pogoism

The World’s Wife, Elmwood Hall, Belfast, Wednesday 21st October

This week, as part of volunteering as a FOH person for the Belfast Festival, I got the opportunity to see a performance called The World’s Wife. I’ll be honest, when I signed up to help out, I wasn’t too sure what it was about. It was a one woman show, the fantastic Linda Marlowe, performing poems from Carol Ann Duffy’s collection The World’s Wife. The “wifes” featured range from The Kray Sisters, Mrs Faust, Frau Freud to Salome. I’m not a great fan of poetry, but this performance was gripping and very entertaining.

Things for Mac

I’ve been awful at planning my time for the last few weeks and I’ve been relying heavily on iCal to help me organise my todos and lectures, meetings, lab time etc. It’s calendaring capabilities are marvellous – it’s clean, simple and works. And it syncs with my iPhone and Google Calendar. However, when it comes to todos, it lacks. I searched around online to find a suitable app that had a nice interface, worked well and fast on Snow Leopard, and had the ability to sync with my iPhone. Having discovered that there is a genre of apps available called GTD (for Getting Things Done), I stumbled on Things for Mac. It’s $50 for a licence (about £30), so it’s quite steep. I’d recommend downloading the trial and see how you get along with it.

It’s a neat little app. When your fire it up you’re presented with an inbox, where you can put todos that you are going to file later, and then there’s the “Focus” section. Here you can view all the todos that you want to focus on today (complete with dock badge counter), next, scheduled, someday and projects. For me, projects is probably one of the most useful functions, as you can break a project down into individual tasks and work through them. Another great feature is the ability to add tags to your todos, to make them easier to sort through quickly.

If you’re unsatisfied with iCal’s abilities to sort todos, Things is definitely worth a try. There’s also an iPhone app available, which I may download and review at a later date. As it is my laptop is with me all the time anyway…