Yahoo Acquires Astrid
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
I don't want to take anything away from Astrid.
I keeps dismissing my ideas as trivial and already done. When I think I have a new idea, my friends would dismiss it as trivial and already done. Take astrid's todo list or task sharing for example. My initial and only thought would be 'does the world need another todo app', 'another list making app' really? If I take the idea to my friends, they would bombard me with companies who do exactly the same thing. And yet here we are with Astrid being acquired. It seems to have some angel investment/funding even. The founders may not be millionaires but they definitely made more money than I did.
Note to self: do something. anything. and get acquired.
Astrid was founded in 2008. If step (a) is above, and step (b) is simply "Persevere", then such a note to yourself becomes:
Make something people want. Persevere.
Somehow that seems far more likely to end in the manner you'd like.
I would say this as 'make something you want and sell it to yourself.'
Well, crap. Any migration path or alternatives? I don't even need 99% of Astrid's bells and whistles, just your basic "add entries and tick 'em off" todo list along the lines of what the Palm V used to do.
I rely on this with Gtasks on Android every day as my main note taking vehicle. I find it especially useful for literally instantaneous syncing between phone, tablet, desktop, and laptop.
Here's a way to access it via its own independent window (I keep this pinned in my browser):
Update: Use the link below instead. Even better.
We are primarily focused on grocery shopping lists, but it'll work fine for other simple lists, and makes it really easy to share lists and collaborate with other people.
Also, thanks for including a list of acknowledgements in the app. I track all of the ones I find at https://www.cocoacontrols.com/apps?o=date, but unfortunately a lot of people simply don't include any OSS acknowledgements.
https://astrid.com/home/export
As for alternatives, Google Keep is pretty great for your basic todo needs:
I get an infinite redirect loop trying to https://astrid.com/users/sign_in with google.
By the way, Keep doesn't do reminders, its only purpose is simple note-taking.
It's just a tiny ajax driven todo list written in php with a sqlite (or mysql) backend
Trivial to setup, self hosting and so simple you can hack it to do what you want.
I wrote a small scheduler that emails me todo's at random intervals after the last one completed.
ETA: OmniFocus has a nice iPhone client.
They even put out a beta of a usable Android app a few days ago -- finally!
.. and Google Keep for notes.
1) Supports a GTD workflow
2) Works on both iOS and Android (but also has a web interface).
Toodledo syncs well with apps like 2Do (available for both iOS and Android) and Pocket Informant.
If you (or anybody else) is interested in migrating to Toodledo, I wrote a Ruby client library for the Toodledo API that may be handy - ping me and I can send you the link.
And if anybody has other suggestions for services that fit both of the above requirements, I'd love to know.
Our desktops apps are really useful to structuring coding projects and I use it all the time while coding (as Todoist supports shortcuts and outline like nested structures) - - and it's really fast to use. Here's one of my recent projects, for an idea: http://cl.ly/image/1C2p1j1b0r3B
This is great because you can assign due dates and priorities to sub-tasks - - and you can hide/show Todoist while you develop (via a global keyboard shortcut).
We should all be so lucky.
Regarding this "acquihire" talk:
This is something the naysayers like to talk about. Yahoo's scale present an incredible sandbox for the Astrid team. They are a fully contained, highly functional team (across product and engineering disciplines). They know how to build back-end systems, complex web-apps, and cross-platform mobile apps.
The fact that someone found a higher and better use is not a failure on their part. Yahoo is fortunate to have this team join their ranks.
I love Yahoo, always have, but I'm hoping that Mayer cuts out 2-3 layers of management. When I was there, it was embarrassing to talk to my boss, who clearly didn't give a shit about my team or our department.
The dude did nothing but suck up to Sunnyvale. Hopefully they fire folks like him.
I'm afraid I'm not familiar with what scale Yahoo operates on, but wouldn't it be more beneficial for them to merge Astrid into whatever their plans are rather than drop them and alienate people who were already users?
Or was it just seen as a potential resource hole (with the value of the users seen as negative)?
Can anyone shed some light on what Astrid's business model was?
they just have a lot of money to hire, and nobody wants to work there.
So they do the dumbest thing a company can. Spends 10~30million a head, and they are out the door as soon as their contract allows. (case in point, your host. and he was even a case where yahoo wanted to buy the product...)
oh, and they are so sure everyone is leaving, that the new policy (look it up, was on techcrunch) is to give out annual bonuses instead of pay rises and promotions.
Yes, they could Google-Reader-it at any time, I suppose, but for something transient like todos I'm not too worried about it.
https://github.com/todoroo/astrid
Now if only someone would adopt it :(
Half a million new businesses are started every year in the US (with actual employees, not self-employed working from home).
Most small businesses stay that way.
Anyone got any suggestions for an iOS/Mac to-do program that can do geofencing for entire lists, instead of single todos like Apple's Reminders?
When: http://when-app.com Doable: http://doableapp.com
When "rips off" Clear's UI and looks interesting. Doable has a very custom UI and looks like it has a couple more features, e.g. statistics. It looks like neither supports date-fixed tasks. If you need both you'll likely have to use Reminders or something in addition to one of these.