etc.
Tasks will have optional completion dates, but the aim of the program isn’t to act as a scheduler: we have iCal for that. I might add the functionality to send a task to iCal for a reminder. They will also be able to be marked as “in progress” so you can see what has been started, but not yet finished.
Local storage will take place in a file in the Application Support folder for the app. This means there is only one central task repository that’s not easily accessible by the user. Because of this I will look into exporting tasks into various formats later on so it can be backed up, although since Macs have Time Machine, losing data shouldn’t be a big issue.
Now, this is getting further down the line, but eventually I would like to be able to sync with iCloud, which will then sync with an iPhone/iPad version of the app. Once I have the basics of the Mac app in place, it should be fairly easy to port to iOS and iCloud storage is the preferred method of synching for that. That also covers backing up the data, which is good, but introduces complexity when it comes to ensuring data integrity.
For looks, I’ll try and follow the general look of the Mail.app for Macs. The left-hand side will be the hierarchical group view, and the right will be list of the tasks for that group. I want to keep it fairly simple, so tasks will not have “detail views” at all: they’ll just be descriptions, optional dates, and marked for their various stages of progress.
So, I’ve already started programming this app and within five minutes bumped up against my first issue: getting the NSOutlineView (the hierarchical “group” sidebar) to display data. Next post will explain (amongst other things) what exactly the issue was, and how to use the OutlineView.