Today 1.3 Released!

Today 1.3 is now available. The focus of this release was on making the task management features much more powerful based on user feedback. One thing I learned from users is that while viewing a single days worth of events is a great look, many users want to be able to see what tasks they have due several days in advance. You can now do that with Today 1.3. With the influx of more tasks in Today, I went ahead and offered a few sorting options so you can organize your tasks by title, calendar, due date or priority.

In addition to the task enhancements, there are some smaller, but useful navigation and usability enhancements to make working with Today better. If you use a CalDAV this release should also be more friendly.

Today is $15 and has a 10 day trial at the Second Gear Web site. I hope you enjoy the release.

Our Toolbox: Coda

We spent some time this afternoon cleaning up some things on the Second Gear Web site, and I thought I could take some time to share how I keep the site up and running.

Many companies use content-management systems like Wordpress and ExpressionEngine to keep track of their content, but I've found that for the main Second Gear site managing everything using just PHP and Panic's Coda is a much better solution for me.

Coda is an integrated Web development environment that combines the functionality of four apps I used previously into one. I previously kept CSSedit, BBEdit, Transmit and Terminal open all at once when I was working on a site. With Coda, I just have the single Coda window up and it has the same functionality of those four apps integrated.

The biggest drawback for many with Coda is the lack of visual page creation. Coda is very much designed for someone that hand codes Web sites. If you want to have a visual editing environment, check out Sandvox from our friends at Karelia.

Coda is $79 for a license. Give it a try.

Check Off 4 Suggestion Box

Recently on our Satisfaction forum, we asked users of our classic application Check Off what they'd like to see in a version 4 of the application.

Check Off was originally written back in the Jaguar days and looks a bit long in the tooth when run on Leopard. Under the hood, the application is a bit archaic as well, so rather than trying to tack on a bunch of new features, we're wiping the slate clean and starting from a clear foundation.

If you're interested in helping shape Check Off 4's feature set, be sure to check out the post on our forum and share your thoughts.

Check Off 4.0: What Do You Want

Today Loves MobileMe

I'm sure many of you were also waiting in line today to grab your iPhone 3G. I picked one up this morning and am very pleased with the speed improvements of 3G network and (for the most part) the applications that are available on the AppStore.

The thing I am most excited about, however, is MobileMe. Apple's .Mac replacement makes it incredibly easy to automatically push email, contact and calendaring information to and from the iPhone without having to rely on syncing. This is a great feature for Today users!

Let me give you an example.

This afternoon at lunch I making plans for a meeting for drinks later in the day with a friend. I entered the information into my iPhone, which was now set up to automatically sync calendaring data with MobileMe. When I got back to my desk an hour later, I popped open Today and the new event was automatically in the list: no sync required on my part.

Thanks to the hardworking MobileMe team at Apple for such a great tool. It's well worth my $99 a year.

Use Today with Google Calendar

Today was recently reviewed on Mac software site MacApper. As part of the review, we did a giveaway where the entry requirements was to suggest features you'd like to see in Today. By far the biggest request was the ability to use the application with Google Calendar.

This is actually already possible! Spanning Sync is an excellent utility that can automatically sync your Google Calendar data with iCal and Today. Here's a quick tutorial to show you how.

1. In iCal, create calendars with the same names as each calendar you have created in Google Calendar. We will use these to sync data between Google Calendar and iCal.

2. Download and install Spanning Sync from their Web site. Spanning Sync is a $25 a year subscription or 1-time $65 payment for a lifetime of updates.

3. Launch the Spanning Sync preference pane and authenticate with your Google account. This will enable the sync settings window as you can see below.

4. For each Google Calendar you want to sync, match it up with it's corresponding iCal calendar.

1. Set your syncing frequency to every hour.

2. Press the Sync button. It may take a while to get all your data synchronized between the two services depending on how long you've been using Google Calendar.

3. Once everything is synced, what you see in Google Calendar will also be in Today. Any changes you make on Google will also be pushed directly to Today each time Spanning Sync runs.

Spanning Sync is a great application for those that want the power and convenience of Google Calendar, but still want to enjoy some of the luxuries of using iCal and applications like Today. If you have any other tips or tricks on how you're using Today, please do share them with us!