For several years I've been trying to figure out how to use Eclipse and its various plugins for anything else other than software development. Mylyn is a wonderful task management plugin and I've been using this to keep track of what I need to do for the day. But somehow I needed a bit more “oomph”. Finally, a group of people have come up with the answer to my predicament. And I have to say, it's now one right up there in my 2008 list of best software!

The people who came up with TaskTop actually built their idea on top of Eclipse. There are two versions for TaskTop, one for ordinary users who want to work out of the box, and another for developers who already have Eclipse and just need the plugins. I have to remind you that since this is built on top of Eclipse you have to make sure that there's a Java Runtime Environment installed on your computer. I started out with the non-developer version. Installation was actually quite simple and I got the software running in less than a minute. Unfortunately after a few days I did something to my laptop and ended up not being able to start the software at all. Even a re-installation didn't work for me. So I upgraded my existing Eclipse software and installed the TaskTop plugins. In the end, there's really no difference between using Eclipse + TaskTop plugins and TaskTop itself.

Since TaskTop uses Mylyn as well, it didn't take long for me to start assigning tasks to myself. What I've done is I've more or less planned what I'm supposed to blog about for the next few days. After which, the beauty of TaskTop begins to shine! I have to research a bit for some of my stuff, which means constant bookmarking of sites. For every task I'm doing, the web page I'm visiting gets automatically stored and assigned to the task context. The result: I only see the sites that are relevant to the task at hand. When I close a task and open another, only the sites important to the current task will be shown as well. Close that and go back to the previous task and I have the relevant sites within reach again. Makes for clean and concentrated work.

I also like how I synchronize my tasks to either MS Outlook or Google Calendar. Since I don't use MS Outlook, I configured mine to use Google Calendar instead. The tasks show up on the calendar giving me another good view on what I have on my plate.

It's better to take advantage of TaskTop's internal browser so the sites you visit are automatically bookmarked and assigned to the current task. But if you don't mind having to bookmark manually within TaskTop, you can also configure it to open in your favorite external web browser too!

More than just web pages, you can also assign certain files and folders which you will most likely be working with to complete a task. Since I mostly work with word and spreadsheet documents on OpenOffice, all I need now is to download the OpenOffice.org plugin for Eclipse and I got my very own working environment for writers! Of course, I could always open those same files in some external software as well.

While downloading the software is free, TaskTop's updates are a subscription service with plugin updates rated at $40 while the TaskTop application itself is rated at $60.