Saturday, August 16, 2008

iPhone ToDo app and why my reviews are better than the rest

I bought Appigo's ToDo.app ($10) for my iPhone (currently I think of my phone as iTease). (BTW, Appigo has a Google Group for this app.)

I've been using it with Toodledo. I'd considered a switch switch to Remember the Milk but Toodledo tech support helped me with my major concern -- the ability to apply operations to sets of items. The combined cost of ToDo.app ($10) and Toodledo ($17) together is $27 - a good fraction of MobileMe. Too bad Apple hates us.

Here's what conventional, good, reviewers will tell you about ToDo.app
Macworld | iPhone Central | Review: Todo 1.1.1 for iPhone and iPod touch

... it’s in creating and organizing tasks that Todo really shines, offering many more features than Zenbe Lists or any of the basic to-do apps I covered a few weeks ago.

As with other apps, you can create multiple lists of tasks; you add new lists and tasks using the plus (+) button at the top of the main lists screen or any individual list screen, respectively. When viewing a list, tapping on a task’s circle marks the task as complete; depending on your settings, completed tasks disappear completely or are moved to a Completed section at the bottom of the current list..

... Creating a new task demonstrates Todo’s best attribute: offering many options and features while keeping the interface simple and easy to use. In addition to naming a new task, you can specify a due date, a repeating schedule, and a priority (1, 2, 3, or none); you can also include a text note...
This is what you only get from me:
  1. If you try to switch services, say from ToodleDo to RTM, every item on your list is deleted. So you can't decide to use one service, then switch. [Update: Appigo consciously decided to do this for the initial release, they will probably make this configurable in a future release.]
  2. Tasks can belong to only one list/category/tag. (Very much like Palm -- in fact ToDo.app is pretty much a functional clone of the original Palm To Do app).
  3. There are no alerts or alarms on tasks.
  4. There's no search. I really need search. Of course this is a problem across the entire iPhone. [Update: Appigo expects to deliver search in a near term release]
  5. It's crashed once in light use.
Update 9/22/08: I'm a regular Appigo ToDo.app customer. It's a great product, but there's a scary specter looming.

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