Category: todo

2022 TODO

No looking back. Burn our 2021 ships behind us. Forward is death or glory.

  • Ship Haunted Dungeon. Work on other games which are not CRPG/roguelike for a while.
  • Write more Scheme, maybe publish some of it. If Scheme's so efficient, why am I such a bum who can't ship?
  • Playtest & ship my new tabletop RPG.
  • Boardgames? I've been thinking about condensing some of my ideas into a more concrete, boardgame model. Print or software, I dunno yet.
  • Read more, watch less garbage/browse the web less. I didn't do too badly on reading in 2021:
    • Fujino Omori: Is It Wrong To Try To Pick Up Girls In The Dungeon light novel. I loved the anime, and played the mobile game for like 2 years, it's being adapted too slowly for my taste, so I read the books some. It's amusing easy-reader trash about JRPG fantasyland, and I don't care.
    • Tim Pratt: The Wrong Stars. Started on the sequel and it sucked, DNF.
    • Michael Warren Lucas: Drinking Heavy Water, Butterfly Stomp Waltz
    • Alastair Reynolds: Shadow Captain, Bone Silence, The Prefect, Elysium Fire, Beyond the Aquila Rift (had read several in earlier mags/collections, but many were "new"), Revelation Space, Redemption Ark. Look. I'm aware that's too many. But I want to read the new one, so I have to catch up and I'd forgotten everything in the RS setting.
    • Rudy Rucker: Million Mile Road Trip (been sitting on tsundoku for too long)
    • Neal Stephenson: Cryptonomicon (reread after 22 years). Dude, Neal used to be able to write a doorstop I liked reading.
    • Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary
    • Martha Wells: Fugitive Telemetry
    • random old pulps from the '40s-80s off archive.org. Complete Manly Wade Wellman in Weird Tales has been a nice trip, lot of Fritz Leiber and Roger Zelazny.
  • Top of my tsundoku:
    • Hannu Rajaniemi: The Quantum Thief
    • Alastair Reynolds: Absolution Gap, Chasm City, Inhibitor Phase and then I will be free! I might go a year or more without another Reynolds book oh sweet mother of fuck yes.
    • Rudy Rucker: Juicy Ghosts, have read the short story
    • Martin Gardner: The Last Recreations
    • Isaac Bonewits: Real Magic an Introduction (research for better game design!)
    • Black Magic Omnibus vol.1 & vol.2
    • Andrzej Sapkowski: Time of Contempt. I read up thru Blood of Elves a couple years ago (prompted by the TV show, yes), and keep picking up the next one and stopping. I dunno why, they're pretty similar to my D&D-type fantasy campaigns.
  • Do some more software & project maintenance. A lot of my stuff that I have in various places is either unmaintained, broken, or just unadvertised in any way. Might set aside one work day a week to this.
  • Actual contract work. I'm never going back to an office in my life. I should be #1 online earner, but I really can't be arsed to talk to recruiters, clients, get the job, and do it, a lot of the time. Probably should be slightly more than zero productive citizen.

TODO App

I'm yet again frustrated by the state of checklist TODO apps. I had a perfect one once, ToDo on the Palm Pilot; aesthetically it was of its time, but for usability on a stylus-based PDA it was perfect. Everything since then has been a compromise.

Must:

  1. Run locally on iPhone and Mac.
  2. Sync automagically, preferably with iCloud and/or Dropbox.
  3. Have multiple lists, though does not need nested folders.
  4. Show a list of items I can check on/off.
  5. Be able to show or hide checked items, delete checked items with a command.
  6. Be able to reorder by hand (or sort with a command).
  7. Start up instantly right back where I was.
  8. Be usable while drunk, stoned, tired, or hungry. UI cannot be a giant pile of fiddly little switches.

Nice to Have:

  1. Due dates/expire dates.
  2. Priority tags.
  3. Search screen to show "What's next?", showing date, priority, list, item in that order.
  4. Notifications. But local notifications require a recent app launch, so you might miss stuff; or interacts with calendar which many people find annoying; or uses push notifications, which costs real money past a small number of users.
  5. Emoji & color tags, photos, long notes, etc.

Must Not:

  1. Give my information to Google, Microsoft, Facebook, or other evil mega-corporation who will weaponize my shopping for killer drones or advertising, or both. I'm dubious of Apple & Amazon, but at worst they seem to be venal, not evil.
  2. Be subscription-based.

Don't Care:

  1. Other platforms. Android, Linux, Windows, I don't use these so they're not a pain point for me. If mulle-objc works out, I could think about that.
  2. Pomodoro, GTD, and other fetishistic rituals.

State of the Field

  • Clear was good on iOS, but it's been "dead"/rebooting at Impending for 2 years already, and they won't be making a new Mac version.
  • Apple's Reminders is awful on the Mac (try finding the "show all" button, and keeping your list in order).
  • Things, Trello, OmniFocus, etc. are too slow & heavy for a grocery list.
  • Text files in Editorial or Drafts don't have usable (finger-sized) checkboxes.
  • Wunderlist got bought by Microsoft and destroyed as per usual. They're getting to be as bad a product graveyard as Yahoo! was.
  • RememberTheMilk is not super useful until you pay $40/year, which is not what a dumb todo list should cost.

What Am I Doing?

Thinking about this. I could write the app I want, release it for $5 on each platform, use Marzipan to make it use the same codebase. In theory, this is pretty easy; I can write a database-backed table view thing in a week. Making it nice is a while longer. Marketing is my least favorite thing, who do I use to get it in front of millions of people?

But I'd have to pay Apple to get back into the sharecropping business, and deal with their shitty Xcode tools and the rotting corpse of developer.apple.com which got fucked over by Apple marketing so you can't get to the FUCKING DOCUMENTATION. @invalidname went to work for them and got sucked into the black hole.