The Task Manager of my Dreams (and how I get tasks done)
I've got a task management problem. It might be a bit different from most people's, which may be why I've looked at everything from OmniFocus to Things to TaskPaper and I can't find something that meets my needs.
What I need — and what I can't figure out to do in any of these other applications in a reasonable fashion — is a daily log of what I've accomplished, from which I can cherry-pick and summarize into monthly reports, and then again into annual reports.
I can do this in my current system, which has worked pretty well for three years now. I rely on VoodooPad to keep my to-do list. Every day I assemble tomorrow's to-do list on a page named with the next day's date. This consists of both uncompleted items from that day's to-do list, as well as scheduled calendar appointments.
Mac Syslog GUI
I know that Console.app is a decent if not stellar tool to view syslog entries on a Mac, but recently I wanted to send remote syslog entries to a Mac.
While I've found instructions for enabling remote syslog on a Mac, they're out of date. I can figure it out from these instructions, but it occurred to me this wasn't really what I wanted to do anyway.
What I really want is a database-backed syslog (a la syslog-ng) configured to accept syslog entries from remote servers. But I really want this with a powerful GUI to filter, colorize, and sort syslog messages by timestamp, host, facility, priority, and regular expression.
Now, this is a very un-Mac-like thing I want, at root. But it sure would turn my Mac into a powerful syslog processing machine.
Bento: Close enough to taste it…
Continuing to research my wish-list software from my previous post, I gave Filemaker's Bento a try.
Listing my fields and putting together my form was a snap. Adding data is easy. Printed output is attractive. The Neutrals theme pack is mandatory. But I've still got a couple of problems:
- Text fields appear to be limited to plaintext. Maybe I'm missing something here, but I'd really,r eally like rich text fields: bold, underline, italics, numbered lists, bullet points... I feel like this almost <em>must</em> exist, but the more I look, the less I believe it does.
- I can't seem to enable the Mac OS X built-in spellcheck on the text boxes, either. This means I'll need to review the content in another software package...
- ...but the export options kind of stink. It's limited to CSV and CSV-like options (e.g., tab-delimited output), with no structured markup choice. This limits my ability to massage the output using third-party tools. I really want XML output, at least as an export option.
I could output to Excel via CSV, if I had some way to pretty-print Excel tables using some sort of form software. But if I had that, I probably wouldn't need Bento in the first place.
Does anyone know if Filemaker Pro addresses any of these issues, or if there's something even closer to what I want?