Today’s Anxiety: Mac OS X Leopard iCal new engine at work

The new Leopard’s iCal storage engine seemed to attract at least two GTD centric implementation in the last few weeks. The most notable are Today (by the same guys that wrote PocketTweets, the mobile Twitter client) and Anxiety (quite a strange name, I agree…) To be honest, both applications are pretty much the same thing with several twists on the preference pane, and that thing is just an interface to the iCal storage engine. But by sharing the simplicity of TaskPaper they can attract an important market share from the “quick and dirty GTD-ers”, people who are too busy to implement a complete GTD system. Nothing wrong with that, don’t get me wrong, it’s enough space for everybody in this world. And actually that’s the reason I decided to make a quick roundup of the two aforementioned applications.

Anxiety

When you launch it, you get an empty window, with the title of your default calendar. Of course, if you already have some tasks in that calendar they will show up, but on a clean Leopard install chances are that you don’t have any tasks set by Apple’s engineers:

Adding a task is extremely easy, generally a quick hit of “Option + N”:

And after adding the task you can also select the calendar where it will be inserted:

The task apears immediately and you can also select from the top bar which calendar tasks you want to list:

Double-clicking a task in a calendar view opens iCal and you can edit the task details directly in iCal:

If you feel like you want to customize Anxiety (it’s pretty difficult to customize such a small application, but hey, simple things can become sometimes the most complicated stuff in our lives) you can do that through a preferences window:

Well, that’s pretty much all about Anxiety.

Today

It seems that Today is featuring at least a much colorful interface than Anxiety, although I’m much more of a fan for simplicity and distraction-free interfaces. Here’s how it looks an instance of Today with two tasks and one event. Yeap, Today is also featuring events, not only tasks:

Events are playing a greater role in our activity, apparently, since they are listed first, and the tasks are listed only on the second pane. Adding a task it seems to be a little more complex than in Anxiety, and that means a deadline date field and option:

Adding an event is almost the same:

Each calendar is keeping it’s own color and you can have a quick grasp of all the task in one place:

Today is also featuring a preferences pane, if you feel ambitious enough to configure a global invocation key for Today’s launching, for instance:

All in all, both applications are looking more like programming exercises, with a lot more potential under the hood. The new Leopard iCal’s interface has more things to be squeezed and I’m sure we will see much more coming in the next few months.

One more thing to note is that Anxiety is a free application, while Today costs $15, with a seven day full-featured free functionality.