Potion Factory has released a public preview of The Hit List today. The Hit List is a brand new task management app that takes a welcome departure from current offerings, combining simplicity and power in a polished user interface that never ceases to delight. While based around the concepts behind the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology, The Hit List won’t impose a system on you and there is no requirement to understand any of those things.

The Hit List is, as the name suggests, based around lists. You can create separate lists for each set of tasks you need to manage, whether a work project, plan for a trip or anything, really. There are also some special lists such as Inbox, for collecting tasks, and Today and Upcoming to keep track of tasks, and you can create smart folders too. Lists are in outline form, a perfect way to organize your thoughts, with each task an item in the list. Tasks can have start and due dates, estimated times, tags, notes and attachments and can be organized into folders.

For me, what makes The Hit List stand out is how straightforward it is to use. Hit Return to create a task, and start typing. Tags are inline, prefixed by the / character, and appear as highlighted text. Context tags start with the @ character. The Hit List can also predict tags as you type.

Typing is a big part of The Hit List, and almost everything to do with creating and working with tasks can be accomplished with a number of single-character shortcut keys, such as T for today or F to file tasks. And if you’re wondering how you would ever remember all this, a Hints bar is shown along the bottom of the list and changes depending on the context. Of course, you can accomplish everything with the mouse too.

Add to this the tabbed interface, a tag browser, where tags can be organized into bundles, a contextual tag filter and cleverly implemented iCal sync and this app appears to want for nothing. Well, apart from an iPhone version, which is planned. And that’s the amazing thing: this app is feature packed, but to just look at it, you would never realize. The Hit List strikes the perfect balance between simplicity and power.

While public preview continues, you do not need a license to buy The Hit List, but at the time of writing, you can for a special price of $49.95. The normal price will be $69.95. The Hit List requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later.

Normally, I only write about Mac software I’ve had the opportunity to beta test, but with The Hit List, while that is true, the story is somewhat different. Potion Factory developer Andy Kim is a very good friend of mine, and I have watched him sculpt this application for well over a year now. I know and appreciate the time and effort he has invested in every detail, and I have looked forward to the day when he shows it to the world.

Congratulations to Andy on this release and if you’re interested in a task management application that doesn’t leave you dumbfounded, check out The Hit List from Potion Factory without delay.

Link: The Hit List Public Preview

Together 2.2.4 introduces a very small, but potentially quite useful feature addition following a feature request. You can now send a Together item link for the selected item in the list (or the item in the current tab) to another application using the Services menu.

To give a practical example, OmniFocus‘s Clipping feature allows you to set a keystroke that can be used to import the current selection into OmniFocus. For most applications, it achieves this using the Services menu.

As of Together 2.2.4, when an item is selected in Together and OmniFocus’s clipping service is used, whether through the keystroke or Services menu, OmniFocus will create a new task with the Together item link in the tasks’s notes. Clicking the item link will open the original item in a tab in Together.

As I mentioned, this is using Mac OS X’s system services, it’s not an OmniFocus-only tip, so you may be able to find a use for this in other apps, too.

This time last year, Give Good Food to your Mac’s kitchen opened for the first time, presenting allowing you to cook up your own bundle of Mac apps by choosing the ones that suited you the best, and the more apps you bought the more you saved with a progressive discount rate. In the summer, there was a developer special.

Today, the promotion is back for another fortnight. While the recipe is the same, you can now choose from around 70 apps from independent developers across the globe. Together is included in this promotion. Discounts start at 20% when you buy three or more apps and rise to 50% for five or more apps. The promotion runs from Nov 17th to Nov 30th.

So, to create your own bargain bundle, head over to the Give Good Food to your Mac store.

Together 2.2 is available today, bringing improvements to tagging, groups, item categorization, tabs, the Shelf, imports and previews. Here’s a summary of the main changes:

Tagging

Together 2.2 introduces intelligent auto-tagging based on items with similar content. When items are imported or saved, Together will analyse their content and tag them based on other items with the same tag.

Also in 2.2, tags can be organized into bundles, and system tags (which show things such as labels, ratings and groups as though they were tags) are also shown in their own bundles. It’s now possible to show items that have all the selected tags in the tag browser, rather than any of the tags.

The new Change Tags panel replaces the Add Tags panel to add or remove specific tags from multiple items or all items in a group. This is useful as is not possible to edit specific tags in the Info view when multiple items are selected and not all items have the same tags.

Items

Together 2.2 adds a new Web Page group to show all web archives, web pages and PDFs of web pages, whether printed from a browser or web PDFs created by Together.

Items’ file creation and modification dates can be edited in the Info view by clicking on the date.

Tabs for items can now be rearranged and will scroll horizontally when there are too many to be displayed in the main window.

Web PDFs have also been improved so that you can specify the minimum size for a web page when creating a PDF in Together, with default settings in Together’s Previews preferences panel that will be used when PDFs are imported from dragged URLs.

Also, the content for notes and text documents can now be zoomed and the default zoom percentage can be set in Previews preferences.

Groups

Groups and smart groups can now be nested in folders. Items can be added to new or existings groups and moved to folders using the Items menu.

Shelf

Together 2.1 added the ability for the Shelf to show options when importing. This is now improved so that, in the case of single-item imports, you can edit the name of the item being imported.

Also, Together will return to the previous application after the Shelf closes and there is a new “Find in Library” hot key to open the Shelf with the search field selected.

Importing

Together now has better handling of file promises. Sometimes when dragging from other applications, the other application is responsibile for creating the file in Together’s library, but Together would only know when that process started and so would show the new item in the library before the copy had completed. This could cause some confusion for larger files, so now Together will wait until the file has been fully copied to a temporary location.

This change also works around a problem where Mail.app will silently overwrite exported email files with the same subject, as Together now has control over the name of the imported file.

There are plenty of other smaller improvements and tweaks in this version. See the Together release notes page for a full list.

Allison Sheridan has created a ScreenSteps (which looks very cool) tutorial on how to create a podcast feed for Feeder as part of her Podcasting on Podcasting series.

You can hear Allison give the tutorial on PoP Episode #9 (enhanced podcast) and read it on her site: Feeder Tutorial.

The Podcasting on Podcasting (PoP) series should prove very useful to budding podcasters as the entire process can be very daunting, as it covers everything from the technical side of recording equipment, software and web hosting on the one hand, and the creative aspect on the other, not to mention considerations such as time and family commitments.

Allison’s been podcasting for a long time now, and occasionally brings in other experienced contributors such as Don McAllister of the excellent ScreenCastsOnline.

The Podcasting on Podcasting series can be found as part of Allison’s main podcast, NosillaCast, at podfeet.com. Allison also contributes to the Mac Roundtable Podcast and the Mac ReviewCast.