Yet Another Task Application - org mode style tasks in the browser | Hacker News Reader

Yet Another Task Application - org mode style tasks in the browser

yata.in

24 pointshogu11 comments

I made this app because I wanted to do emacs org mode stuff in the browser. There are other things on the web that do this sort of stuff (workflowy, for example), but they didn't do quite what I wanted

You can share documents you create with a other yata users, or with the entire world, even people who don't have yata accounts

You can email items which will be automatically added to your outline

If multiple people are editing a yata document, changes will instantly appear on everyones copy of the document. This is useful for working collaboratively.

simple keyboard interface allows you to search your document, compact parts of it, and mark items TODO, INPROGRESS, or DONE.

left to do:

doesn't really work on touch interfaces

make it attractive

hashtags don't work very well

profit! (would be nice, but haven't really thought much about that)

any feedback is greatly appreciated, and I can be reached at hugo.r.shi@gmail.com

I built something similar a few years ago. Basically yammer but hash tags and @ references interact with plugins. So #bug would make a bug, and "@This Person #remind me to contact them" would create a reminder in the reminder plugin for me to contact this person (with their name linked to contact data in the contact plugin).

I've had several people tell me they wish it was still up and I won money for it in a university contest. I'm not really sure what to do with it now.

So the only use case for this application is when one cannot use "the real thing" (org-mode in Emacs), e.g. when browsing using an internet kiosk PC, tablet, and smartphone?

Btw, I do hope tablets and phones can run Emacs soon :)

That is one use case, here are some others

Some people don't know or want to learn how to use emacs

yata allows you to share docs with those people, so I take notes sometimes in yata during meetings and it's easy to share these notes with them.

yata changes are always centralized, and you can access them anywhere with web access, you could kind of achieve that on emacs with tramp.

and yes, phones and tablets, though my phone and tablet interface isn't very good right now (I also hope we can run emacs on phones and tablets, but honestly, without a good keyboard, emacs would be really hard to use)

collaborative editing, which is harder with emacs, you would have to share screen sessions, or pop up buffers on someones X windows session

yata allows you to email items into documents, in emacs you can do this by checking email, and shuffling those items to org mode, in the future, I may support txt messages in addition to email.

In the future, I think there I would like to add some features that aren't present, or are hard to do in org mode

google calendar integration, which you can do in org mode I've never done it, but it seems to be driven by manual syncing, and I would like to make that automatic.

that's it for now I think.

I don't want to use Emacs.

I have used it as a REPL and I think I will only use it for editing Lisp, but never for anything else.

You could also use http://workflowy.com for something similar.

I know, I mentioned that in my original comment, workflowy is awesome, and much more polished. But there are very specific things that I wanted, emacs style folding for example, and also tag inheritance in search, those things don't really make sense for the general population, but I wanted them.

nice job on the live updates. Can you link email so @tags directed at users send them an update (maybe one per day)?

yes, and I should also make it so that "recent" items are noted somehow

Nicely done!

I wonder why there are so many task applications out there? I hope people refrain from being all "oh god, not anotherone, :rolls eyes:" because it's really interesting. The weird thing is that usually when there are such a huge variety of choices that do the same thing a clear winner emerges but as far as I can tell there are still a lot of very popular task apps. More than us usual for any one genre of app for there not be some clear winners. Even if we just count the popular ones there's still a ton.

I'm thinking it's because there's an incredibly huge variety of ways that people get things done by using them and each somehow have such subtle nuances that maybe we can infer that the basics of task management or to-do lists are the same but people have very subtle differences in what's effective for them. They seem to be so subtle that 2 task apps that are the same in every way on the surface can actually be vastly different depending on who you ask. I don't know but it's really interesting to me.

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