iThoughts enables you to attach Start Date, Due Date and Progress (% complete) values to individual topics. The values are fully transferrable between most supported import/export formats (see the compatibility page for more details)

To indicate that a topic has a start/due date, iThoughts

will place one of 3 icons next to the topic as follows:

1. •Has a start or due date
   

2. •Has a start date (in the past)
   

3. •Has a due date (in the past - i.e. overdue!)
   

To indicate that a topic has an associated progress value, iThoughts will place one of the following icons next to the topic:

1. •Less than 5%
   

2. •Between 5% and 35%
   

3. •Between 35% and 60%
   

4. •Between 60% and  99%
   

5. •100%
   

If the note window is visible, the values will also be summarized in there - for ‘quick look’.

Note Encoding

Mindmanager, XMind and Novamind have native support for task attributes - but Freemind and OPML don’t. To overcome this limitation iThoughts encodes the task attributes in the note field as can be seen in the Freemind 0.8.x screen shot below:

The actual note entry is:

        Start:May 1, 2009 10:35 AM|Due:May 2, 2009 10:30 AM|Progress:99%||

Which is structured as  

        Start:<start>|Due:<due>|Progress:<progress>||

It is ok to modify the values in Freemind and they will ‘synchronise back’ - although the format is critical to get right - get it wrong and iThoughts will simply ignore it. A normal note can be added after the terminating ||

In Freemind 0.9.x there is a new feature called ‘attributes’. This is a way of associating a name/value pair with a topic. iThoughts can use this mechanism to transmit the task attributes. The names are as in the note field (Start, Due, Progress) - only split into 3 separate name/value pairs. Again the format of the date is important...

The mechanism to use is configurable - see the page on ‘Settings’ for more details.