Jumat, 08 Juni 2018
If you’re after a quick comparison, here’s how their features compared. The criteria is taken from my thoughts on what makes a great GTD app, outlined in the introduction post. I’ve included some ‘nice to have’ features that I discovered which I enjoyed and/or were useful. These apps didn’t get reviewed because they lacked some feature/s that made them unsuitable. Nirvana - Well thought out, great looking GTD web app. Assana - Good looking, collaborative task manager. Smarty Task - Great looking GTD app with some smart filters. Things & Omnifocus - Users of these had great things to say about them but sadly Mac only. Wunderkit - Wunderlists big brother, fantastic UI for collaborative task management. It was really hard to choose my apps to make up my trusted system. There wasn’t a single one that looked like a clear winner. All of them had at least one thing wrong or missing.
So it’s not that the runners up are bad apps, it’s just that the others were better, sometimes marginally. I love Wunderlists simplicity and looks but the lack of tags or appearing in more than one list, means no contexts. Based on that alone it loses out. Although there might be reprieve for this, as I’ve been using it for a while for my work tasks for Life Tuned and Pik Pak, in a kind of personal Kanban. With its drag ‘n’ drop task ordering (something surprisingly missing on most), it makes easy just-in-time ordering of the next tasks to do in a project, so it might remain as part of the system. This is for you, if you after an app that has great looks, fantastic simple UX, same experience across multiple platforms and are happy with basic task organisation. The odd UI and it’s clunky-ness is just something that would grate on me after a time, it bewildered me in the short time I used it.
Plus missing features, like task recurrences (essential for doing stuff like monthly accounts) and Google calendar sync puts this one out of the running. This is for you, if you after an app that looks good, supports many platforms (Playbook and Nook included), don’t mind Adobe Air and are not too bothered that it doesn’t look/work like anything you’ve used before. For the high price it has to be the best and I don’t think it is (yet). The brownish UI for Mac just doesn’t work, I can’t quite put my finger on it, is it because the colour palette looks like something off a toddlers app, I’m not sure. My biggest turn-off was their New Android app. With a small number of tasks it was slow. What would it be like with many more, It also looks like I’m not the only one having problems, it gets a right panning in the reviews on the Google Play store which worries me more.
To be fair they’ve only just released their new Mac and Android apps, so perhaps one to keep an eye on for the future. This is for you, if you after an app that is GTD all over, simple to understand, you use Dropbox and/or Evernote, your patient (as they get out of beta quality), rich and your favourite colour is brown. These apps come in as a threesome, working together to provide one trusted system. TODO for my Mac, Due Today for my Android phone and Toodledo for access anywhere (it’s Web) and providing the core service/glue that the other 2 sync with. One of the advantages of Toodledo is the many of 3rd party apps, so if I find that I don’t like Due Today, I can swap it out for one of the other many apps that sync with Toodledo. Some people love Toodledo but I can’t get over its poor user experience. I don’t come away feeling happy, I just feel frustrated. It’s not alone, TODO for Macs task editing is jarring and the overall experience is mundane.