I early wrote about my experiences with several todo web apps that may be used with a mobile device, such as, say, an iPod Touch. Here is my full review on the subject. (By “full review” I mean 4000+ words on the subject.)

My Background

When I bought my iPod Touch it was a purchase I was hoping would be able to replace my Palm Zire 31. I used my Palm on a daily basis, keeping track of assignments and my daily schedule. The thing I really liked about my Zire is that I had everything in one place. I had a calendar and a task list, and adding an event to either one was quick an easy.

Looking back, there were several aspects of the Palm that really worked well for me. The first was the task list. On the task page, it shows the list of tasks and the date each one is due. Clicking the checkbox signifies that a task is done. To change a task, one need simply to click on the line and write. Adding a new task is as easy as clicking “New” and writing the task down. The dates are all shown on the side, and if the date is wrong, it can easily be changed by clicking on it and choosing a new date from a drop down menu. If the due date was more than a week away, a separate screen would allow for any date to be chosen from a calendar view.

The date picker is a very important part of the process for me. I liked Palm’s date picker because it showed both the day number and the day abbreviation. For example, “13/4 Sun” would be shown to signify Sunday 13th of April. This is important to me because as a student I receive many assignments on a day to day basis. Many assignments come with instructions such as “This is due Tuesday” or “This is due next time.” But some assignments are long term: “This is due on the 6th.” By showing both the day number and day name it allows the user to work with whichever is more familiar or what is easier. (I’ll complain about this more later.)

The other thing I really liked about my Palm was that there was an agenda view which showed both the events that were happening today as well as the tasks that were due. It would also give some heads up for tomorrow. From this screen the user can view the entire day at a glance and even check off finished tasks.

The thing I didn’t like about my Palm is that it didn’t do a good job of syncing up with iCal and my Mac. I managed to make it work for the better part of three years, but most of that time I simply did everything on my Palm Pilot and didn’t bother with the desktop end of the deal.

My state of mind when getting an iPod was one of excitement, that I would find a great todo app and it would work perfectly until Apple made something that worked with iCal. Which leads me to the web apps I have tried.

TODO Web Apps

From my experience I have settled on three of the best todo apps available on the web. Before going over these three in detail I want to point out that I have tried a large number of web apps out. I have played with Ta-da List, Toodledo, Listingly, Remember the Milk, Noter, Vitalist, 43 Actions, iChecklist and pTasks.

I tried to give each of these a fair trial, but honestly, I could only stand some of them for a few minutes. Ta-da List, for example, didn’t offer an option for due dates, and the interface of pTasks looked so cluttered I couldn’t stand it. Others I used for a day or so before throwing in the towel. Vitalist had a nice interface which related it to both Toodledo as well as Remember the Milk. The problem I had with Vitalist is that failing to input a year for the due date caused the date to default to 2007, which rendered them absolutely useless. I did, however, like the concept of “Ticklers” which I gather to be reminders about things that have to be done on a certain day. It’s the closest thing I found to an integrated calendar.

Mostly, the apps didn’t have the feature set I was looking for or didn’t perform as reliably as I would like. So I finally narrowed it down to the three best apps, which I am currently using in order to get a good feel for them. I do predict, however, that the final winner will be the one that gets a native iPhone app made. If you’re looking for a good todo list, I would recommend looking into one of these three.

Toodledo

Toodledo was the first todo list I came across that I really liked. I still don’t like the web interface, it looks cluttered and there is too much going on. I felt overwhelmed as I set things up.

On the other hand, I was very impressed with the iPhone experience. The interface was clean and easy to follow.

I think part of my problem with Toodledo was that when I first used it I was still looking for a replacement that was just like my Palm Pilot, and Toodledo was different. That being said, I used Toodledo for about a week or two before moving on to something new, which is a long time compared to several other of the web apps I used.

I like a lot of things that Toodledo does. Adding a task is easy, just click the “Add Task” link at the top of every page. What I really like about adding a task is that there are only a few options and they are laid out nicely.

Give the task a Name and it’s good to go. Give the task a Folder, Priority and Due Date and it makes it even easier to find later. Toodledo also gives an option for Repeating tasks and give tasks notes. I didn’t use either of these features much, and as such I really wish that they could be turned off or toggled off, so that I wouldn’t have to scroll down to click on the “Save” button to save the task. I know, it’s a little thing, but is one of the thing that bothers me. (Okay, I stand somewhat corrected, I am able to hit “Go” in the onscreen keyboard and it saves the task, but I still would like an option for minimizing unneeded items.)

One important feature about Toodledo is it’s ability for what I call “generic” dates. When adding an item, I can type the due date to be “Thursday” and it will automatically set the due date to the next Thursday. This only works for 6 days in advance though, if the day name entered is the current day, the due date is set to today. Also, setting the due date to “Today” or “Tomorrow” work as expected. In fact, you can even set the due date to “Yesterday.” (I expected this functionality on several of the apps I tested, but not all of them offered it.)

One thing I understand more about Toodledo now is the idea of the Hotlist. I understood what the hotlist was, I just didn’t understand how it benefitted me. On my Palm, I always saw everything I needed to do, ever. It was all in one big list, and I could always keep track of everything. When working with Toodledo, (and eventually other todo lists), I cam across this concept of only needing to see overdue tasks, tasks due today and maybe, tasks due tomorrow. This was not something I was ready for when I first started using Toodledo. The usefulness of this has now grown on me and I realize that I maybe should have tried harder to stick with some of my first web apps.

When clicking on a completed task a check-mark appears in box. This is completely expected, but thee task doesn’t go away immediately. At first I didn’t fully understand this, and didn’t like it. Again, I was use to the functionality I had enabled on my Palm, and this was different. Upon retrospect and looking at the comments for some of the other web apps I have used, I now completely understand this functionality. This is basically the “undo” feature, in case an accidental touch should mark a task as completed before it’s time. Which is good, because it’s easy to touch the wrong spot on the screen. Toodledo also offers a “Recently Completed” menu, which makes it easy to a) go back and see what you have done, but also b) un-check a task that you didn’t mean to complete.

Toodledo offers a host of other features that can be combined with Toodledo for a better experience, my favorite of which is subscribing via iCal. Although, this is only marginally helpful, because I hardly use iCal on my iPod Touch, and when I do it seems very disconnected, feature sparse and relatively useless.

There were some things which bothered me about Toodledo, though. One thing was the double arrow oval in the top right-hand corner of the screen. I still don’t know what it is suppose to do. It looks like a “Refresh” button, and in some instances it seems to refresh the page, but somethings just don’t like to be refreshed. Take the number of tasks due each day, for example. Each list title includes the number of tasks in the list behind the name in parenthesis. This number is cached in a manner which seems to ignore page refreshing. After checking off all items in a list, the list item count remains the same, even after successive page reloads. As a perfectionist, this really bugged me. (Still does.) I’m not exactly sure why it does this, but it does.

The list of settings for the iPhone Toodledo is rather slim. It let’s you choose the default start page, which is nice, but it didn’t seem to work for me, and I jump around between view enough that I liked the Home Page as my default start page anyway.

As I reviewed the features for writing this, I surprised myself by thinking I should still be using Toodledo. One of the main reasons I left was because I needed to see if there was anything better out there. I’m not entirely sold one way or the other, but Toodledo is definitely a top program.

What I would really like to see added is a calendar functionality. If there are events that I want to go to, such as talks, lectures, concerts that are happening on a certain day, I need a method of being reminded about them. I suppose the solution would be to set up a Folder for “Special Events” and then put the time and location in the notes section of the task. I will definitely have to experiment with this solution while I continue to try out these apps.

43 Actions

At first I dismissed 43 Actions. When I first tested it I couldn’t get the due date picker to show up properly. I only had the options provided in their default drop-down menu. When I came back later to give it one more try, I was happy to discover that not only did it work, it worked just how I wanted it to work. That is to say, clicking on the “Show Date Picker” link uncovers a calendar from which a due day may be chosen.

Personally, I would prefer it if the date picker was always shown. I understand that it takes up quite a bit of space, but personally I would only need it to show a week at a time with an option for expanding to month view. But even with having to click an extra link to display the calendar it’s a lot easier than typing in the date into the other services that I used.

The user interface for 43 Actions is clean and friendly. I love the way it is set up and I love the lock of it. 43 Actions was one of my last apps to sign up for, so I haven’t used it as much as the others, so I really want to jump in and use it nonstop for a few days to see what it’s like.

Like Toodledo, it’s easy to add a new action, since there is usually a link up at the top of the page. Options when adding a task include Name, Mark as “active,” Due date, Project, Context, and a notes field that pops up on demand. There is also a checkbox next to the “Create” button which allows you to add another task directly after saving the first. There is no notion of priorities, but this doesn’t bother me because I usually set everything to high priority anyway. The interface for adding tasks is longer than Toodledo, by which I mean that it doesn’t fit on one screen. You have to scroll about two pages to see it all.

The thing I really like is the home page for 43 Actions. Each list is distinguished by color, which makes choosing the right list very easy once the color pattern is engrained into the mind. 43 Actions is also the only one I know of that shows the number of overdue tasks on the front page.

The other really nice thing about 43 Actions is that it has a whole slew of preferences. Here’s the list of options on the settings page:

Management
• manage contexts and projects
• manage actions

Layout

• actions to show
• display rows
• quick add field
• notes
• show context/project badges
• color scheme

Home

• next action
• agenda
• today
• this week
• organize
• contexts
• projects

Email Actions

• generate newaction email

Twitter

• add twitter username

Backup

• export all actions

Time Zone

Admin

• change email
• change password
• stay logged in
• show feedback field
• hide safari address bar
• turn archiving on
• delete this account

One of the reasons behind this large set of options is that there is only one interface for 43 Actions, and that is the mobile iPhone interface. There is no separate secondary “desktop” interface, such as Toodledo and Remember the Milk have.

Something that some of the other apps I have played with lacked is a search tool. At the bottom of the home page on 43 Actions is a search bar that allows you to search all your actions. Another thing that they have down there is a “Help and About” link which leads to a page of questions and answers. While on the subject of different features, 43 Actions has two other features I find very attractive. The first is their little green “operation complete” text which appears whenever something is saved. It’s good to know when things are successful. The other feature is that this is donation-ware. Whereas Toodledo and Remember the Milk offer a yearly subscription plan in the range of $15-$30, 43 Actions let’s you decide how much the system is worth to you, if you feel like donating at all. (Like the others, donators get benefits, although one could call them beta testers.)

When viewing a list of tasks, there is no option to check the task off. Instead the user is required to click on the task and then check it off as completed. What’s nice about this is that it is harder to accidentally check off a task. (Which is good, because unless you set the preferences to archive old actions, checking off an action deletes it.) What’s also nice is that there are options besides just checking it off. Users are also given the option to email the action to themselves as well as set the current action to a “next action.” (Which will make more sense to those who are GTDers.)

The one thing 43 Actions doesn’t do is a iCal feed. For my purposes, although I set it up for Toodledo and Remember the Milk, I never really used it.

Overall, I think I am in love with 43 Actions. The things that bothered me about Toodledo are not present in 43 Actions. The biggest issue I have with the todo list is that there is no calendar attached. Again though, a simple solution would be to set up a new “Project” called Current Events and place them on the right day.

The other thing I am really excited about is that 43 Actions has already announced plans that they are starting work on a native iPhone application. If it’s anything like what they have on the web, I’ll be pretty happy.

Remember the Milk

Finally, there’s Remember the Milk. Of these three apps I have used Remember the Milk the longest. I caved a few days after my pro trial ended and purchased a one year license for $25. If you’re planning to use Remember the Milk on an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s almost a requirement to pay for pro service. (The normal ‘mobile’ service is rather ugly in comparison.) I think this is one of the flaws with Remember the Milk.

The other big fault I find with Remember the Milk is that the web interface is cute but useless. The website looks much nicer than Toodledo, it’s very clean and inviting. That is, until you try to use it. First look at the cute interface. Isn’t it nice?

I love the look of the interface. I love the white, the clean, it looks very well done. But when it comes to usability, it looks like this:

B) Enter task. C) After entering task, clicking on task allows for editing due date, repeat, tags, etc… A) allows for changes in priority, moving to different lists and postponing actions. And D) is there to tell you what things mean, but looks like it should be a continuation of C.

But I don’t want to complain about the web interface, because that’s not my point. My focus is on the mobile interface, which is pretty much wonderful. First off, I love the options displayed on the home screen. Today, Tomorrow and This Week. The main focus is the things that are going on today, which includes any tasks that are overdue. Several things about this home screen. First, I love the look. The number of tasks in each list is in a small circle on the right. The icons on the left are beautiful, and the current date appears in the calendar box for the Today and Tomorrow options.

When I saw this user interface I was sold on Remember the Milk.

Compare this, however, to the standard Remember the Milk mobile interface.

Once you go to the iPhone version, there is no going back.

The top of the page offers two options, search and add task, (magnifying glass and plus sign respectively.)

Adding a task offers a few more options than I think are completely necessary, and not all the option work entirely as expected. When adding a new task, you may choose to enter task name, list, priority, due date, repeat, time estimate, tags, location and URL.

Unlike the other apps I have talked about, Remember the Milk is subtle about the data type for each entry. (Notice the “Touch to select…” vs the “Touch to edit…” names. It took me a while to catch on.)

Task name is a simple text entry, but List is chosen from a drop down menu. Lists may only be edited from the desktop version of the site, and it isn’t immediately obvious how to go about doing this.

Priority is a simple drop down menu, but the options listed are “None, 1, 2, 3″ with no indication if 1 is important or 3 is important. (Turns out, 1 gives an orange color, 2 a dark blue and 3 a light blue. Interpret at will.)

Due date is an empty text box. Fortunately “generic dates” work nicely. Unlike Toodledo, however, entering “Monday” as the due date on a Monday sets the due date to next Monday (a week later), whereas Toodledo would set it to today.

Repeat is also a blank text box, I’m not sure what to do with it, I never used it. Time estimate is a blank text box as well. I actually like the idea of being able to put in a time estimate, but I never used the feature once.

Tags allows you to put in tags via a text box. This could get old quickly if you had many tags for many tasks.

Location is a drop down menu which I highly disagree with. The way Remember the Milk does locations is more like a “well, we can… so we did” or perhaps “look at how amazingly cool this is!” Locations may only be chosen from the standard website. What’s more, locations are chosen and labeled via a Google Map. This is extremely NOT helpful, when you want locations to be “Garage”, “Office”, ” Kitchen”, etc. Trying to pinpoint locations on the map is rather obnoxious and I always have had trouble trying to navigate this section of the website. It all seems counter intuitive.

Final, URL is a text box to edit. I don’t know how it works, I never used it.

The list of tasks is nicely laid out. Task priority is shown with a colored dot on the left and the due date is color coded on the right. Orange means past or overdue, blue means today or future event.

Checking off a todo item can be a bit tricky, because it’s not obvious how to go about doing it. When viewing a list, there is a button called “Edit” on the top of the page. Clicking the edit button will produce a list of checkboxes, or check-circles, along the left hand side of the tasks. Clicking on a checkbox produces a box on the right hand side of the screen which reads “Complete.” Clicking on this button marks a task as completed. After checking off finished tasks, clicking the “Done” button which is now in place of the “Edit” button returns the user to the usual interface.

This method is not immediately intuitive, but upon reflection makes perfect sense, because the extra steps ensure no accidental checking off of tasks. A complaint of this method, however, is that if the list of tasks is long the user has to scroll to the top of the page to click “Edit” and then scroll down the page to find the task, which no longer has any color identification for priority or due date and thus is harder to find. After checking off tasks as completed, the user then has to scroll back up to the top to be done. It’s almost like a separate mode specially for marking tasks as done.

The settings link at the bottom is more like an accessibility list, than things you can actually set. It lists out you’re Remember the Milk “Inbox Email Address” an “Import Email Address” the link to iCalendar Services and the url of the Atom Feed for your lists. I found the iCal service to be a nice feature, as todo items would appear in iCal as all day events. However, there is no way to check these off from iCal, and unless you sync your iPod or iPhone with your computer every time you update Remember the Milk then the list on iCal is never up to date.

Overall, I really like Remember the Milk. It has some nice features and a beautiful interface. It’s not perfect, however, and there are several places for some improvement. I really hope that they decide to build a native iPhone application for their software.

In Conclusion

Writing this piece caused me to evaluate each piece of software in a while new light. Throughout the course of writing and researching I learned several new things about each of the applications. In some cases I even had to go back and correct some earlier comments. Each of these three web apps are amazing pieces of technology.

I would have to say that 43 Actions is currently my favorite. I think I’ll be using that one, almost exclusively for a bit to make sure that it completely fits my needs. Remember the Milk is a close second. I still have some issues with the implementation, but since it’s still under development by a small team of developers, I think they have potential for great improvement. Toodledo would have to come into third place for me. Toodledo is the oldest of the bunch and as such it’s much more set in it’s ways. While there are several things I really like about Toodledo, there is nothing that really makes it stand out for me.

I think I have pretty much exhausted this topic, at least from my standpoint. If I’ve left anything out or have come across faulty perceptions of the systems, please share your comments and feel free to correct me.