Do More: Online To Do Lists Compared

Do More: Online To Do Lists Compared
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byFrank GruberonMay 8, 2006
Timeis our most valuable commodity. Productivity pays. Procrastinationcosts us time and money, and leaves us stressed, exhausted andunreliable in the eyes of others.
For many, the classic “To Do” list is the remedy. But for heavy webusers, there are a number of recently launched to-do list products tochoose from, with convenient sharing and other features, and easy touse interfaces.
We’ve taken a look at five of the best.
Web 2.0 To Do Lists
Bla Bla List
Ta-da List
Tudu List
Remember The Milk
Voo2Do
Note: we steered clear of some of the more complex personal homepage and calendar products likeZoho Planner andBackpack to try and compare only apples to apples.
We examined the usability and interesting features of theseapplications to find the most noteworthy procrastination remedy. Allthe products reviewed are free, and the normal set of featuresincludes: sharing lists via email, emailing yourself a list and theability to subscribe to your lists via RSS.
Bla Bla Listis a simple to-do list product built on the RIFE, open-source Java webapplication framework. It’s fast, and offers the basic to-do listfeatures and functionality. It tenders an easy-to-use interface, butloses points because of the annoyingly small pop-up window launchedwhen you set up a new list.
Ta-da List by37signals,the Chicago-based company, is built on Ruby on Rails and offers awonderfully simple and clean to–do list product. Ta-da list uses lotsof white space and larger fonts to make the list easy to read.37signals subscribes to the rule of “less is more” and it shows.
Tudu Listis unlike the rest of the to-do list products reviewed since it is notprimarily a consumer-facing online solution. Instead Tudu list is anopen-source solution which has been offered online byESS Development AG.Tudu list is intended to be downloaded and installed on your own hostand is the outlier of the group but we felt it was appropriate toreview since there is a free version running online. Tudu list providesthe ability to create multiple to-do lists with prioritized items on adeadline. Some interesting features are the backup and restore featureswhich allow downloading XML files of a list as a back. Lists can thenbe restored online via uploading an XML file. In addition, Tudu listscan be shared with others.
Remember The Milk, an Australia-based company which waspreviously reviewed on TechCrunch,offers a smooth Ajax interface and rich user experience. It allows lotsof metadata to be associated in the form of date information, repeatevent and tags. Tasks can also be organized and prioritized by tab aswell as sent to other Remember The Milk contacts. Tasks can be addedvia email, which could be a helpful feature especially if you have anemail-enabled mobile device for on-the-go to-do updates.
Voo2do, created by software developerShimon Rura,has a catchy name and a good (also Ajax) interface. However, it is amore complex project management task list than a simple to-do list.Voo2do tracks lists as tasks with assigned priority, due date and timeestimates for each task. The interface is intimidating in comparison toTa-da or Bla Bla list. Nevertheless, voo2do offers several interestingfeatures including the ability to add a task via email, collaborate onpassword-protected shared to-do lists in addition to the ability toview your task history. Voo2do also has an API in progress which willallow developers to create custom applications.
Summary
The easy-to-use Ta-da list, with its clean and simpleinterface and good-enough feature set, is in our opinion the bestchoice if you are looking for an effective and easy to use solution.Online to-do applications are becoming competitive; products like BlaBla list closely match the Ta-da list features, and voo2do and RememberThe Milk offer more complex and powerful to-do list products. Onefeature that I think all of the competition should look into ismobile-accessible to-do lists because, unless you print your lists foron-the-go use, the traditional paper- written to-do list still couldtrump all of these products.