Saturday, September 10, 2011

Toodledo: How you can give me the search I need with your current architecture

I've been a Toodledo web app customer for years. I use their web task management service with Appigo's ToDo.app.

It's an old relationship born of historic necessity. Toodledo and Todo don't approach tasks and projects the same way, there's the usual awkwardness of dueling data structures. These days most people would want to use Toodledo's cloud service with Toodledo's iPhone app or Appigo's Todo.app with their Todo online.

I've lived with the two for a while though. I appreciate Appigo's elegant iOS client, and it rarely fails me. That reliability means a lot. I know what works with Toodledo and what doesn't; I only use what works. On the other hand, I admire Toodledo's wide range of task integration and data liberation policies, especially the ability to mail myself a task. That's huge.

On the other hand, I need Todo's full text search. I've been pestering Toodledo to provide full text search of my tasks for (literally) years. They won't do it. So I have full text search of tasks on my iPhone but not on the web. On the web I can only search within a field (default is the task title).

Frustrating. I'm ready to leave both of them for something better. Still, I'll make one last try to persuade Toodledo that they can give me 80% of what I want without abandoning their current infrastructure.

Toodledo, here's the search I want built using your save search function, where "term" is the string I want to search on.

Screen shot 2011 09 10 at 10 12 03 AM

See, it's not so hard. You can do this with your current infrastructure by

1. Let me save this search with a name.

2. Let me make the named search my default search.

3. Provide a checkbox that means "search all fields with this string". Check it and gray out two of the fields leaving me one to type in (there are more elegant UIs obviously, this one has the fewest changes).

Thanks for considering this!

Update: Even simpler. Just let us save this as the standard search.

Update 9/12/11: This time Toodledo had a different response to my inquiry: "This is on our to-do list, but it is our policy to not comment on our roadmap or delivery dates for future feature improvements or bug fixes.". Joy!

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