I have been quite frustrated by TODO applications for some months now. They’re usually either too simple, or almost too complex and without features that I think are really valuable. In particular, there are two things that I don’t remember having seen in any TODO application:
- Possibility to “postpone” a task, so it doesn’t appear in the main view for a defined time.
- Possibility to associate a task to a “person to nag”.
When you have a lot of small tasks to do, and they are not the kind of things you put in a BTS (say, stuff that you have to do that is not really connected to some project’s code) I think these two features are really useful, and I was surprised that no applications I saw seemed to have those. I mean, don’t people have the same problems as me?
That’s why, as I had mentioned, I started writing my own TODO application: I’d have what I wanted, and I’d learn a thing or two about Merb, DataMapper and jQuery. The application has several design limitations that I used to simplify things, like not having any notion of users (single user app without authentication) or supporting only a “title” for the tasks, without any longer description. It isn’t something I really plan to publish for other people to use (I mean, the code is in my Darcs repo, I’m just not going to make a project page for it or anything like that), so I don’t really care how much it fits other people’s needs :-)
As it is a pet project and I didn’t really mind how long it would take to finish it, I started by making some mockup of the application in HTML (+ a bit of Javascript with jQuery), and once I was happy, I started with the actual design and code. I think some parts of the code are nice, and it has some Ajax sweetness, but I admit I haven’t used it yet for myself: only as a kind of underpowered BTS for the application. Maybe I’ll upload some screenshot some day. In the meantime, feel free to download and try it out ;-)


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We use Basecamp at work (http://www.basecamphq.com/). But (oooh!) I think you have to pay for the full functionality, at least if you want to have several projects on it. But at least some months ago, it was possible to get a free account as long as you did not have more than one project.
In any case I find it quite practical, useful and simple to use.
February 10, 2009 @ 7:28 pm
Hi kwan!
Thanks for your suggestion. I did know about Basecamp, but I always thought it was more like a full-fledged BTS/project management app. It might have worked, I’m not sure.
However, I just checked the homepage and apparently all options are paying (you just have 30-day free trial period), so I think that it’s out of question for now :-(
February 11, 2009 @ 8:44 am
Do you know GTD? I like it. There are many applications that implements the methodology. In this moment I’m trying GTD-Free.
February 19, 2009 @ 9:06 pm