Posted on Jan 11, 2009

The Hit List: New Kid on the Block

The Hit List: another solid choice.

Despite the fact that there were a some hefty distractions like Macworld and the rollout of Things 1.0 this week, the new entry in the task management space on OS X has generated a lot of buzz. The Hit List from Potion Factory was launched as a public beta on Thursday. And it appears that a lot of people are curious.

Including me.

After a quick install and launch, my first impression was that this was really close in concept to the aforementioned Things from Cultured Code. But after a longer test drive over the weekend, some major distinctions became apparent.

This is in no way a review, but rather an early look at some of the features and design decisions that caught my attention:

  • Cards: First off, I really like how this app makes a play off of the hipster PDA concept. The implementation of the Cards view is really nice in that it allows you to really focus on one task at a time, as well as capture relevent reference information for each task. That’s an area I’ve felt other task management applications have been lacking. You have to have another tool to manage task related information.
  • Focus on the keyboard: This app has been built with the keyboard in mind. That is a good thing.
  • Sub-tasks: Need I say more? I think a lot of people would agree with the statement that a task management application has to have good support for the nesting of tasks.
  • Tabbed folders: Similar to the Cards idea mentioned above, The Hit List was designed to represent folders—any project, area or list you have created can be viewed as a separate file folder. Cool idea.

Once again, this is a beta release that shows a lot of promise. But it’s still a beta. If you’re looking for picture perfect polish, you probably want to stay away from The Hit List for now.

Overall, I really like how developer Andy Kim has integrated the classic organization concepts of pen and paper into the design of this app—the Cards and Tabbed Folder features make this app feel cool1.

It looks like we have another solid choice in the productivity genre …

  1. The extensive use of core animation may also be cool … unless performance suffers. Time will tell, especially for folks running older Macs. [↩]