TaskPaper for iPhone preview
Go Jesse! I can’t wait for this. You had me at the screencast
My goal was to port TaskPaper for Mac’s “paper” design to the iPhone. This turned out to be a lot harder then I expected. It’s easy to display lists on the iPhone. But when it’s time to edit something the normal iPhone design is to show a new view, or enter a specific editing mode. That works well for many apps, but it’s not how TaskPaper is supposed to work.
Delays Story…
And so what I thought would be a quick project has turned into a much longer one. It’s taken me many different iterations to finally come up with a design and set of interactions that keep TaskPaper’s “paper” feel. There has also been a rather large number of technical problems.
Originally my plan was to use WebKit, that would allow to share almost all code between TaskPaper for iPhone and a future version of TaskPaper for Mac. But for some reason WebKit is a private API on the iPhone, Apple started getting strict with private API’s, and I chickened out.
Next I decided to use UITableView instead, the general list view that most iPhone apps use. But that turned out to not be flexible enough… or quite possibly I was too dumb to make it do what I want. Wish I could have seen source code, then I know I could have made it work!.
And so after that roadblock I started writing my own UITableView replacement, and finally that seems to be working. The current beta still has many bugs, but I think most of them are just programmer error type bugs, instead of “Impossible to do” bugs.
What I have now, a Screencast
I think I’m finally on the right track. I’ve just posted a screencast demo of what it looks like today. I think I’ve figured out the basic interaction model, and most technical problems are solved.
Not done yet, it’s buggy
The current release is read only. You can sync and view documents from SimpleText.ws. You can also edit them with the new TaskPaper document view, but you can’t save those edits… to many bugs right now and I don’t want to destroy anyone’s data.
A few more testers…
Existing beta testers, I’ll send out the new beta download a bit later today. If you are not a beta tester, but want to be one, please email me your device ID. I don’t have many slots, so please only email me if you really have time and interest in trying it, looking for bugs, reporting bugs, etc.
