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Tell HN: we've made dddone.com - a TODO app done right

11 points by snitko ↗ HN
Hi HN, we've made http://dddone.com. It's a TODO app. The main idea is that you can have 2 views of the same todo list: one is for the structure, so that you can have the global vision of the project, and one is for the priority with the most important tasks at the top. We made it for ourselves, because we felt no existing app satisfied our purposes and this approach seems to be extremely productive for us.

Hope you'll like it. Of course, any suggestions and reviews are welcome.

28 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 76.1 ms ] thread
snitko
clickable: http://dddone.com
CatalystFactory
Having a bit of trouble loading it in Chrome - is the site down?
dazzawazza
I have a feeling we've killed it, the sire isn't responding at all.
snitko
Yes, a problem with the linode, rebooted and working now. Weird, we don't even have the traffic.
maxdemarzi
It's weird that I can't mark a task done on the right column...
snitko
What do you mean? There are only delete buttons in the right column tasks. If you click "done" in the left column though, the task automatically becomes "completed" in both columns.
maxdemarzi
Ok, "Done" and "Delete" both make the item disappear, which would make one believe they do the same thing except one fades green, one fades red.

Does that mean something else in the back-end? or is it the same ? The view/hide done tasks link is confusing because it's resetting the list which make it useless trying it out.

_ Update: Also it's weird to have the Pencil icon on the left, make a change, and then have to go all the way to the right for save. Maybe it's easier to just keep everything on one side?

snitko
Ok, I hear you. "Delete" button completely deletes the task from the list (from the db, if you wish). "Done" button just marks it as done and you can see it if you click the link "View dddone tasks too!" - although for some technical reasons it only works on the saved lists (e.g. it works everywhere else, but on the mainpage).

As for the pencil ico and save button - you can simply hit "Enter", that will save the title.

ydant
It might be clearer to have it fade to "disabled", but not entirely disappeared on Done, at least until the list is re-loaded.
resdirector
Have you tried http://www.folderboy.com? That's the to-do-ish app that I'm building that allows you to put the same task in multiple lists. Full nested-labels.

And allows you to search for the task/data/idea real fast with search-as-you-type.

</shameless-plug>

snitko
That seems like a great app, but unfortunately it lacks the main feature that we needed - two representations of the same todo list, synced with each other. Plus, does your app has a sharing feature?

I liked your search-while-typing feature. Looks great.

resdirector
Cheers, thanks.

two representations of the same todo list

Kind of. With FolderBoy, any note (or folder) can be in multiple places at the same time. So, I guess you could create a "Priority" folder, with all your tasks arranged by priority, and also put these (exact same) tasks in another folder(s) with them organized in a more project-like way.

I think what yours does better is that you can have two lists side by side.

Ah, yes, we don't do sharing...yet!

petervandijck
Nice, I like the concept, and love the example it opens up with.
petervandijck
Do you have any plans with this, ie. to turn it into a full-fledged (paying?) service? Open source it? Etc?
snitko
We'll see how it goes. We're going to use it ourselves and work on it a bit. If we see that more people are using it, we'll start reviewing suggestions and will be ready to invest more time into developing it.
slouch
looks like your server is struggling with the HN traffic. i can't get the root to load.
snitko
It's working now. Try it. We'll immediately upgrade if needed.
petervandijck
Few thoughts:

- Gotta improve/simplify the actions between left and right view. It doesn't feel right that you can't mark an item DONE at the right.

- You should show completed tasks by default. Nothing more satisfying than seeing that checkmark and seeing what you've done. After a day or so, they can dissapear.

yock
I too like the idea of displaying completed tasks for a limited amount of time.
petervandijck
- The clear/save buttons are a little un-intuitive. I'd expect everything to just get saved as we go.

- I do really love the concept. Awesome way to improve upon something so simple.

- The title editing is a little clunky: the edit button shouldn't be there (you should just be able to click the title), or else only show it on hover, and you need a submit/cancel button instead of only submitting on ENTER.

- The "edit" icon before each item: the placement of this (and the way it looks) make it look like it's a checkbox where you can check things of when they're done. Move "edit" to the right, and put a checkbox before each item where you can mark items done. Don't hide done items immediately, but remove the checkbox with a checkmark (Green) and leave the item there for a day or so.

snitko
Thanks, sounds reasonable. We'll find some time to fix this.
LeBlanc
The online to-do list application market is very crowded. There are a whole lot of different apps out there. I like your idea of a structured to-do list next to a priority one. Have you thought about using the APIs of the other to-do list apps to pull a user's data from those sites and display it using your novel method?
snitko
As you can imagine, pulling data from another apps would take time to implement. Especially because there are so many apps out there. Personally, I'm not sure it would make sense, at least at the moment. Or do you think it would?
LeBlanc
You are probably right that it doesn't make sense right now, just because a lot of the good suggestions in this post are more pressing.

The reason I suggest it is that it would give you access to a number of users right off the bat which could be good for getting feedback from a large group of people who are actually going to use your app for their actual to-do list (rather than the informal sort of playing around with it I just did for a few minutes). In the end, it really depends on where you want to go with this.

martinc
Looks nice.

I get an error in IE8. Webpage error details

User Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; GTB6.5; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; InfoPath.2) Timestamp: Thu, 1 Jul 2010 14:50:19 UTC

Message: 'console' is undefined Line: 48 Char: 11 Code: 0 URI: http://dddone.com/javascripts/app/event_set.js?1277907280

snitko
Thanks, we fixed that. It was a forgotten debug console.log() call.
sebastianavina
well, it's just what we need. Thanks for the idea, I will implement this concept on my internal ERP

(F)