I was never a big fan of Wunderlist, it was too much eye-candy and too few features for me. But it was the best todo app the whole family could use. Support for all platforms, simple list sharing, and the ability to set custom backgrounds and colors..
Not sure what will replace it. Almost certainly not Microsoft To-Do, though. Seems too opinionated for a todo system and lacks critical features.
It's pretty much a replica of the original app. It's being developed by the same team that made Wunderlist as in Chad Fowler and company (he has a larger portfolio now). Most of these comments are probably unnecessary. The original team still works at MSFT The app is simply a rebrand that's trying to add additional features over time.
It is not a replica of Wunderlist. I'm a long time Wunderlist user, and Microsoft To-Do only implements a subset of the Wunderlist features. It's close, but several important organizational features, like sub tasks and nested lists/projects are not there.
Very similar to what they did with Sunrise. Buy the app & implement a very poor version. I like a lot of Microsoft things but they killed Sunrise & their Outlook app which once was good has become filled with bugs in my experience.
I know have to help my wife migrate from Wunderlist. This will not be fun.
I know it's the same team and I'm sure it'll reach parity/inherit their existing roadmap, but with Accompli they literally just rebranded it Outlook and released as is - complete with support for gmail etc. remaining. I'm just curious why they didn't do the same here, I'm sure there's a good reason and it'd be interesting to hear it.
Wunderlist had an own backend infrastructure where accompli just managed your mailbox based in gmail, exchange, yahoo etc via a standardized protocol (imap).
This app uses the Exchange Online backend (hence you see Outlook tasks showing up in To-Do) so it is a re-write, not re-brand
Is that true? Flagging for moderation is quite different to actually moderating - the moderators are free to ignore flags, users can't tell how flagged something is AFAICT.
User flags on submissions do affect rankings. If a submission receives enough flags, the [flagged] tag will also be displayed. You're right that there isn't a way for non-mods to know exactly how many flags a submission has received.
There are some other knobs the mods can turn, but user flags definitely are used and useful. If you see something you feel is inappropriate for HN, flag it. Community curation is definitely a part of HN. I have seen the mods override user flags for contentious yet popular submissions, but that's been rare, in my experience.
Which features is it lacking? I'm surprised no one has re-made Sunrise. It was the defacto calendar app until it was bought & killed... I mean migrated into Outlook.
Google Keep, as suggested by others here. I'm sceptical though, since I'm using both apps now but feel that they are very complementary. Might just be habit.
Wunderlist will keep working until Microsoft To-Do has those features. Once they're done implementing those, you can import your Wunderlist and transition over.
I have been using org-mode the last few months and I really like it. It easy to get lost in all the possibilities, but it has extremely cool features, for instance: since org is also a markup language, I can just create my slides with Markdown-like markup and export it to e.g. LaTeX beamer. But since any heading can be made a TODO item, I can just mark slides that are not done as TODO and it will show up on my TODO list.
Damn, now I need to move faster. My app must be ready by the time they close Wunderlist. I expected an eventual closure, but not that soon.
I've spent the last two years developing a todo app that would be a good replacement for Wunderlist (and Astrid, if anyone still remembers that).
The app will include with some major / critical features both those apps lacked: proper hierarchies / first-class subtasks, automatically-activated contexts (e.g. location), snooze for arbitrary durations, a robust implementation of recurring tasks, and an infinite calendar-like timeline to look ahead.
I went full waterfall on it, the spec is 266 pages long and took half a year just to write. I'm currently testing an Android alpha version, and, for me, it works ridiculously well, much better than Wunderlist, which sat on my homescreen since August 2013.
Yes, I'm aware of this problem. First, we're unlikely yo be acqui-hired, because we're based in Russia. Second, I simply don't believe that this app will reach the levels of success similar to Wunderlist or Todoist :)))
But I definitely think that there should be a legal way of protecting existing users of an app from "Our Incredible Journey". Maybe some clause that permits the authors to open-source the app.
One thing that is great about wunderlist is the truly instant sync. Have you been able to replicate that? I vaguely remember reading an interview somewhere about how they accomplished it.
wunderlist was the only todo app for me that stuck, mostly because it was simple to use, i would drop allmost anything to wunderlist without much structure. and thats why i kept using it. keep the advanced feadures but dont let them cluter the UI .
> I went full waterfall on it, the spec is 266 pages long and took half a year just to write.
Why would you write a ~9k “loc” long spec over 6 month instead of coding it directly ? The only reason I can think of, is if you want to out-source the development. Is there any good reason to work this way on a one-man project ?
Not OP, but once you have a spec, it's much easier to code up. If you're designing while you're coding, you have to switch all the time between 'how should this work' and 'how do I build this'. Thinking and writing down how something should work, should always be the first step - regardless of whether you're on your own or in a big team.
(before the obvious objection: exceptions are toy programs which you write to find out how to build something, in which you focus on the technical aspects. The technical aspects ('how does it work') don't matter for the end user (= your potential customer), they only care about 'what does it do'.)
In my experience there is far too little respect for well written specifications.
Most colleagues of mine and a few managers see them as a waste of time ("you're over thinking this", or "we'll figure it out later") yet somehow the projects with a specification always end up being done more or less on schedule.
The thing about specifications is that you need to be open to changing them if you find it's not working out. Specifications are not synonymous with waterfall development, and it's harmful to treat and view them as such.
I totally agree with this statement, but here we're talking about 0.5 year of planning !
Planning is important, and cautiously thinking about your features before diving in can save you weeks later on. But spending 6 month in a tunnel, writing specs you'll spend at least a year to implement, is a huge risk : what if your users only use 30% of the features you designed, and lack a missing feature you didn't plan ? You could have figured it out way sooner have you built something earlier and released it.
Also, your time to market is way slower and you don't risk losing years of work by missing a deadline …
> Damn, now I need to move faster. My app must be ready by the time they close Wunderlist. I expected an eventual closure, but not that soon.
I never plan. I just code. I end up writing 10 versions of every module, and retrofitting everything that touches it 10 times as well. What I'm trying to say is that I think... I think you might be on to something :)
> Is there any good reason to work this way on a one-man project ?
(Not the OP.) At least for me, emphatically yes.
From your question, it sounds like you're only considering the communicative value of a spec. That's of course important, but I consider it secondary.
Writing a good spec forces you to think through what you're developing in an orthogonal way. You're thinking through flow, cohesiveness, design, some implementation, UI, etc. together at a high level.
I love having the time to write a spec when I'm building something nontrivial. I've found numerous problems that I wouldn't have otherwise by doing so, ranging from simple UI problems/contradictions to spotting unconsidered assumptions that would have lead me down dead ends.
A spec and the application should naturally co-evolve during development to some extent. But the spec also provides an anchor for what you're doing, as well as a map. It is very, very helpful if you Do It Right(tm), no matter the size of your team.
I just wrote well-structured, dense, coherent / "mentally type-checked", bulleted-list prose, often copied directly from Workflowy. Some of the critical parts were described with FP-style pseudocode, for greater exactness.
(OP here) This is not a one-man project. I'm the founder, and there's a UI designer and two coders - which makes it 4 people total. And we'll add another dedicated coder for iOS development, when we find a good one.
It's so you won't have multiple 'ooh' moments a year in coding - "I need to change that base thing, will require large rewrite". Or at least decrease possibility of it. Six months seems a bit too long even for 266 pages specs though.
>I went full waterfall on it, the spec is 266 pages long and took half a year just to write.
Wow. It's nice to see extensive planning like that. I usually just throw anything that seems like an important idea into a text file on the assumption that it'll be fully hashed out during production at a later time. That method entails far less work, with the caveat of occasionally wondering if you're delusional from time to time.
In any case, good luck. I hope you kick ass. If Microsoft employs their usual design aesthetic, doing so should be very possible.
In case of this project (btw, here's a temporary website: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/), it was impossible to quickly throw it together. I had to think it through in one single chunk.
The app combines four intersecting concepts:
1. Infinite timeline with addressable days.
2. Recurring tasks that support this infinite timeline.
3. First-class subtasks, which have all properties of normal tasks.
4. Contexts, which hide tasks from the list based on certain conditions.
I simply couldn't create a working mental model that accounts for all possible interplay of these concepts without speccing it out in advance.
If you need another tester I'd be happy to help out :)
Currently I use OmniFocus, primarily due to the start dates which hide things until they're relevant, which so many apps (including Wunderlist) lacked. Sadly the Android support is poor and only covered by 3rd party clients that lag massively behind in functionality.
> I've spent the last two years developing a todo app
Without seeing what you have, a general remark would be that everyone and his cousin has clocked at least some time developing at least one ToDo app. It's a right-of-passage thing for a lot of developers, just like a Weather app is the same for UX designer wannabies.
BTW, what set Wunderlist apart is not the features first and foremost, but their bold in-your-face marketing rooted in very pretty visuals and a fake arrogance routine. Whether they had proper hierarchies / first-class subtasks was quite secondary.
What set Wunderlist apart is that they have been the archive of my project ideas for the last who knows how many years. While other apps came along and disappeared, I was sure Wunderlist was just "there" when I needed it.
(OP here) I've set up a quick website with more detailed descriptions and some screenshots: http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/
I'm absolutely aware of the rite-of-passage thing, but I'm doing this because I NEED a proper, working todo app. My life will crumble without it. And I'm prepared spend my time and money on it. In any case, there's no going back to Wunderlist now.
As for marketing, I'm not worried. All I want is a working todo app, and it will be great if it turns out to be useful for other people.
I wrote this text in an hour, specifically for HN :) Of course the description for the general public will be more accessible - and supported by screenshots.
(Which reminds me that I should be doing the screenshots now.)
Looks really nice. Unfortunately, I usually don't want my task list associated with dates. I just want a list of stuff I need to get done (actually, A lot of lists of stuff). Once in a while I'll want to associate a reminder date but that's about it for the way I work.
It is fine, occasionally a neat idea or concept emerges, but I just use Org mode and Agenda now. I always see or hear people eventually giving up on Emacs for some pretty new editor (VS Code) or finally quitting vim because they "feel more productive" somewhere else. Or using some new and random TODO app. Meanwhile, I have been using the same system for 7 years and I know it will work on any platform any time and my data is all plain text and not under control of any third party. Finally, I have a depth of features most TODO apps /still/ lack. But there is a huge reluctance to embrace this work style, but I think it is a short term gains / long term gains problem and most people end up with whatever is shiny and in the moment, but it will get abandoned over the long haul. My text based system will work in 10 years. Will whatever shiny and new TODO app?
> Without seeing what you have, a general remark would be that everyone and his cousin has clocked at least some time developing at least one ToDo app. It's a right-of-passage thing for a lot of developers, just like a Weather app is the same for UX designer wannabies.
I'm no language expert, but I don't think there was any "switch".
As Wikipedia says, "[rite of passage] is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage."
"Right of passage" may mean something similar to "right of way", and may be used my mistake when people mean "rite of passage" but there was never a switch in how "rite" is spelled.
Would you be willing to share the alpha?
I've been a long time fan of wunderlist and just put a ton of things into it for an upcoming move. Kind of bummed it's being shut down and would love to try yours out.
I like your list of features. I currently use OpenTasks on Android, because it's the only thing that syncs (via DAVdroid) with Nextcloud. But while Nextcloud supports task hierarchies/subtasks, OpenTasks doesn't. Will it be possible to do DAV syncing with your app?
[For heavy-duty use and project planning, I use org-mode. But there's still no really satisfactory mobile org-mode story.]
It's too late to edit my original comment, but I've set up a temporary website, where I explain this app in more detail, and show some (temporary and very messy) screenshots and designs:
I think the point of Wunderlist was the online synching across devices and the list sharing. It was that there was some trust built up with the brand. I wouldn't just start using some random todo app and allow it to sync my todo lists without having some level of trust built up.
Something else that was critical is that I could use Cortana to add tasks to lists while driving or without typing on the keyboard.
I think when I want to go deeper in organizing tasks, todo apps are often bad for that simply because a document format tends to do better once you're in the thick. It's better if those things are stored, tracked and organized with the work itself most of the time and todo apps tend to be outside that context.
Does HN have a way of moderating astroturfing? I'm honestly curious. Im aware of the typical HN digressions but it appears lately, threads are just consistently hijacked encircled in twaddles and responses to channel traffic and discussion off to some app.
What are the checks and balances if any to keep the astroturfing binge to a minimum and encourage discussions instead of traffic channeling bait.
Your barrier in gaining popularity once you launch is going to be cross-platform support. It sounds like you started wholly with Android, with other platforms coming further down the pipeline. These days a product that does not have apps for at least Windows, Android, iOS, and OS X severely limits its customer base.
Android essentially represents only a subset of phones and tablets. An app like yours is useless to many people unless it has desktop equivalents, as mobile-only access heavily restricts a user's ability to be productive where and when they need it. I might be an edge case, but I use Windows, OS X, an iPhone, and an Android tablet. Your app could be the most functional and usable todo app out there, but a competing product with 10% of your features is going to wind up being my choice simply because I get to use it across all my workflows. Platform support beats out the quality of the app, every time.
Based on your screenshots, the app is wonderful. I simply suspect you have focused too much on launching a 100% complete product instead of starting with an MVP. Obsessing over having a perfect product that launches too late to market, while your competition launches early and takes your cake, is all too common a scenario.
Yes, we started on Android, because that's the most efficient way for me to dogfood the app. Another reason why we didn't start developing for more platforms in parallel is that the concept was unproven. I wasn't sure it would work.
(Under "the concept" I mostly mean the approach where all non-snoozed or dateless tasks are shown in Today, and you swipe away the tasks that are not yet "ripe" to be done -- whereas in traditional apps you do the reverse - you select tasks to do by starring them during a review).
Now that I found out that the concept clearly works well at least for one user (me), the next step would be to validate the concept on a wider group of users. An Android-only soft-launch, or even a closed beta should be enough for that.
And if the concept is valid, we'll definitely develop for other platforms, the ones you mentioned. iOS and Android clients will be native, and the desktop apps (Windows and macOS) will probably use some cross-platform technology.
First of all, clearly the advice I'm giving is a bit too early for where you are at presently. I think that's giving credit to you for the quality of the work you are producing. Basically, I want this app. You might want to dial back just a tad on the intricate details, out of fear you may wind up never shipping an initial version. Being a software dev myself, I understand that you could spend another year (hell, even 2-3 years) completely hashing out every minute detail. However I think that what you have is getting to the point of being "above and beyond what is necessary" that you need to stop tinkering so much, and find a way to ship something sooner rather than later.
When you get around to desktop clients, ignore the seemingly negative consensus regarding Electron[1] if you think it's the right fit for you. All the negativity I've read about it is from "purists" who aren't specifically singling out Electron; rather they are hating on all non-native implementations. I noticed the mention of Xamarin on your site; never heard of it, but I'd be weary as they seem to be oriented more towards mobile whereas you're looking for a cross-platform desktop solution which is where Electron shines.
If your goal were to be the gold standard for apps, you should be developing using native OS X APIs; the performance you get from a native implementation on OS X is astounding. However, if you do native OS X you're putting yourself in a position to do native Windows and possibly Linux apps, and the collective work required for native-everywhere obviously does not come easy or cheap - particularly if you are doing this as a solo project without assistance from a team.
Electron is a perfectly fine balance for most UIs that are fairly simplistic, which is going to be true even for the most advanced todo-type app. Extra bonus being that if you put in the effort to plan out the Electron app side-by-side with your web/browser-based app, you can share the frontend development between the two, resulting in less overall work.
Being a software dev myself, I understand that you could spend another year (hell, even 2-3 years) completely hashing out every minute detail.
I won't do that :) I stopped working on the spec the moment I handed it down to coders, and my total time spent on the spec since then is around one week. When the spec is written well, and you simulated all important situations in your head before encountering them in the wild, you actually don't need much extra time.
There's almost no tinkering happens on the app right now. I'm fixing critical bugs and smoothing out rough details that manifested after months of my dogfooding.
Regarding the desktop solutions: yes, going native would be perfect, but that is not feasible for a 4-man team. We'll go with Electron or Xamarin or, less likely, Qt - we haven't decided on the exact technology yet.
I'm wondering if you're including the Astrid feature I still miss and have never found a replacement for: assigning locations to tags, so that you can do things like have an alert come up with "stuff I gotta do at home" when you get home.
If you have this and an iOS version, then you have my money.
Hope your waterfall spec has caldev integration. I want a to do app that syncs with my iPhone todos and Google todos. I should be able to tell Siri to add something and mark it off later from my desktop. Or add couple of things with Siri, some auto populated from Gmail and notes.
Basically I don't give a shit about a walled garden to do app anymore no matter how good it is. I don't want a new app. I'd rather use something that puts my existing apps on steroids.
Nice looking app, but screenshots are not much use. Do you have release anxiety? 2 years and nothings out but a landing page?
If you had released it earlier you might have been able to get some traction right about now when people are forced to leave wunderlist.
You want to move faster, then release the app. Customer feedback positive and negative will get you making changes quick smart and you'll get a good sense of initial demand. App development is a continuous process that requires constant input from users. No point in adding features no one asked for, you're just wasting your time.
As a wise man once said 'It's better to have released and failed than to never have released at all'.
I use Google Keep for this. Works well enough. When Microsoft bought Wunderlist I moved away from it as I guessed it would be replaced by a lesser product (at least initially) and probably folded into Office 365.
Remember The Milk is great. Tried Wunderlist, tried Todoist and always eventually came back to RTM. For me it's the Smart Lists that let me run my own, weird version of GTD ;)
Ha yeah I know what you mean. I am still angry about Reader.
For now at least it seems Google is putting work into Keep so I hope it won't disappear anytime soon.
Unfortunately having a todo/notes app that allows for account controlled sharing is tricky to do without some kind of service. Unless you want to get all ghetto and build something that works on top of something like Dropbox but that gets problematic as Dropbox isn't designed to be used that way.
I built my own test program that used a protected-shared Google Sheet as its data source but at that point you might as well just use Keep!
Oh, this is disappointing. Any app launched as a result of killing a long-running service now carries the added risk of "when are you going to kill this, too?".
Won't be touching this, have a lot of history in Wunderlist I'll now need to figure out how to move elsewhere.
Wunderlist is perhaps the only shared to-do list application that actually works. I don't know about 100MM, but it's an important application --- which is why there's a pretty substantial thread here about MSFT killing it off.
Oh dear, oh dear. I use Wunderlist on Mac, and very recently wrote to my entire team about how I tried so many Todo apps over the years and how Wunderlist is the only thing that worked out. Now what do I do?
Wunderlist was super useful - fast, all devices in sync, excellent browser version
starting to rethink using so many hosted services now - Zerigo is closing too in 10 days - that was another service a lot of time had been invested in setting up
it feels like the better a service is the more chance the team gets borged and the app shut down
I get grumpy about cloud services coming and going, and I can imagine how much marketing data we're all providing to Microsoft by sharing our shopping list this way, but then I remember what a pain in the ass hosting my own email was for a decade and what that would be like in this era of massive botnets.
Then I put my cane away because as much as I wave it at clouds, I will still use cloud services over having to host my own.
No, you can't really blame them. One could make the argument that once providing a service to users you have some responsibility towards them, but I don't think it overrides the case for them to be acquired.
I can't help feeling that there is something rather dreadful about this state of affairs, however. It just seems like too many good things get acquired and shut down. That could be the fault of the market/culture/prevailing business models/app stores in not making it profitable enough for developers to want to keep going with their single app, and it could also be the fault of the acquires for shutting down good things.
> Sparrow, Sunrise, Wunderlist... all the good apps just get bought and killed.
Consider it as a lesson only to use open source apps so that a group of convinced users can at least hire a programmer to fix bugs or add new features.
It's not really killed. The original Sunrise, Accompli and Wunderlist teams still work at MSFT and they're working on their new apps respectively. Chad works on Wunderlist. Javier still runs outlook. They just absorbed a bunch of other apps too
It doesn't matter where the team is now, the Outlook Calendar is not Sunrise nor To-Do is Wunderlist.
I get what you say but the apps are gone (or soon to be in this case) and for the people that used those apps that is killing them.
I totally get where you're coming from, but Outlook is literally Accompli renamed. I see the opposition to Sunrise being folded into the Outlook client (it's not standalone), but To-Do is effectively the same as Wunderlist but their V2 that they've been gestating on for more than a year (a more to-do oriented view).
The question I ask is, were all those apps just created to be bought? In other words, were they 'startups' always aimed at some kind of buy-out or IPO or whatever? If so, I have to question that whole model (shock, horror).
After all, it's one thing to expect everything to get cannibalized into, well, Microsoft I guess, and consider that an ideal world.
It's quite another to get used to the idea that all good things exist to be consumed and obliterated. I really don't care if it furthers somebody's stock prices or is a correct competitive move, to me that seems like entropy in a very obvious way.
And I have a feeling that when AI does kick in, its value system must surely be founded on resisting entropy… so it'll look at this sort of thing with a very dim view.
I don't think those apps were just started with a boyout, acquihire, or an IPO in mind. But to "succeed" and be able to get money out of them. Do better in life, have a better (maybe a lot better) lifestyle and be able to support it for considerable time. Maybe a desire to retire younger. So when a good offer comes around they go for it. Because you never know - another excellent XYZ todo app from some ABC MNC or startup might have killed it in future - just an example.
This is normal, why would you be shocked by it? Consider going for open source apps only that supports open standards. That is not full proof and not always convenient but it's a good way to avoid some of thse shocks and horrors.
Bugger. After 5 years of on-off trying todo lists, I'd finally got to like Wunderlist. Now I guess I'm back to Todoist, which I've never felt any affection for.
Taskwarrior on Desktop and Taskwarrior + Termux on Android is the most flexible, private, open and lightweight TODO manager I've ever used. No eye candy whatsoever, just pure power. I've been using the combo for a few years now, give it a look.
The desktop runs a cron job to sync every X minutes with a taskwarrior server on an amazon instance. The cellphone syncs manually, or you can automate a sync installing Taskwarrior for Android. The UI of this Taskwarrior for Android app is not very good for me, but it allows you to sync the taskdata files every X minutes if you want. You only need to make sure to point the app to the termux .task folder so both the Taskwarrior for Android and the Termux + Taskwarrior CLI use the same data files.
Do you use a special keyboard like Hacker's Keyboard for Taskwarrior CLI?
EDIT: I just found out about the Volume Up+Q thing, maybe I don't need another keyboard. I would prefer it that way so I can swipe when typing new tasks.
I configured a SyncThing[1] between my devices with the taskwarrior file included in the synced folder and it's been working well, without having to setup a taskwarrior server.
Seems like users need to have an (Office 365/Outlook) account with Microsoft to use To-Do. Big turndown, most of my colleagues are using Macs and have no need for Microsoft (no, not even Office), seems we need to switch (again).
You don't need Office accounts, a Microsoft account is enough. I'm pretty sure they are free. If you switch to another service, there is a change you will have to create users on that service anyways, no?
If anyone is looking for an alternative that will probably be around for a long time, check out Todoist [1]: they are bootstrapped and profitable and been around for 10 years.
In terms of product - it's as simple to use as Wunderlist, but does have a few extra features. And they are cross platform like Wunderlist.
(I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy user.)
The Todoist sign-up page now has a migration tool: "Coming from Wunderlist? Import your tasks." If that isn't timely reaction to a market need then I don't know what is.
I was initially excited but this was a let-down:
>>>
The owner of www.todoist.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.
This site uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to specify that Firefox may only connect to it securely. As a result, it is not possible to add an exception for this certificate.
Thanks for the support arikfr! Being a long time HN user, I am happy to see Todoist recommended.
We are in this for the long haul. We don't even go into acquisitions talks (we already turned down a lot of them), and we don't have an exit strategy. If you are interested in learning more please read our `No Exit philosophy` https://tentimezones.com/why-we-don-t-have-an-exit-strategy-...
As someone who is also building a company [1], I found this post (and the others on your blog around the topic) truly inspiring.
Actually it was a big part of why I decided to use Todoist and become a paid user. I was using it on and off for a long time (been a paid user in 2010!) but seeing how you run things, made me stay this time.
I like this. I run the boutique audio plugin company Airwindows http://www.airwindows.com and last year I ran into a little problem: my payment processor, Kagi, went out of business owing me hundreds of dollars.
Your reasons for the No Exit strategy resonate with my thinking when I flipped Airwindows over to a Patreon strategy, decimating my income (I'd grossed close to a quarter million dollars by this point) just so I could release all future plugins as free AU, Mac and PC VSTs. At that point, the tactics became flooding the market with VST versions of software that had been AU-only up to that point, and coming up with promises (such as an open-sourcing program under the MIT license, and I've also debated using the GPL) to motivate people to join the Patreon.
If you starve and die, you can't do any work. If you're incredibly poor, you can only work on that which you can afford. (no modeling of Neve consoles here, not properly!) If you have incredible access to capital, sky's the limit, but it seems compulsory to screw over your users because capital demands to be returned tenfold, and this puts HUGE pressure on any dev or creator to turn full-on evil.
I don't know the answer and I'm not doing that awesomely, but that's not so different from how things were going before: that market is shriveling, in part because people simply can't pay money for things any more. There are major players which are, I think, staving off total collapse by setting up the most heinous DRM treadmills imaginable and trying to latch on to all the credit cards they can, all while trying to race to the bottom and starve everybody else.
I can't target capital as a goal anymore. I'll beg if I have to, I'll accept ugly and scary poverty, but I can't be part of the system geared to leave all the users with nothing. It's open source and tool-distribution for me. The whole concept of being rewarded with wealth for valuable work has become a charade when it gets crowded out by 'rewarded with lots more wealth by helping Microsoft screw everyone over'. The link's broken. And this is a rather big deal in a world where that link's axiomatic.
Nice to see that - I love Todoist, especially due to its wide platform support (having quality apps for macOS, Android and Android Wear is pretty awesome!).
I know they are doing what HN commenters tell everyone to do and charge more, but I am just not comfortable paying £22/year for a todo list (£28 through Apple). I'm not really a todo list enthusiast, so I don't want 90% of the features features, just basic stuff like "show all tasks except those scheduled far in the future".
I can second this, I've been a paying customer of Todoist for 2 years now, really really enjoy it. The 'natural language' style of setting dates is a nice touch.
Great and very complete alternative indeed. While I personally prefer Things, particularly now since version 3 is finally almost here, I was very tempted to migrate to Todoist on more than one occassion when Things / Cultured Code went rather silent in the past.
The "feel" of Things.app on the Mac is just wonderful. The difference in feel between a highly polished Cocoa app and all these others that incorporate varying degrees of web technology mishmash is night and day in my book.
Cultured-Code's development schedule is indeed certifiably GLACIAL though. On the Things 3 (re)(re?)announcement front, I'm really surprised that they aren't switching to subscription pricing.
Seconding Todoist. I've tried every to-do app/service around, and they're the best I've found.
It's not perfect - there are a few parts of the app that annoy me and can't be configured the way I need[0], but of all the ones I've tried, it's the closest to what I need.
[0] If anyone from Todoist sees this, I'd be happy to go into more detail about what those are.
I've used Todoist, but I've found Remember The Milk a little more suited towards my own needs. I'v been using it for 8 years now (I think), so hopefully it should be around for a while.
I'd second Todoist. Its simply amazing! So easy and delightful a UI and yet it has a lot of really cool features (emailing tasks, nice to set up in a GTD environment etc.)
Feel free to use my (open source) Todoist backup tool[0], which doesn't require a premium account and which is even more powerful than the built-in premium option. You can both export more data and use a format which is more suitable for data processing. Read my blog post[1] for more information.
I've been a paying customer for over 2 years now, after trying many other apps, and I'm not moving anytime soon. However, one thing that bothers me was first killing a voting platform and then the discussion forum on Todoist. You can still contact the support, but there is no way to publicly vote for or discuss any feature requests.
Also, a shameless plug: I've built a Todoist backup tool[0], which can be used even as a non-premium user and which supports more processing friendly formats[1].
What would the design people at Microsoft or Apple do all day once they have defined a guideline? The only thing that guarantees them jobs is changing the goalposts constantly.
According to Microsoft’s announcement, To-Do starts you off in a screen called “My Day” which offers a list of items that need to get done today.
While Wunderlist allows you to see the "Today" view first it's not forced ... it's flexible enough to let people manage their To-do lists in a number of different ways. I have a bunch of general To-do lists in Wunderlist including open-ended ones and ones that I duplicate every week (marking the old version as done) and slowly modify. The "My Day" default does not work for me.
The other thing that was great about Wunderlist is the developers really paid attention to Mac and iOS users. I found that the Mac version was better than Windows in a few areas - specifically the ability to expand a note to a bigger view and a lack of buggy behavior when modifying a note (confirmed in Windows 10 but not fixed by Wunderlist, now we know why). In the new setup, Mac/iOS/Android will clearly take a back seat to Windows:
As many users realized, some platforms do not yet support To-Do, including Mac, iPad and Android tablet. List sharing is also not available. But Microsoft says these will roll out in time along with other integrations with Microsoft services.
Too bad. Wunderlist was a great service, the only To-Do app I ever liked.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 292 ms ] threadNot sure what will replace it. Almost certainly not Microsoft To-Do, though. Seems too opinionated for a todo system and lacks critical features.
http://chadfowler.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wunderlist
https://www.linkedin.com/in/fowlerchad/
I know have to help my wife migrate from Wunderlist. This will not be fun.
There are some other knobs the mods can turn, but user flags definitely are used and useful. If you see something you feel is inappropriate for HN, flag it. Community curation is definitely a part of HN. I have seen the mods override user flags for contentious yet popular submissions, but that's been rare, in my experience.
I feel like I'll just go back to Reminders again, and try to stick with standard clients for these things...
Does anyone have a recommendation for a similar app with shared lists? To-Do doesn't handle this (or a bunch of WL functionality for that matter)
Good luck to you^^
- an open source self hostable implementation, even if they offer a paid instance to ease your life.
- an open format in which you can get your todos entries
- an offline client that will still work even if the online instance closes
Started to use it because of some HN comment suggested it and I am so happy to started this. The only todo system that really stuck with me over time.
I've spent the last two years developing a todo app that would be a good replacement for Wunderlist (and Astrid, if anyone still remembers that).
The app will include with some major / critical features both those apps lacked: proper hierarchies / first-class subtasks, automatically-activated contexts (e.g. location), snooze for arbitrary durations, a robust implementation of recurring tasks, and an infinite calendar-like timeline to look ahead.
I went full waterfall on it, the spec is 266 pages long and took half a year just to write. I'm currently testing an Android alpha version, and, for me, it works ridiculously well, much better than Wunderlist, which sat on my homescreen since August 2013.
I use WP8 day to day but dabble in Android, I'd love to give your app a spin...
But I definitely think that there should be a legal way of protecting existing users of an app from "Our Incredible Journey". Maybe some clause that permits the authors to open-source the app.
Are there any examples of this in the industry?
Of course, the buyer may just ask you to remove that clause prior the acquisition.
How many times did you make paper/cardboard mockups and user-test the interactions?
Why would you write a ~9k “loc” long spec over 6 month instead of coding it directly ? The only reason I can think of, is if you want to out-source the development. Is there any good reason to work this way on a one-man project ?
(before the obvious objection: exceptions are toy programs which you write to find out how to build something, in which you focus on the technical aspects. The technical aspects ('how does it work') don't matter for the end user (= your potential customer), they only care about 'what does it do'.)
Most colleagues of mine and a few managers see them as a waste of time ("you're over thinking this", or "we'll figure it out later") yet somehow the projects with a specification always end up being done more or less on schedule.
The thing about specifications is that you need to be open to changing them if you find it's not working out. Specifications are not synonymous with waterfall development, and it's harmful to treat and view them as such.
Planning is important, and cautiously thinking about your features before diving in can save you weeks later on. But spending 6 month in a tunnel, writing specs you'll spend at least a year to implement, is a huge risk : what if your users only use 30% of the features you designed, and lack a missing feature you didn't plan ? You could have figured it out way sooner have you built something earlier and released it.
Also, your time to market is way slower and you don't risk losing years of work by missing a deadline …
> Damn, now I need to move faster. My app must be ready by the time they close Wunderlist. I expected an eventual closure, but not that soon.
Or worse, what if different segments of users only use 30% of different feature sets? See also: Evernote's 5% problem [1]
[1] https://venturebeat.com/2016/01/05/evernotes-5-problem-offer...
Yeah but that's not necessarily in man-years. Maybe he worked on it an hour or two a day. Now we're talking around two man-weeks of planning.
(Not the OP.) At least for me, emphatically yes.
From your question, it sounds like you're only considering the communicative value of a spec. That's of course important, but I consider it secondary.
Writing a good spec forces you to think through what you're developing in an orthogonal way. You're thinking through flow, cohesiveness, design, some implementation, UI, etc. together at a high level.
I love having the time to write a spec when I'm building something nontrivial. I've found numerous problems that I wouldn't have otherwise by doing so, ranging from simple UI problems/contradictions to spotting unconsidered assumptions that would have lead me down dead ends.
A spec and the application should naturally co-evolve during development to some extent. But the spec also provides an anchor for what you're doing, as well as a map. It is very, very helpful if you Do It Right(tm), no matter the size of your team.
(OP here). This. A thousand times this.
Wow. It's nice to see extensive planning like that. I usually just throw anything that seems like an important idea into a text file on the assumption that it'll be fully hashed out during production at a later time. That method entails far less work, with the caveat of occasionally wondering if you're delusional from time to time.
In any case, good luck. I hope you kick ass. If Microsoft employs their usual design aesthetic, doing so should be very possible.
The app combines four intersecting concepts:
1. Infinite timeline with addressable days. 2. Recurring tasks that support this infinite timeline. 3. First-class subtasks, which have all properties of normal tasks. 4. Contexts, which hide tasks from the list based on certain conditions.
I simply couldn't create a working mental model that accounts for all possible interplay of these concepts without speccing it out in advance.
Currently I use OmniFocus, primarily due to the start dates which hide things until they're relevant, which so many apps (including Wunderlist) lacked. Sadly the Android support is poor and only covered by 3rd party clients that lag massively behind in functionality.
Without seeing what you have, a general remark would be that everyone and his cousin has clocked at least some time developing at least one ToDo app. It's a right-of-passage thing for a lot of developers, just like a Weather app is the same for UX designer wannabies.
BTW, what set Wunderlist apart is not the features first and foremost, but their bold in-your-face marketing rooted in very pretty visuals and a fake arrogance routine. Whether they had proper hierarchies / first-class subtasks was quite secondary.
A nice wood texture (not even joking, was totally sold on the visuals in the early days)
I'm absolutely aware of the rite-of-passage thing, but I'm doing this because I NEED a proper, working todo app. My life will crumble without it. And I'm prepared spend my time and money on it. In any case, there's no going back to Wunderlist now.
As for marketing, I'm not worried. All I want is a working todo app, and it will be great if it turns out to be useful for other people.
My 2 cents - "Tuskarr supports first-class subtasks" might be a fine description on HN, but an average user won't know what that implies
(Which reminds me that I should be doing the screenshots now.)
This sounds awesome, I'm looking forward to testing!
Never liked there UX though, but the concept.
20 year UX veteran, this is the first I've heard of this (o; Not a criticism, certainly made me smile, but I've not heard or seen this before.
(that said, I work mostly in enterprise, this might just be a mobile thing)
UX primarily starts with user research, then a metric shiton of postit notes, paper prototypes, a bit of testing and then some hi fidelity mockups
Its funny, because it true. :D
So yeah, pretty common.
Unrelated, TaskWarrior ftw
right of passage is probably more like the right of way :)
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=rite+of+passag...
As Wikipedia says, "[rite of passage] is the Anglicisation of rite de passage, a French term innovated by the ethnographer Arnold van Gennep in his work Les rites de passage."
"Right of passage" may mean something similar to "right of way", and may be used my mistake when people mean "rite of passage" but there was never a switch in how "rite" is spelled.
Compare:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_passage
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rite_of_passage
[For heavy-duty use and project planning, I use org-mode. But there's still no really satisfactory mobile org-mode story.]
- Shut down Wunderlist
Now let's hope they procrastinate just like everyone else.
http://tuskarr.tilda.ws/
And somewhere in several years it'll grow big.
And Microsoft or Apple will buy it.
And someone will need to move faster to release his to-do, which is much better, of course.
Something else that was critical is that I could use Cortana to add tasks to lists while driving or without typing on the keyboard.
I think when I want to go deeper in organizing tasks, todo apps are often bad for that simply because a document format tends to do better once you're in the thick. It's better if those things are stored, tracked and organized with the work itself most of the time and todo apps tend to be outside that context.
What are the checks and balances if any to keep the astroturfing binge to a minimum and encourage discussions instead of traffic channeling bait.
Android essentially represents only a subset of phones and tablets. An app like yours is useless to many people unless it has desktop equivalents, as mobile-only access heavily restricts a user's ability to be productive where and when they need it. I might be an edge case, but I use Windows, OS X, an iPhone, and an Android tablet. Your app could be the most functional and usable todo app out there, but a competing product with 10% of your features is going to wind up being my choice simply because I get to use it across all my workflows. Platform support beats out the quality of the app, every time.
Based on your screenshots, the app is wonderful. I simply suspect you have focused too much on launching a 100% complete product instead of starting with an MVP. Obsessing over having a perfect product that launches too late to market, while your competition launches early and takes your cake, is all too common a scenario.
(Under "the concept" I mostly mean the approach where all non-snoozed or dateless tasks are shown in Today, and you swipe away the tasks that are not yet "ripe" to be done -- whereas in traditional apps you do the reverse - you select tasks to do by starring them during a review).
Now that I found out that the concept clearly works well at least for one user (me), the next step would be to validate the concept on a wider group of users. An Android-only soft-launch, or even a closed beta should be enough for that.
And if the concept is valid, we'll definitely develop for other platforms, the ones you mentioned. iOS and Android clients will be native, and the desktop apps (Windows and macOS) will probably use some cross-platform technology.
And thank you for the kind words :)
When you get around to desktop clients, ignore the seemingly negative consensus regarding Electron[1] if you think it's the right fit for you. All the negativity I've read about it is from "purists" who aren't specifically singling out Electron; rather they are hating on all non-native implementations. I noticed the mention of Xamarin on your site; never heard of it, but I'd be weary as they seem to be oriented more towards mobile whereas you're looking for a cross-platform desktop solution which is where Electron shines.
If your goal were to be the gold standard for apps, you should be developing using native OS X APIs; the performance you get from a native implementation on OS X is astounding. However, if you do native OS X you're putting yourself in a position to do native Windows and possibly Linux apps, and the collective work required for native-everywhere obviously does not come easy or cheap - particularly if you are doing this as a solo project without assistance from a team.
Electron is a perfectly fine balance for most UIs that are fairly simplistic, which is going to be true even for the most advanced todo-type app. Extra bonus being that if you put in the effort to plan out the Electron app side-by-side with your web/browser-based app, you can share the frontend development between the two, resulting in less overall work.
[1] https://electron.atom.io/
I won't do that :) I stopped working on the spec the moment I handed it down to coders, and my total time spent on the spec since then is around one week. When the spec is written well, and you simulated all important situations in your head before encountering them in the wild, you actually don't need much extra time.
There's almost no tinkering happens on the app right now. I'm fixing critical bugs and smoothing out rough details that manifested after months of my dogfooding.
Regarding the desktop solutions: yes, going native would be perfect, but that is not feasible for a 4-man team. We'll go with Electron or Xamarin or, less likely, Qt - we haven't decided on the exact technology yet.
If you have this and an iOS version, then you have my money.
Basically I don't give a shit about a walled garden to do app anymore no matter how good it is. I don't want a new app. I'd rather use something that puts my existing apps on steroids.
vim ~/todo.md
If you had released it earlier you might have been able to get some traction right about now when people are forced to leave wunderlist.
You want to move faster, then release the app. Customer feedback positive and negative will get you making changes quick smart and you'll get a good sense of initial demand. App development is a continuous process that requires constant input from users. No point in adding features no one asked for, you're just wasting your time.
As a wise man once said 'It's better to have released and failed than to never have released at all'.
I guess at least when it's a todo-list app that's shutting down, there are a lot of alternatives to move to!
Edit: typo
For now at least it seems Google is putting work into Keep so I hope it won't disappear anytime soon.
Unfortunately having a todo/notes app that allows for account controlled sharing is tricky to do without some kind of service. Unless you want to get all ghetto and build something that works on top of something like Dropbox but that gets problematic as Dropbox isn't designed to be used that way.
I built my own test program that used a protected-shared Google Sheet as its data source but at that point you might as well just use Keep!
I think that's said about every Google thing at some point in time.
Won't be touching this, have a lot of history in Wunderlist I'll now need to figure out how to move elsewhere.
For what they paid, they got a team that knew how to build a To-Do app, what the challenges are, and how to scale it.
So they bought not having to deal with a dev team that is building a to-do app for the first time.
They also got some existing users (which will migrate) for free, but I don't think they care for that.
But ok, I see your point. Thanks!
Wunderlist was super useful - fast, all devices in sync, excellent browser version
starting to rethink using so many hosted services now - Zerigo is closing too in 10 days - that was another service a lot of time had been invested in setting up
it feels like the better a service is the more chance the team gets borged and the app shut down
Then I put my cane away because as much as I wave it at clouds, I will still use cloud services over having to host my own.
I can't help feeling that there is something rather dreadful about this state of affairs, however. It just seems like too many good things get acquired and shut down. That could be the fault of the market/culture/prevailing business models/app stores in not making it profitable enough for developers to want to keep going with their single app, and it could also be the fault of the acquires for shutting down good things.
I'm unsure as to the solution.
Consider it as a lesson only to use open source apps so that a group of convinced users can at least hire a programmer to fix bugs or add new features.
Work has LinkedIn blocked, so I can't confirm easily.
After all, it's one thing to expect everything to get cannibalized into, well, Microsoft I guess, and consider that an ideal world.
It's quite another to get used to the idea that all good things exist to be consumed and obliterated. I really don't care if it furthers somebody's stock prices or is a correct competitive move, to me that seems like entropy in a very obvious way.
And I have a feeling that when AI does kick in, its value system must surely be founded on resisting entropy… so it'll look at this sort of thing with a very dim view.
This is normal, why would you be shocked by it? Consider going for open source apps only that supports open standards. That is not full proof and not always convenient but it's a good way to avoid some of thse shocks and horrors.
isn't this what the developers behind them are hoping for these days?
OMG that is AWESOME
EDIT: I just found out about the Volume Up+Q thing, maybe I don't need another keyboard. I would prefer it that way so I can swipe when typing new tasks.
[1] https://syncthing.net/
In terms of product - it's as simple to use as Wunderlist, but does have a few extra features. And they are cross platform like Wunderlist.
(I'm not affiliated with them. Just a happy user.)
[1] https://todoist.com
The owner of www.todoist.com has configured their website improperly. To protect your information from being stolen, Firefox has not connected to this website.
This site uses HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) to specify that Firefox may only connect to it securely. As a result, it is not possible to add an exception for this certificate.
I hope the next thing has all these features, i hear Todoist does!
We are in this for the long haul. We don't even go into acquisitions talks (we already turned down a lot of them), and we don't have an exit strategy. If you are interested in learning more please read our `No Exit philosophy` https://tentimezones.com/why-we-don-t-have-an-exit-strategy-...
Actually it was a big part of why I decided to use Todoist and become a paid user. I was using it on and off for a long time (been a paid user in 2010!) but seeing how you run things, made me stay this time.
[1] https://redash.io
Your reasons for the No Exit strategy resonate with my thinking when I flipped Airwindows over to a Patreon strategy, decimating my income (I'd grossed close to a quarter million dollars by this point) just so I could release all future plugins as free AU, Mac and PC VSTs. At that point, the tactics became flooding the market with VST versions of software that had been AU-only up to that point, and coming up with promises (such as an open-sourcing program under the MIT license, and I've also debated using the GPL) to motivate people to join the Patreon.
If you starve and die, you can't do any work. If you're incredibly poor, you can only work on that which you can afford. (no modeling of Neve consoles here, not properly!) If you have incredible access to capital, sky's the limit, but it seems compulsory to screw over your users because capital demands to be returned tenfold, and this puts HUGE pressure on any dev or creator to turn full-on evil.
I don't know the answer and I'm not doing that awesomely, but that's not so different from how things were going before: that market is shriveling, in part because people simply can't pay money for things any more. There are major players which are, I think, staving off total collapse by setting up the most heinous DRM treadmills imaginable and trying to latch on to all the credit cards they can, all while trying to race to the bottom and starve everybody else.
I can't target capital as a goal anymore. I'll beg if I have to, I'll accept ugly and scary poverty, but I can't be part of the system geared to leave all the users with nothing. It's open source and tool-distribution for me. The whole concept of being rewarded with wealth for valuable work has become a charade when it gets crowded out by 'rewarded with lots more wealth by helping Microsoft screw everyone over'. The link's broken. And this is a rather big deal in a world where that link's axiomatic.
Cultured-Code's development schedule is indeed certifiably GLACIAL though. On the Things 3 (re)(re?)announcement front, I'm really surprised that they aren't switching to subscription pricing.
It's not perfect - there are a few parts of the app that annoy me and can't be configured the way I need[0], but of all the ones I've tried, it's the closest to what I need.
[0] If anyone from Todoist sees this, I'd be happy to go into more detail about what those are.
[0] https://darekkay.com/todoist-export/
[1] https://darekkay.com/2014/12/14/todoist-export-tool/
Also, a shameless plug: I've built a Todoist backup tool[0], which can be used even as a non-premium user and which supports more processing friendly formats[1].
[0] https://darekkay.com/todoist-export/
[1] https://darekkay.com/2014/12/14/todoist-export-tool/
They break so many of their own rules i sometimes wonder if that was what made Duarte leave
While Wunderlist allows you to see the "Today" view first it's not forced ... it's flexible enough to let people manage their To-do lists in a number of different ways. I have a bunch of general To-do lists in Wunderlist including open-ended ones and ones that I duplicate every week (marking the old version as done) and slowly modify. The "My Day" default does not work for me.
The other thing that was great about Wunderlist is the developers really paid attention to Mac and iOS users. I found that the Mac version was better than Windows in a few areas - specifically the ability to expand a note to a bigger view and a lack of buggy behavior when modifying a note (confirmed in Windows 10 but not fixed by Wunderlist, now we know why). In the new setup, Mac/iOS/Android will clearly take a back seat to Windows:
As many users realized, some platforms do not yet support To-Do, including Mac, iPad and Android tablet. List sharing is also not available. But Microsoft says these will roll out in time along with other integrations with Microsoft services.
Too bad. Wunderlist was a great service, the only To-Do app I ever liked.