ForumsThird-Party ApplicationsWhat's the interest in a full desktop client for ToodleDo?
What's the interest in a full desktop client for ToodleDo?
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KnightBaron |
Look like it's out of my league since I develop mostly for web. Good luck on the project. I'm patiently waiting for an amazing app from you. ;)
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tjjr2112 |
Brand new user here (about 12 hours ago) but I'd vote for a Windows app with the ability to install to a portable USB drive. Too many companies are locking down desktops to new software.
Thanks! |
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j2020 |
I'm not sure I fully understand the advantages of a desktop program. Being able to work offline? Integration with desktop files/programs? Improved interface?
For me, the biggest appeal would be an improved interface. But my concern for you would be that you will spend a lot of time developing it, and about that time Toodledo will improve the web interface and negate some of your advantages. The only desktop programs I've tried haven't *fully* integrated with Toodledo (changed some features, didn't sync consistently, etc). Since I would still use the web interface and iPhone interface sometimes, it would be critical to me that a desktop program be both consistent and complete in its integration with Toodledo. Otherwise I run the risk of losing data, and that is a more significant negative than any positives I can think of. This message was edited May 11, 2010. |
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Alaskanmama |
My biggest and truly only issue with the current interface is the lack of checking off multiple items to make changes. It takes so much time to reorganize my list that I stopped using it.
I tried Vitalist and liked their interface but they obviously aren't doing much and I miss Toodledo's iphone app and customization. |
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Peter |
You've hit upon the three big advantages of a desktop application, in order of importance to me:
* Offline access - this is the primary motivator...for when you just don't (gasp) have Internet access, but want to access and update your list * Better integration - for things like dock/taskbar reminders; links to email applications; quick task entry from the desktop; etc.... the list could get quite long but the key is that once you leave the web browser sandbox, you can start doing some interesting things * Better interface - actually the least important in my opinion, although it is true the Toodledo web interface could use some tuneups and a desktop application can correct for some of this. It will also be a faster interface since there is no network latency involved. But the truth is that UI can be quite subjective -- what one person loves, another hates. For me, the key is simplicity. If anyone ever has to create a task called "figure out how to use my task manager", that is a big fail. |
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Peter |
And, oh yes, I forgot. Another motivator for us is full synchronization to ToodleDo with matching features -- not another to do app that happens to use ToodleDo for offline storage. As you said, you definitely do not want data getting munged in the sync due to feature mismatch. Everything above and beyond that core feature set is extra.
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Mike |
It makes me sad to read that you're using a cross-platform toolkit. Mac users tend to dislike those in droves, and generally won't pay for apps that look or feel emulated. In my many, many years as a Mac developer, I've seen this more times than I care to admit having worked on the Mac versions of several high-profile cross-platform products.
My two cents: what you gain in time to market, you lose ten-fold in user dissatisfaction. -Mike (Project lead for Camino, Mac Tech Lead for Chrome) |
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mat_rhein |
While Mike is hitting a weak spot I would consider it mildly destructive compared to you guys try to give us the toodledo UI feeling on any platform.... Yuk...
Using Things I am wondering why not someone with more developer brain space than me between their ears creates a connection between a splendid online service (with an ugly UI) and a splendid offline tool like Things... <sheesh> |
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David |
I would be 100 percent happy if I could run Appigo's Todo iPad on a pc through an iPad emulator (which doesn't exist). But I can't so I'm using Toodledo's website atm. I have yet to find an elegant looking desktop solution and would LOVE it if someone created a "Things" like web based/desktop app on the pc :-D
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Peter |
1. Mike, you are right, and it's a really tough call. I agree that non Mac UIs turn me off too. I discarded Adobe Air and Java for those reasons. RealBasic is a bit different as it actually compiles using native UI widgets to each platform. Currently it is still using the Carbon toolkit for Mac, although they are currently updating it to Cocoa (support for Cocoa is in beta). It's not perfect, and will never match Objective-C and Cocoa - but it's not bad. On the PC side, it will not match some of the 3rd party toolkits like Telerik, or even some of the advanced controls in .Net, but again, it's not bad.
I don't think the business decision is clear cut - certainly some Mac and Windows users will be turned off, but my suspicion is that if we do it right, the majority will not know the difference (that would be my goal) even if it is not as perfectly Mac like as Things, for example. 2. We definitely do not intend to simply wrap a website UI in a desktop application - that would not be a good solution. 3. David, I am also surprised that Things/OmniFocus/The Hit List/other apps have not simply built their own connectors to ToodleDo. Having a backup in the cloud, along with access via the Web is such a good selling point for their own apps, and it would cost them only the time to build the connector. Maybe it'll happen at some point. This message was edited Jun 03, 2010. |
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Transisto |
1 : I'm no programmers, I also prefer OSX interfaces but Most have PCs and few people will get a mac for a toodledo client.
You know better, It's up to you, I'll entourage you either way you choose. Posted by Peter: 3. David, I am also surprised that Things/OmniFocus/The Hit List/other apps have not simply built their own connectors to ToodleDo. Having a backup in the cloud, along with access via the Web is such a good selling point for their own apps, and it would cost them only the time to build the connector. Maybe it'll happen at some point. I don't think it's that costly nor complex to run a backup in the cloud. They might prefer not risking it to keep their customer locked in. (bad) Access via the web UI on the other hand is a big job, but often I use the XML export to modify my tasks, so it's better than nothing. |
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dent |
I'm doing most of the programming on this project and, whilst I have a lot of experience on both platforms, I can tell you that it's not going to happen unless we use REALbasic because the overhead in doing both a Cocoa and .Net UI is too much. I've done enough cross-platform code with split UI to be realistic about the cost. In many cases, REALbasic is also a more productive development environment than either Visual Studio or XCode (opinion based on 25+ years plus development, if you want to argue take it offline).
One big benefit of using REALbasic that Peter hasn't mentioned is that it has a great scripting language built in (RBScript) and from day one, the model we're planning has full scriptability. One reason other desktop apps haven't done *full* synchronisation to Toodledo is the difficulty of mapping their data model precisely to Toodledo. If there's a single thing you can do in Toodledo that their app doesn't support, or vice versa, then mapping decisions have to be made. Generalising these to a GUI is incredibly hard. Using scripts to do the mapping allows you to have play with the rules in place to do it exactly how you want. It's not something that everyone needs but it's a key feature for power users. It also offers the chance to have scripted operations that can merge stuff back into the cloud, such as bulk changes, copy data to other services or do other rendering such as plots of task completion. For an example of what can be achieved with scripting in RBScript, have a look at the graphics and logic teaching program rbKarel, a port of Karel the Robot. http://code.google.com/p/rbstuff/wiki/rbKarelOverview |
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murrycamper |
I am currently working on a desktop app that syncs with Toodledo that allows you to view your tasks and drag them onto a calendar to schedule out your days and weeks. It is based on block scheduling. Any interest?
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Transisto |
Posted by murrycamper:
I am currently working on a desktop app that syncs with Toodledo that allows you to view your tasks and drag them onto a calendar to schedule out your days and weeks. It is based on block scheduling. Any interest? Yes that'ld be quite useful, Toodledo calendar is lacking, But it could be solved by simply a few line of code on toodledo side, That is : Allowing an url in the iCal Tasks Import instead of uploading a local file. http://www.toodledo.com/connect_ical.php It would then be much easier to automate the sync from Google Calendar to Toodledo. This message was edited Jun 27, 2010. |
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mike |
I am currently working on an out-of-browser Silverlight application that is attempting to be a 1:1 Toodledo client, and will run on Windows/Mac (and partially on Linux with Moonlight) and will run offline and sync when online. I'm using a codebase that I wrote to run on Windows Phone 7 (emulator right now). The two reasons I wrote the Silverlight app are 1.) the web interface is just painful. i prefer working on my iPhone because the interface is so nice compared to the web. 2.) gives me offline access (for when it's required). I'm debating canning the project for another opportunity. With my luck, as soon as i get the app written Toodle will make a bad-a$$ interface that will make my app moot. Anyone have any interest in a Silverlight clinet? Or a Windows Phone 7 client?
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Transisto |
Why not make something open-source ? everyone is working on it's own thing.
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mike |
I plan on open sourcing my project if i make significant progress on it.
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JCLATWORK |
Posted by murrycamper:
I am currently working on a desktop app that syncs with Toodledo that allows you to view your tasks and drag them onto a calendar to schedule out your days and weeks. It is based on block scheduling. Any interest? If by this you mean you can on-the-fly drag to-dos onto your calendar and make them events, then yes, I would be very interested. Are you talking Windows, Mac, or both? |
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Salgud |
Very interesting thread! I just took the survey and here is my comment at the end:
My vision for a perfect task manager is a lot like TD in back and Things up front. I also know, from my own experience and from talking to developers, that a UI that goes more than two levels deep (the interface and one level down, like TD) is confusing to the majority of users. That said, I'd like to have just the key features that I use daily on the first level, and everything else out of sight except when I venture there to set it up or make changes, which would require one more level. In TD, that would be having a "Views" option, in which only selected views of my task list would normally be visible. A "view" being a filtered, sorted, search that I've selected to appear on the main screen. So when I start out with TD, I could go in and create as many Saved Searches and filters as I like, Sort them however I want, and when I get exactly what I'm looking for, save it as a View to appear on a list of views on the main screen. In my case, I'd probably have views like "Today's Work", Today's Personal", "Today All", and "Due Next 3 days". Maybe a couple of others. Hidden from the that first level would be a bunch of other less frequently used views, primarily for selecting tasks from longer lists, pretty much like the ones availalble in TD now, to be starred to display them in one of my "Views". This would give me the depth of TD, and the pretty face of Things. I wouldn't even have to do tasks anymore - I would have already died and gone to heaven! END OF SURVEY I'd like to add that while I'm now a Mac user at home, I don't require that all my apps look Mac-like, as some here have suggested. And I don't think I'm all that unusual. I suspect that those who've lived in the Mac world for a while, even made their living there, begin to believe that all Mac users have drunk the koolaid. But there are a lot of us who like the Mac system but don't have to have everything in our lives, or even everything on our computers, look and feel "Mac-like". My brother and all three of my sons are Mac users, yet I doubt that any of them would eschew a software package that was useful to them just because it wasn't "Mac-like". One of the things I dislike about my iMac is the total lack of color in the vast majority of Mac apps, especially the Apple written apps. I like color, lots of it, splashed all over my house and all over my computer screen. I have very colorful screen savers and very colorful skins on Chrome and FF to give a little life to my otherwise rather drab iMac. I know that's not very "Mac-like", and I don't care. What I want to say to TD and to other developers is that not all Mac users want that drab, white-on-white "Mac-like" look that Apple favors these days. And we don't have to have everything on our iMacs and Macbooks look tired and faded. There are a fair number of us in the TD forums, using TD, which is about as un-Mac-like as you can get. We'd all be using Things, and waiting endlessly for their rare developer appearances and even rarer upgrades if we were really hung-up on everything on our Macs being "Mac-like". |
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drosene |
I too just completed the survey. My comment follows:
I am a new TaskAngel user and find it nearly perfect. I am presently waiting on access to their forum to post comments. You might also want to look at Ilium Software's ListPro for inspiration. The only reason I switched is due to their incredibly slow response to Android. ListPro has several significant features not present elsewhere, including multiple levels of subtasks (incredibly useful, one level doesn't cut it!) and much more customizable lists and even calculated columns. They have/had a large base of WinMo and Palm customers with lots of shared templates, etc. The biggest challenge to delivering ListPro level functionality on Android or the iPhone is finger tip navigation. While I love my Samsung Moment there are times I wish we had more control over font size so developers could at least offer higher function or even dual mode apps. That will be even more true on larger "xPad" devices running the same operating systems. The stylus is not completely dead anyway as conductive screen styli are available and are a near requirement for some applications. |
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