I think we have a winner. This sort of personal toolsmithing is fun, and you can try out some new programming language or whatever. We all love a good excuse to build something small-to-medium sized for our own perfect "tailor fit" preferences. All the excuses about other tools not being adequate are just what we need to say to ourselves to justify the time ;)
This starts to sound like something someone might waste time building instead of actually being productive…
Alerts are most important, that's why paper doesn't work for me. I just write everything in my calender app in my phone.
But if it's AR you can have a cute hamster run up to you and holding an urgent note. Or the hare from Alice in Wonderland. And it can just sit on your desk (virtually) and do cute things while you continue to finish what you were working on. Better than a boring annoying beeping alarm. We have not even started combining digital an real world, and the last few idea, e.g. from Meta, were devoid of anything useful, show…
'Wow there are a 1000 of ToDo apps. I can't possibly try them all. So I will write my own ToDo app that does exactly what I want!'
Result:
There are now 1001 ToDo apps.
ToDo/productivity apps is a very tough market. I know because I wrote a visual task planner for Windows and Mac (hyperplan.com) and struggled to get enough visibility to make it commercially viable, despite a lot of rave feedback.
Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes: - having your computer alert you to things that come up - being able to tag notes - being able to add events to a calendar - being able to set priority of tasks - expecting prioriti…
You give a long list of features that I don't want. And then go on to encourage everyone to switch text editors, and adopt a specific plugin that happens to work in the way that you personally like. As a vim user, this is kind of what I have come to expect from emacs users. Honestly, I'm glad that you've found something that works well for you. But I hope that some day you internalize the fact that other people aren'…
Why does it require mixed-case? It's for TODOs, not healthcare. If I want to use my insecure password to try out your service, please let me! It took extra code here for you to try to be secure, when it's now generally known that password requirements are security theatre at best and anti-security at worst.
Thank you for the feedback. A month ago, it didn't need any text in the password field at all. I may have overshot the mark a bit when I added validation. Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
> Longer term, I mainly want it to just use external auth (Google, etc.) and not use passwords at all.
I usually avoid services that do this because I don't want any issues to my Google account (or any other service) to affect other services I use. Good luck trying to talk with someone at Google if some automated system flags and blocks your account.
Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes: - having your computer alert you to things that come up - being able to tag notes - being able to add events to a calendar - being able to set priority of tasks - expecting prioriti…
"Copy-pasting tasks is laborious" "I recommend people read this 30,000 word technical guide"
I was also dissatisfied with existing task tracking apps, and built my own:
t-do.com
There are still many rough edges, but it’s extremely useful. One of the best features that a text file has that very few apps support is unlimited sub-task nesting, and that’s a core feature of T-Do.
Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes: - having your computer alert you to things that come up - being able to tag notes - being able to add events to a calendar - being able to set priority of tasks - expecting prioriti…
As somone who uses text and paper for todos, happily for years now after spending equally much time procrastinating in search of the perfect task management system I will now do a half-ironic take on answering your points: > having your computer alert you to things that come up That's what the calendar or the alarm is for > being able to tag notes Write #tag and then grep for it. Not that hard > being able to add eve…
Very well said. People here are interested in poking holes in things, instead of actually being productive. Again, we should just look at what actually productive people tend to do, which in my experience is generally to just use whatever works and not spend too much time thinking about optimising todo systems.
Reading through the comments under this thread, there are many users who swear by a plain text file, but who then build quite a lot of snowflake software to regain functionality offered by more structured TODO applications. That includes: - having your computer alert you to things that come up - being able to tag notes - being able to add events to a calendar - being able to set priority of tasks - expecting prioriti…
Todoist does all of that and more, basically any reminders app does most of that.
Just a counterpoint to say, many of us look for a todo app, use one of the many great ones on the market and then don't write blog posts about it. It's worth just trying one of the many existing apps instead of building your own.