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- Hi, this is Mike Schmitz,
and welcome to another edition of ScreenCastsOnline.
This week, we'll be taking a look
at TaskPaper for the Mac,
an extremely flexible, and deceptively powerful
plain text task manager.
The big advantage of TaskPaper is that plain text
makes it incredibly easy to just jot down
a bunch of things in a quick list.
So, it may not look as flashy as OmniFocus or Things,
but with some simple plain text formatting,
you can make TaskPaper do just about anything
those two applications can.
And even if you don't use the TaskPaper app itself,
you can still benefit from understanding
how it handles the simple plain text syntax
for managing tasks and projects.
So, for example, if you wanted to create
an iOS shortcut for a project template in OmniFocus,
you're still gonna need to know
how to read and write TaskPaper formatting.
So, in this episode, we'll walk you through
how TaskPaper handles projects, tasks,
tags, and notes, and we'll show you
how to set up custom searches, import and export
from the Reminders application,
customise the style sheets, and instal scripts
to extend the functionality of TaskPaper
so it can do just about anything you might want.
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To get started with TaskPaper, you first need
to download and instal it, and there's a couple ways
that you can do that.
You can find out everything you need to know
about the application at TaskPaper.com,
which also has links to the guide,
which will show you how to use TaskPaper,
and a bunch of extensions and themes
that you can download, and plug into TaskPaper to extend it
beyond its capabilities out of the box.
That's one of the beautiful things about TaskPaper,
is it is a simple application, it's a plain text to-do list,
but you can make it do just about anything that you want.
And we're gonna show you a couple examples
of those extensions and style sheets in this tutorial.
But if you scroll down a little bit
you'll see there's a link to download a trial version
of TaskPaper, and you can also buy the application
straight from the developer by clicking the buy now button.
This opens up a pop-up Paddle checkout form,
and you can purchase TaskPaper for 24.99 USD.
directly from Hog Bay Software.
So, if you prefer to buy directly from the developer
to support them, there's an option to do that,
but there are limitations with this.
TaskPaper Personal is licensed on all of your computers,
but if you're gonna use it in a work setting,
it's limited to one device.
So, if you prefer something like the App Store,
which allows you to use it on up to five computers,
you can scroll down to the bottom of this page,
and you can download the application from the Mac App Store
for the exact same price.
There is one additional option,
and that is to use the application
as part of your Setapp subscription.
So, if you have a Setapp subscription,
which is 9.99 USD,
you can get access to TaskPaper, Ulysses,
iStat menus, and a whole bunch
of other awesome applications.
That's actually how I found out about TaskPaper,
it was already included in the Setapp subscription
that I currently had.
Regardless of the version that you choose,
it's gonna function the same.
So, let's open up TaskPaper and dive into this tutorial.
The first time that you open TaskPaper,
it's gonna ask you which document you want to open,
and because it's plain text, you can locate
a plain text document on your computer,
or you can click new document.
TaskPaper will remember documents that are open
when you quit, though, and restore them
when you next open TaskPaper.
But if you close the documents before you quit TaskPaper,
then it's not going to work.
Also, you need to make sure that
System Preferences, General, "Close windows
when quitting an app" is not checked.
All right, let's click new document to create
a new TaskPaper document, and when we open a new document,
there's actually a little bit of a tutorial
that opens up here, which explains how projects
and tasks and notes, and things like that,
work inside of TaskPaper.
I'm gonna get rid of this, we're gonna walk you through
everything that you need to now about TaskPaper,
and we're gonna start from scratch.
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