I can’t believe it’s only Wednesday. Also, I can’t believe it’s already Wednesday.

As far as a status update, my knee is still about the same as theist time. Sometimes I can bend it without really noticing that I’m bending it. That is good progress. But walking is still a chore. So not there yet.

After the previous couple of posts regarding some apps/software I have played around with, it got me thinking about portability and open formats of data. So, I’ve been playing more with Obsidian. Still not ready to use it instead of Ulysses, especially for writing up blog posts. But I’ve been reading a lot about it, looking through the community plugins, and thinking about how I want to structure it and what to use it for. Not sure I’m any further than I was after the great note app post. But I’m thinking about it.

In looking through the above and people shouting about open file formats led me to a couple of items from one company. First one has been around for ages; second one was released this week.

Hog Bay Software is a small indie developer in Maine that makes a few software apps for the Mac. The first app I started thinking about was the older app Taskpaper. It’s a simple task manager and uses a simple text file as the backend. It adds some basic functionality to manipulate, view, search, create tasks. The text format is extremely straightforward. If a line of text has a “:” after it, it’s a project designation. If a line of text begins with a “-“ it’s a task, belonging to the Project under which it sits. If a line has neither, then it’s a note. You handle due dates, start dates, completion, etc., using tags starting with an “@“ instead of a hash symbol. So you could have something like:

So in the above, I have a project “Write Article.” Under that I have two tasks. Task 1 was due on May 16 and completed on May 17. Second task is due May 18. So It’s just a matter of learning the “special” tags regarding dates. I find that this is just a text file intriguing. It’s so simple. I will say that this particular software is really geared towards tracking what needs to be done but not alerting you when it comes due. Just doesn’t work that well. Another downside is that Taskpaper does not have a first party mobile app. There is Taskmator which is a taskpaper client, but is separate from the official company. But since we’re dealing with just text files, little chance of causing many problems.

The second app I followed down a rabbit hole, is Bike. Came out this week as official 1.0 version. It’s rather limited in scope right now, but seems like there are several ideas that will be coming in a while. Bike is an outliner app. You write outlines in it. At $30 it’s not exactly cheap, but other outline software generally costs more. I haven’t played around with it much yet, and I don’t know how much I need an outliner. But it seems extremely fluid and quick so far. Bike also does not have a mobile app, but this time there is no third party to fill the gap. An iOS app is planned for a future date, but I don’t know what the timeframe for it is. Default format is a “proprietary” file, but it’s essentially just an html file. You can actually rename the file to “.html” and open it in a browser to see it. It can also save file format as text, where a lot of the features would not work. And it can save in OPML.

Could I do the above using any text editor? Technically, yes!. For taskpaper format, you can use any text editor. For Bike, you can save it as text if you want. And if you use OPML as the file format, it can be opened by other apps that read OPML (an open standard). The fact that both of the above are just local files and are in standard file formats is very intriguing to me. Portability with few downsides. So, I’m playing around with the above while I also decide how to use Obsidian and what I should put in it.

While this post is just kind of an extension of what I wrote the previous two times, it’s just how my brain works. Always looking for the next thing.

And here’s a dog.