April 1st, 2008 : Finding the right todo list
UPDATE: I changed the title of this post to something more appropriate. A future post will talk more about my general complaints with web apps.
The last week in February I went out and finally bought myself an iPod Touch. I had been wishing I had one since January 1st when a good friend showed me his. The original idea I had, although now seen as rather naive, was that I would get an iPod Touch, Apple would shortly after announce the SDK and within a week or so I could have some sweet calendar and to-do apps running on my iPod.
For over a year I have been working with a Palm Zire 31, and have been very pleased with it, but when I got my iPod, the Zire went to ebay. I was really hoping that the iPod could fully replace my Palm Pilot. Well, Apple made their announcement and it wasn’t what I expected. They told me I had to wait until June, or more likely, early to mid July, before I could use my iPod like I wanted too.
I figured I could live with this and that I would simply have to run off Web Apps until June, which wouldn’t be entirely hard because most of my time is spent on a well wireless campus. I already had a preconceived idea of how a to-do list should work and I was hoping someone had made a really wicked awesome web app that would fulfill all my needs, hopefully making things easier and more user friendly than my Palm.
I was first recommended towards Ta-da Lists, which I was really hopefully about, coming from 37 Signals. It was a neat app, but it wasn’t what I was looking for. I really wanted something with due dates, so I can put every assignment for the rest of the semester into it, as well as a long list of things I want to try to accomplish in my free time. I quickly decided that Ta-da Lists was not what I was looking for and moved. (I really like the idea behind it and I love the simple to use interface, but it’s just not what I needed.)
I did some searching via Google and came across a site called, Just Another Mobile Monday, which had a list of several good applications for online to-do lists. A site called Toodledo caught my attention and seemed to have everything I needed. I like Toodledo, it did pretty much everything I wanted to do. It has priorities and allows for grouping in folders, and maintained a “Hotlist” of all tasks that were overdue or coming up soon. For anyone looking for a good to-do web app, I would put Toodledo on my list of “web apps you should try.” For some reason though, I wasn’t satisfied. I had used Toodledo for a few weeks and I really liked it, but I decided I needed to try something else, to see if it fit things better.
The next web app I decided to try out was Listingly. The interface looked neat and method of breaking things down into lists looked promising. After trying it out for a bit though, I was not very impressed with the site. The images wouldn’t always load and the text never sat right in the buttons. I played around with it for a day, but by then I knew I needed something else.
I heard Leo Laporte mention that Remember the Milk was a really good to-do list for the iPhone. I had seen it before when searching for a to-do list, so I thought I should try it out. Remember the Milk looks really promising, but unfortunately, it’s not as nice as I would like yet. After playing around on my Laptop I decided to give it a try on my iPod. I finally found the iPod optimized version of the site and discovered that it was for “pro” users. This means that there is a $25 yearly fee to use the service. Fortunately, they have a 15 day trial period for the software, and I was quickly up and running.
Remember the Milk has a very nice interface, although there are some things that take some getting use too. I have used it for 15 days now and don’t fully understand how location and tags fully work, but I really liked the rest of their set up. The little side graphics looked wonderful and they color scheme was nice too. There were a few more options in adding a task than I really needed, but it worked how I expected for the most part and worked well.
Today, however, my trial is up. Ideally, I want to use a iPod based app, rather than a web based app to store my to-do lists. Over the summer I won’t always be in a location that has wireless connection, in fact, after another year of college I can’t guarantee I’ll have wireless connection anywhere. I’m really hoping to find a great to-do list app for the iPod in June or July. One that will sync with iCalendar and everything. As much as I like Remember the Milk, I don’t feel that $25 is worth 3 months of usage, especially if $25 is suppose to give me $12. Personally, I can’t justify the spending of that money. I can work with the “non-optimized” mobile version of the site, but it really isn’t the same if you know how it could be.
Surfing the Apple website, after my trial had ended, I stumbled across Noter, a simple little to-do list on the web. It took me about 2 minutes to decide that it had no chance of serving my needs and again I needed to move on.
Which actually brings me up until now. I decided to write up my experience, and actually in the process have discovered two things. The first is that there is a site called Vitalist, which like Toodledo and Remember the Milk, look promising. The iPhone interface is free, and it appears to have a good feature set. I have signed up for an account and will probably spend the next day or two playing around with it and seeing how well it works.
The other thing I realized while writing this up was that I really did like Toodledo, and if Vitalist doesn’t live up to my expectations I can always fall back onto it for a few months until I am finally able to run apps on my iPod.
In Conclusion
There are a lot of web apps out there for staying on top of your to-do lists. I think my favorite has to be Remember the Milk, but I don’t agree with their policy of charging for an iPod interface. I understand it makes sense financially for them, but I just wish it was free.
Toodledo is probably my overall favorite because I have used it the longest, but I’m curious to see how well Vitalist works in comparison. After I spend more time with it I’ll have to post up my experience, but I’m hoping it’s going to be a good one.

































The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past was one of the first video games I had as a child. We got our SNES a few months before the N64 came out. (With a promise to our parents that we wouldn’t also want the N64 because it was newer… which turned out to be completely false later.) A Link to the Past has a quality to it that few other games have. I think it has an amazing replay value. Not necessarily because there are different choices you can make, there really are not any choices, or because it has a hard mode, it doesn’t, but it has a unique quality of game play that makes it enjoyable to pick up and play every now and then.
I love metroids. I don’t know why, but I’m actually in the processes of trying to create a metroid screen saver wherein several metroids will roam around my screen guarding my computer from any intruders. (More on this on this later.)
matter, on occasion, I have. The racing style of Mario Kart is perfect, the items allow anyone to have a fair chance (well… sort of…) and the variety of tracks and battles keep things interesting.
Kirby’s Avalanche
I love MegaMan, but never actually bought any of the games. Only rented them and downloaded their soundtracks. Kirby always had great games and I’ve purchased the old ones for the Wii now. Smash Bros is a great series that has offered weeks of great fun with friends. Perfect Dark was by far the best first person shooter for the N64. Beetle Adventure Racing was pretty sweet and while I’m thinking about racing games the original F-Zero is on my list of games I enjoy to sit down and play every now and then. Star Fox is a great series too, but I haven’t played the newest ones a whole lot. I enjoy the occasional jaunt into Halo, but more often then not I’m just listening to their soundtracks. Final Fantasy VII is a classic and one of these days I’ll remember that I still have to fight the final boss. Sim City for the Super Nintendo is the best Sim City game ever except that our cartridge was rather fickle and we were never able to keep a city going for very long before the data was erased. Of course, I can’t leave out Mario World Series and Super Mario 64.