Simulating an Action List with ToDo

I really like action lists - these are integrative lists that show you, in one place, all your current tasks.  Not all task manager apps use action lists.  In this post, I'll describe how you can set up Appigo ToDo's focus list to act like an action list.

Most task manager apps let you organize your tasks into a variety of groups: contexts, projects, lists, etc.  They'll also try to arrange your tasks so that you'll find it easy to see just what you have to do next.  But different people have different ideas of what "easy" means.

I've found that task manager apps can be grouped by how they handle "easy" presentation of tasks.  One group defines a fixed set of views on your tasks on the basis of some rationale that tells them their way is best.  This approach, taken by apps like OmniFocus and Task PRO, usually gives you separate views for tasks that are overdue, tasks due today, tasks due soon, and so on.

Another group of apps, including Taska and Things, are built on action lists.  These are user-constructed views of your tasks.  You pick which tasks should be in the list based on what you think is important.  Most of these apps will automatically compile some tasks (e.g. those with due dates) into the action list.

Then there's a third group of apps, like ToDo and Toodledo, that give you some flexibility.  There's an optional list that is configurable, and that you can set up in a variety of different ways.

I really like action lists.  I want all my current tasks in one place; I don't want, for instance, to have to navigate to another list just to see my overdue tasks.  And I like to control what goes into the action list.  Some of my tasks have to be done, but don't strictly have to be done by a given date - they're just whatever's next in a given project.  Those kinds of tasks are nigh-impossible to bring to the fore with apps of the first type.

But what do you do if you prefer an app that doesn't directly support action lists?  Well, it depends on the app, but if you like ToDo, you can rig up a pretty good action list in just a few minutes.

ToDo has a focus list that can be configured in a variety of ways.  Here's how to make the focus list into an action list.

1. In the in-app settings for ToDo, go to the Focus List settings.
2. Under Show Tasks:
• Set No Due Date off.
• Set both Starred and Subtasks to on.
• Set Completed to None.
3. Under Hide Tasks:
• Set Due After to Today.
• Set Priority to -.

That's all there is to it.

All dated tasks will appear in the Focus List, on their due date.  And any task with a star will also appear in the Focus List.  This includes a regular task, a project, a task in a project, a whole checklist, or single checklist items.

ToDo has a really easy way to star tasks.  Choose the reordering icon (the one with three horizontal lines at the top right of the screen).  This lets you reorder tasks, but it also lets you star or un-star tasks.  Just tap the star beside a task to toggle its state.  You can also do this within the Focus List itself, so it's easy to un-star your starred tasks and get them out of the Focus List immediately.

I think this is a very nicely balanced way of managing your current tasks; it's both highly effective (giving you complete control) and efficient (it doesn't require much work to set up or use).  If you like the Action List approach and are willing to try ToDo, then you should give this technique a try.

If you come up with any variations that work better for you, please do leave a comment and share with the rest of us.

[Read my other posts about ToDo.]

iPad still cool, but Air wins for me

I've written a couple of posts about my iPad.  This will probably be my last post about it, because, unfortunately, it hasn't turned out as well as I would have liked.  And there's a much better, existent solution, which I've now adopted - the Macbook Air.

Over the past few months, I've struggled to find ways to take advantage of my iPad for productivity.  Struggled is the right word.  Not because the iPad is somehow bad or insufficient.  Rather, because it just doesn't fit my needs.

The iPad is, as others have noted, primarily for content consumption.  There's all manner of apps for finding and using information.  Whether it's playing games, or online books and newspapers, or reading blogs, or finding great recipes, or viewing MRI images, or buying things on eBay, or any of a hundred other things - the iPad is wonderful.  It's light; it lasts forever on a charge; now with iOS 4.2, it does fast task-switching and supports folders.  And it's oh-so cool.

On the consumption side, I really enjoy the iPad, and think it's quite brilliant.

The problem is that I'm not about consumption, but rather about content creation.  Whether it's saving links to interesting sites and blogs, or writing my own blog entries, or uploading photos, or just managing my research notes and articles, I use computers to create things.  I'm not passing judgment on content consumers; the only reason I have so much content to create is that content I consume is stimulating that creativity.  But, for me, consumption is useless except that it helps me create.  So a device that can't do both isn't going to help me much.

And I've found the iPad is rather weak on the creation side.  I know I've written to the contrary, but I thought I'd find more apps that would help than I actually did.  And let's face it, these days it's all about software.  Thanks to the Web, Java, Javascript, Perl, and other programming platforms, it's quite easy to write software that will run well on any platform.  This makes the platform irrelevant.

Or mostly so.  The iPad suffers the curse of iOS, which is a good and robust operating system for mobile devices, but the iPad could be so much more than "just" an iPod Touch on steroids.  Unfortunately, many Web-based apps still consider the iPad as a small device rather than a real computer.  And Apple's decision to not support Flash on iOS doesn't help.  I know what their thinking is, and in principle I agree with it.  HTML5 seems to be the way of the future, in that HTML5 is an integrated solution, whereas Flash is always going to be an add on.  There's an interesting post in ReadWriteWeb that suggests the race is still on.  And while Flash has a huge installed base, HTML is the heart and soul of the Web; all previous versions of HTML were adopted rather quickly, and I don't see HTML5 being any different in that regard.  Still, today, the problem remains, no Flash support in iOS is game-limiting for content creators like me.

Sure, I can create documents in Word-compatible format and sync them to Google Docs or Dropbox or any number of other services.  But I still can't pull those documents into, say, most blogging platforms because the rich text editing features of services like WordPress don't work on the iPad.  And I hate the notion of adding all the formatting tags myself.

I can read news and blogs very well on the iPad.  Indeed, many of the feed-based reading apps (like GoodReader, Pulse, and Reeder) are among the best apps I've seen.  And G-Whizz works around the limitations of iOS to give you the full desktop version of Google Reader (albeit with some occasional weird behaviour) as well as access to most every other Google service.  But there are still some things I can't do.  Like finding a good link and adding it quickly to Diigo, the bookmarking service I use.  Which is something I do a lot.

The lobotomized version of Safari on the iPad is also rather limited compared to the desktop version, and even more so compared to Chrome or Firefox - neither of which run on iOS.  Something I often do is tag, or bookmark, or save, or whatever certain web sites I run across.  Can't do that with iOS's browser.

So while things are still possible, and there's always the hope that things will improve in the future, I really need to get things done now.  Put another way, the iPad doesn't hit the right balance of function and form that I need.

Enter the Macbook Air.  It's unnervingly thin and light, and packs a truck-load of flash memory in place of a hard-drive.  The small ones weigh about as much as an iPad.  It doesn't have a touch screen, but it's large trackpad does support the same multi-touch interface as iOS.  It doesn't last as long on a charge as an iPad, but it does last longer than a regular laptop. (It's rated at between five and seven hours, which I've found to be a pretty accurate measure.)  It needs a regular, laptop-sized charger, which is a dead-weight to lug around when I've travelling, but because it lasts so much longer on a charge, I don't have to worry about bringing the charger with me everywhere.

And the Air runs full Mac OS X.  Indeed, I've even installed the dreaded Microsoft Office on it, and it runs just fine (well, as fine as any MS product runs...).  With full OS X, I can run all the apps I run on any other of my computers.  I have total compatibility, and the interface is exactly what I'm used to.  I can blog, and surf, and tag, and bookmark, and edit, and link everything.

All in a package just as wide, slightly longer, and only a smidge thicker than the iPad.  Sure, it costs more than an iPad, but you do get what you pay for.  And what I've paid for is a frighteningly light and powerful computer.

So in the end, if you're looking for a simple, light, long-lasting device that will do exactly everything that a larger, more expensive, and heavier laptop will do, I would urge you to take a very close look at the Macbook Air.

(In case you're wondering, I've regifted the iPad for my wife.)

Dropbox: totally transparent file sharing and backup

Dropbox is a great service.  It allows you to sync files between an assortment of computers in an entirely transparent way.  Since my perspective on it is more designerly, I blogged about it at my other blog.  Having tried a few other services, I'm perfectly happy to say Dropbox is the pick of the litter.

App face-off: Taska versus ToDo

Taska and ToDo, two of my favorite task managers for the iPhone and iPad, recently came out with updates. Since the updates came out pretty at the same time, I thought it would make sense to mini-review them together.



ToDo version 4 includes better support for iOS 4, fast task-switching, sync with Appigo's own sync servers, local alerts, better robustness, and a few other minor features.

Taska version 1.0.8 constitutes a significant update and includes a new look and feel, tweaked fonts and icons, simplified interface, accommodating new functions in iOS 4, alerts, and a whole lot of bug fixes. I should also note that Taska's look and feel is remarkably similar to that of Things for iPhone, by Cultured Code. However, having used both apps, I can say that there are significant functional differences between them, and to read more than this into the matter is, in my opinion, unwarranted. Cultured Code may beg to differ, but it's a free country and that's my opinion.

While Taska shows the greatest improvement and has superior functionality, I find it still needs more work.

ToDo supports all the key functions one would expect from a GTD-oriented task manager: folders, priorities, stars, due dates, task repetition, tags, contexts, and search. It's quite customizable, it syncs with toodledo, and it's very robust. It also has a pretty good fast-entry mode and push alerts thanks to iOS 4. ToDo has a fairly configurable Focus list that let's you gather key tasks in one place for easy reference. It also supports projects and checklists, but can't sync them with toodledo unless you subscribe to toodledo's premium service. Appigo has also introduced it's own fee-based sync service for ToDo.

Taska does pretty much everything ToDo does, and then some. Its Action list is an even more flexible version of ToDo's Focus list. It can sync checklists and projects to toodledo without requiring users to have a premium toodledo account. It manages this by embedding information in other task fields. While this is an interesting way of doing things, it also means that toodledo's browser interface doesn't understand Taska's notion of projects and checklists. This is only a problem if you expect to use toodledo's browser interface, or if you expect to use toodledo as a medium to transfer your tasks from Taska to some other app.

Taska also supports location services for its contexts, which ToDo doesn't do so far. This means Taska can change the content of your Action list depending on where you are - which is pretty cool. (Taska isn't the only app that does this, but it is one of the most affordable.)

Another really cool feature of Taska is it's support for horizons. Setting the horizon of a task tells Taska to pop that task into the Action list before its due date. This is great for tasks that require some advance warning. It's a feature I don't use often, but it's screamingly useful when I do need it.

On the face of it, Taska seems far superior to ToDo. However, Taska does have some shortcomings that, for me at least, are substantive enough to make choosing one app over the other a hard choice.

Taska still requires more "taps" to get things done than does ToDo. This is especially evident when quickly entering a task the details of which you'll add later. I can see why Taska's developers did it this way: to integrate fast task entry with detailed task entry. It's a noble goal, but not if it ends up costing the user extra taps. ToDo's developers forsook that integration for the sake of speed, and I think that it has worked well for them.

Searching is also easier in ToDo. In Taska, you can only search one list at a time; to search all your tasks, you have to navigate to the "All" list, which I find distracting. In ToDo, there's a search icon in the toolbar which let's you search all tasks from almost any screen. It makes sense: if you need to search for a task, you're probably not sure which list it's in, so a global search would seem to be the most useful thing to do.

While Taska's Action list is a wonderful thing, it remains rather hard to reorder tasks in an arbitrary way. It was even more confusing in older versions, so again there is certainly a big improvement, but it's still not quite there. And a proper action list can be simulated quite well in ToDo.

The other odd thing that I noticed is that changing the sorting of tasks in Taska tends to cause unexpected changes in order. For instance, say you have your Action list sorted by due date, and you want to change to a manual sort. As soon as you select manual sorting, but before you actually do the manual sorting, all your tasks get rearranged in some way that I still can't figure out. This is unexpected and distracting. It should instead keep whatever order was there, then let you adjust it by manual reordering. (Again, ToDo does this right.)

Taska also sorts things oddly when you create a new list (Taska lists are like toodledo folders); it seems to sort tasks in the new list in reverse alphabetic order. While this might seem like a minor thing, it's unexpected. And unexpected things are jarring to the user and raise the spectre that something has gone wrong.

These differences are perfectly understandable: Taska is quite new, but ToDo has been around for a long time (by app standards). And I don't mean to rag on Taska; it has a number of great features, like horizons rather than start dates, and contexts that use your current location. Even though I don't use contexts myself, I can certainly understand how others could find this very useful.

So which would I recommend? I don't know, really. It depends on which features you really need, and whether you're willing to put up with a few rough edges. Since I use my task app for seriously important work-related stuff, I tend to use ToDo because it's just more robust and efficient. Taska is more effective in that it offers an excellent range of functions without being a bloated software monster. I would rather use Taska, but I'm worried that I'll lose important information due to its occasionally odd behaviour. I am a patient man and I will keep an eye on how Taska evolves; all else being equal, if Taska's development continues at its current brisk pace, it will surpass ToDo.

One word of caution: if you expect to be able to switch between Taska and ToDo easily, be ready for a disappointment. While both apps sync with toodledo's task management web service, they don't use comaptible data formats; don't be surprised if tasks are synced between the apps via toodledo imperfectly and incompletely. (I note that this isn't anyone's fault - there are no standards for task app data storage and representation, so the kinds of incompatibilities are entirely expected.)