I’ve been using “Ta-da List”:www.tadalist.com for the last couple of years for all my to-do lists. I have about 100 lists and love the speed of adding new items and some of the subtle smarts it applies to sorting recent lists and cleaning up completed ones.
But I’ve been on the lookout for a desktop app. OmniOutliner has become a bit bloated and all the Getting Things Done apps seem so structured. Along comes “TaskPaper”:hogbaysoftware.com/projects/… today and there’s a lot to like. The plain text file format is refreshing and nicely open.
I wrote a Ruby script to export all my lists from Ta-da into TaskPaper so that I can give it a proper workout. It makes a new document (with a single project) for each list it finds. Make sure to install “Hpricot”:code.whytheluckystiff.net/hpricot/ first – there’s no official Ta-da List API so we need to parse HTML a little.
Download: “tadalist_taskpaper.rb”:www.manton.org/software/…
Instructions:
- Open the file in your favorite text editor and change TADALIST_HOST to whatever your account is.
Make sure Safari is running and you have logged into Ta-da. The script reads the cookie value from Safari's Cookies.plist so that it doesn't need to simulate a real sign-in.
Run from the command line. It will create the new files in the current directory.
You will see short status messages for what it is doing. It's broken if there are any Ruby exceptions.
Enjoy!
