Review: MasterList Professional

• By Mike Gunderloy
• February 14, 2005

MasterList Professional
$24.95
Safari Software, Inc.
Sonoma, California
(707) 939-9002
www.safarisoftware.com

If you're like most developers, you're doing seventy-leven things at once. Or, more precisely, you're responsible for seventy-leven things, and often find that a few of them have fallen to the floor because you forgot that they needed to get done this particular week. Task lists, appointments, scraps of paper, on-screen sticky notes...most of us have tried more than one system for keeping track of the various things we need to get done.

MasterList Professional offers a new way to organize your tasks, and it's a flexible and useful one. For starters, tasks get allocated to projects, and each task gets a set of useful properties, including the task's difficulty, its importance, and the time that you estimate it will take you to complete. You can define as many projects as you like, and concentrate on the tasks in an individual project or view them in a master list.

You can mark any task as "current" to have it turn up on a special tab of things you need to concentrate on right now. You can also make "task appointments" for things that need a longer block of time, to ensure that they don't slip through the cracks. MasterList can also automatically schedule tasks for you, based on the information you've supplied on their importance and the time they will take you to complete.

In addition, MasterList Professional will communicate with the outside world. It can take existing word processing documents and bring them in as checklists of tasks to be completed. It can also integrate in both directions with Microsoft Outlook, lettting you share both tasks and appointments with your existing Outlook installation. If you'd like to give it a spin, you can download a 14-day trial from the Safari Software Web site.