Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Karunamon | Hacker News Reader

There are a few things I'm looking for in a task management system. Those of you who remember IWantSandy when it was still around will have a good idea of the feature set I'm looking for, plus a few things.

Haven't yet found something that ticks all of the boxes..

* Easy task entry with natural language Do thing with Dick and Jane at Location tonight at 6:30 pm and every week on thursday (Sandy was the undisputed queen of this)

* Truly cross platform (Needs a web interface, and an identical native interface on Win/Mac/Lin, and a mobile interface which isn't tied to the web)

* A CLI would be nice but isn't super necessary (ala Taskwarrior)

A couple of my favorite systems get one or two things right really, really welll but then fall flat elsewhere. I'd use Omnitask everywhere except it's completely mac specific, and therefore useless for my needs. Seriously. I would give almost anything to have Omnitask on Windows. Wunderlist isn't bad at all, but isn't terribly stable on the native client, have to enter everything the old fashioned way though. Taskwarrior is my go-to in a *NIX environment but, again, useless anywhere else.

I'm currently using Todoist, which has a decent web interface and mobile client, with semi-decent NLP task entry, and it's doing okay for me now.

I'm very, very seriously open to suggestions here. Asana looks absolutely beautiful, but it's another Mac-Web specific product, so wouldn't work for me.

I am very happy to see a Todoist user on HN! Founder of Todoist here.

Unfortunately I had I detour in social networks so the work on Todoist has been slow for some years. But about 8 months ago we started fulltime working on it and Wedoist. I think we have some amazing updates coming up that will solve all of your issues (ex. HTML5 enabled web and desktop applications and native mobile apps for iOS and Android).

Stay tuned and please provide feedback of how we can improve Todoist (here or on my email which is in my HN profile).

Please just get away from your not-native Todoist app. It's slow, it's not pretty. It's the opposity of the awesome web interface. I used Todoist for a long time , but with time and the increase of my mobile usage(due to iPhone) i needed a decent iPhone app. Just make a decent, beautiful iPhone app, believe me lots of people like me will converse and move to Todoist.

(off-topic: Keep up the great work amix. I've learned lot from you programming blog).

We learned a lesson in mobile development and we are dumping our HTML5 mobile app. The experience is simply too limited and you need to do lots of hacks to make simple things work. For anybody that is thinking about going HTML5: don't do it, it's more a pain than a gain and the user experience won't be good.

We will do a public beta in the following weeks of our iOS version. We will make it public via our Twitter/G+/FB accounts, so stay tuned ;-)

Any plans for android in the foreseeable future?

I'm actually very very happy with Todoist (just reread my OP and found that it made it sound like I was an unpleaseable jerkface) - really the two things that I'd give almost anything to see are a native desktop app with some kind of quick entry (Another Omnitask feature I've been spoiled by.. cmd+space, window pops up, enter details, tab, enter further details like date, enter, task is captured), and as mentioned elsewhere here, a better mobile app. I would pay by the month for something like this!

In any case, keep up what you're doing. You've got a killer app :)

Awesome, very happy to see the Todoist founder here :-)

I compared several todo web apps several years ago, and found Todoist to have the best UI -- never understood why people liked "Remember the Milk" so much.

I haven't used it (or any other todo list) much lately. I decided I need to start maintaining one again, and considered Todoist... but decided on TaskPaper (native Mac app) as it can live separately from my browser tab farm, and input/viewing is about as quick & simple as it gets.

One problem I have with most of these services is that they are hosted services, i.e. they have access to my data, even in principle. Therefore, I cannot use them for work information.

I'd rather have a system that saves data locally and lets me handle the hosting on the cloud.

Not that I use it, but I always thought TiddlyWiki would be good for this.

> "Do thing with Dick and Jane at Location tonight at 6:30 pm"

Isn't this an event instead of a task? At least for me tasks and events are very separate beasts. I built http://timegt.com productivity app and specifically try to keep clear that it's not becoming calendaring and events tool but focusing on tasks. But yeah, sometimes it's hard to draw a clear line.

I've never really drawn a bright line distinction between the two, choosing to treat tasks and appointments as a generic obligation that has to be prepared for and dealt with like any other task.. that's one thing that's always bugged me about traditional time management apps like Outlook's calendar.

"Isn't this an event instead of a task? "

Depends on the priority for me. If I have go meet some people just to maintain social ties and I am not really interested, it becomes a task for me because I have to make an effort. If I am interested and looking forward to it, then it is an event.

Never got to use IWantSandy, but how is it different from gmail recognizing events for you to add to your GCal, or adding Alerts? Is there something analogous today?

The big thing with Sandy was the natural language input from almost any method. You could send it emails, text messages, tweets, what have you, which would then be automatically captured. Basically you could add tasks via whatever communications method you had immediately at hand.

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