But don’t wait until version 4! If you want access to some of Default Folder X’s sweet capabilities now, you’re in luck. St. Clair Software has an upgrade policy that will allow you a free upgrade to version 4 if you buy version 3.0.6 now. Version 3 is fully Leopard compatible (as long as you aren’t running any 64-bit apps); it just lacks the translucency. For more information, and to download Default Folder X 3.0.6, see the Default Folder X website.

What excites me about Things is the flexibility that it provides with its tagging system. OmniFocus appeals to me a lot (I used Kinkless for a while so it’s familiar, and, let’s face it, Omni rocks hard and long), but I’m not so much a fan of the way it structures tasks. Contexts make sense as a way to view tasks, but they aren’t terribly flexible and honestly don’t really suit me personally that well. iGTD 2 actually looks very promising, but that’s because it appears to be moving in a Things-like direction (that is, relying on tags instead of on mountains of metadata like the original iGTD).

The Things development team told me that they tried to remove as much complexity from task management as they could, providing the user just with the basics they needed in the spirit of “getting things done”, but that they added tags as a way for more advanced users to apply more powerful approaches to task management. Although what the final version is like remains to be seen, I honestly think that Things is on track to provide this kind of scalable power, and am very happy that I was allowed to play around with an early development version.

In any case, Cultured Code is hoping to provide a public preview of Things in the near future, so if you’d like to try it yourself soon (rather than watching me drone on about it), head over to the Things website and sign up for their mailing list.