Things by Cultured Code, a developer company based in Stuttgart, Germany, has been around since the day the App Store and iOS 2.0 were unveiled. The app is famous for its minimalist, iconic interface and features which are a perfect mix of simplicity and serious business from the very first version on. It’s the perfect example for the ethos of “If 1.0 sucks, all other versions will suck as well”, it was done right the day it came out.

Yet, the first Things just didn’t work for me — I don’t know why, but it didn’t stick. I’ve never tried out other solutions, neither complex workhorse that is OmniFocus, nor have I tried a basic to-do app like Remember The Milk. The last three years, I was a Simplenote guy. I’m really into minimalism; in fact, that’s the reason why I initially desperately wanted to try out Things. But Simplenote worked better than Things for me. You could paste anything into it and the new content would be immediately available across all your devices, and on the web. My notes were always with me. And after I found Notational Velocity for Mac, a Simplenote desktop client, I completely stopped searching for other solutions.

But now, Things have changed. After over a year of beta testing, Things 2 with Cloud sync has finally arrived, and besides its big syncing feature, it’s got a bunch of other cool refinements and new possibilities along the way. (more…)

During the past year, note taking/memory management service Evernote set out to build a platform around its services, which span the web, iOS devices, OS X and Windows through a set of cross-platform tools and native applications. The company launched Trunk, a unified showcase of third-party applications that integrate with the Evernote API, and updated its iOS and Mac offerings with richer user interfaces and new functionalities. Furthermore, Evernote acquired image annotating service Skitch and released an iPad version of it; they also launched four standalone Evernote-based apps: Food and Hello, for remembering meals and people, respectively; Clearly, to read web articles in an elegant format; Peek, to help students learn more through Evernote’s visual presentation.

Whilst it sounds fairly obvious for Evernote to be considering new platforms and opportunities to expand upon the concept of preserving human memory — a subject that offers itself to a broad range of implementations — Alexia Tsotsis over at TechCrunch shares some juicy details behind Evernote’s various acquisitions that led to the dedicated Evernote apps we see today.

As it turns out, Evernote CEO Phil Libin has confirmed the company purchased four startups in the past year alone: among those, Readable became Evernote Clearly, Notable Meals became Evernote Food and an another one, called Minds Momentum, was acquired in order to get the assets for an upcoming Evernote todo list application. TechCrunch doesn’t share any more details, however a quick Google search confirms that Minds Momentum was the company behind Egretlist, an iPhone app to manage todos based off Evernote that we reviewed here.

We wrote:

This isn’t an application meant to replace Evernote with a prettier interface, but rather complement it. Egretlist is strictly focused on managing to-do lists with your various notebooks. On the surface, that might pretty tame. But when you combine to-do lists with Evernote, suddenly the functionality becomes stellar. As you read in the real-estate example, being able to just sync not only with yourself, but others using Evernote’s service, makes for an always online, always updateable task-list not dissimilar to Basecamp to-dos and milestones.

Basically, Egretlist provided an effortless way to create todos and format them in a native interface that would, however, sync back to Evernote’s main client to make those todos readable, and possibly editable as well, from your desktop computers. Interestingly, Minds Momentum also developed another paid Evernote-based app, Egretlinks, which ran universally on the iPhone and iPad and allowed users to manage web clippings from their Evernote notebooks. Both Egretlist and Egretlinks haven’t been updated in months, the developers’ Twitter account is silent, and the website is still showing iPhone 3GS screenshots for the apps.

Evernote isn’t new to this kind of acquisitions. iOS text editor Essay, for instance, was bought by Evernote to power their iOS rich text editor and few people knew about it until the developer published a blog post.

From my perspective, it only makes sense for Evernote to look forward to revamping the todo management aspect of the service. Note taking and memory management often overlap with todo creation and completion these days, and Evernote’s built-in checklist/todo support is stripped down to minimal functionality without really offering a compelling way to add tasks and reminders. I’m first to admit I’ve used Evernote to remember things to do more than a couple of times in the past.

Minds Momentum’s acquisition, I believe, also plays well with Evernote’s plan in the long term. Rather than supercharging the main client with hundreds of features, Evernote has taken the ecosystem approach in choosing to offer a centralized service with a main general purpose client and several different standalone apps for more specific purposes. The Evernote app itself isn’t the proverbial Swiss army knife: the whole service is. Honestly, I don’t want the Evernote app to incorporate a text editor and a task management tool and food diaries, and it appears that the company seems to be thinking the same thing — nurturing an ecosystem can be much more profitable and rewarding (both for the company and its users) than feature creep.

I look forward to Evernote’s “upcoming” todo list application, just as I can’t wait to get my hands on a public version of the latest Mac beta (which adds some sweet improvements in the text editing UI) and refreshed iOS clients. Expect more Evernote news soon.

I’d like to briefly elaborate on my Todo.txt setup, which I only started using last month as a way to keep my “todo articles” separate from general “todos” that I now keep organized and synced through Remember The Milk. Several readers have emailed me asking why I chose Todo.txt of all text editors and task management systems, so here it goes.

Todo.txt has a simple syntax that requires no learning curve. I can fire up Todo.txt’s iOS app or TextEdit on my Mac, and add a new line for a new todo, which in my case is an article I’m working on or I know I’ll be working on in the immediate future (this week or next week, I try not to project too distant in the future as blogging priorities can rapidly change). I’ve tried other text-based todo solutions like TaskAgent and TaskPaper, and I like them a lot as apps with outstanding support from their developers, but I just feel more comfortable using Todo.txt’s syntax, which appends new lines as todos and marks those beginning with an “x” as complete. Obviously, Todo.txt comes with much more complex possibilities and interfaces such as a full-featured CLI and support for contexts and priorities, but I use none of these features. To me, Todo.txt is the easiest way to maintain a list of “todo” Vs. “not done yet” articles that I want to have on MacStories.

For this reason, I keep the Todo.txt iOS apps (on my iPhone and iPad) as simple and clutter-free as possible. Developer Gina Trapani made sure that you can sort by date and todo ID, enable app badges and date new tasks but, again, I haven’t found myself needing any of these (I could have enabled badges on the Mac too). In the Todo.txt iOS app, I chose to display line numbers to give me an easily scannable overview of just how many items I have, and I’ve disabled everything else as you can see in the screenshot. With this setup, it takes 30 seconds to open the app, quickly see what’s up while it’s syncing (takes a few seconds as the file to load is very lightweight) and enter a new todo. I don’t use contexts and projects either: as I mentioned last week, I don’t need a “context” for my MacStories articles, and the project is always the same, writing for the site.

If possible, things are even simpler on my Mac. Todo.txt is synced via Dropbox and alias’d on my desktop. When I need to check on the articles I have in my queue I can use TextEdit or, better, nvALT, which also displays all my other Dropbox notes synced inside a “Notely” folder (no particular app preference here, I just liked the name). Adding new todos to the file requires a few seconds, but if I’m feeling really keyboard-junkie I can append a new todo to the end of the file using an Alfred extension. I use Alfred for a lot of different tasks on my Mac (adding items to Remember The Milk, converting currencies, generating new random passwords, etc.), so it helps that I’ve found a way to integrate Todo.txt with my existing workflow.

And when an article is done and a todo is complete? I just delete it. I don’t archive, “review”, flag or categorize. Articles are just there and it’s up to me to write them.

Text-based todo management systems go back a long way. In learning about Todo.txt’s history, I stumbled upon relatively old articles that described how it was popular “back in the day” (we’re talking pre-Tiger days as well) to keep everything, from notes to passwords to long-form articles, inside a giant .txt file formatted in some way for easy scanning. These days we’re using the modern versions of those systems, which may be Evernote, Yojimbo, or other anything buckets. These services come with a fantastic set of features — I’m a huge fan of Evernote myself — but as far as my articles go, I want them to be highly portable in an environment that’s open to any other app for access and modifications. With plain text, I can have my MacStories-related todos synced in a text file that can be opened and correctly read by any text editor — and I’m sure it’ll remain that way for the next 20 years when .docx files will be corrupted and biting the dust.

Some parts of Todo.txt are modeled after David Allen’s GTD methodology and, at least for my articles, I’m not using GTD at all. But I am getting things done, for real, with a system that I can trust, is reliable and works anywhere.

Sure, Apple may have unveiled a gorgeous Reminders app at the WWDC that looks great, does location-based alerts and will come for free with iOS 5, but until then, those looking for a simple to-do list application that sync seamlessly over the air and runs now on iOS and OS X might want to give another try to Dropkick, an easy to use and useful app we’ve already covered a couple of times on MacStories. The big news today is that Dropkick finally has a native iPad counterpart, which is free on the App Store and, like the iPhone version, can be unlocked to enter unlimited tasks with in-app purchase. Whilst the iPhone app will set you back $2.99 (and the Mac app is also available as free trial on the developer’s website, paid app on the Mac App Store), unlocking the iPad app comes at $3.99.

The iPad version of Dropkick is really, really simple. You can create tasks and lists, delete them, sync back to the cloud with your account. You can move tasks around, and see them in the greater detail using the popover menu. That’s it – the interface doesn’t get in the way and everything’s kept super-accessible. As usual with Dropkick, tasks are pushed almost instantly to the Mac and iPhone, and I can’t wait to see this taking advantage of iCloud’s unified sync service for developers (and users).

Dropkick for iPad doesn’t have all the fancy features and graphics of Reminders for iOS 5, but it’s available now and it’ll help you stay focused and get things done. Go download it here.

Dropkick is a simple, elegant iPhone app we covered a while ago that lets you manage to-dos and sync them back through the cloud to a free Mac companion application. Dropkick, in fact, is free if you want to enter up to 10 tasks, and it goes paid to unlock unlimited access to task management. The app is really minimal and focused on entering new tasks, and completing them. Cloud sync happens through a free Dropkick account, and it’s really fast. For many, Dropkick has become the best way to quickly capture and manage to-dos, keeping them always available thanks to the comfort and reliability of online sync. (more…)

If you are looking for a GTD app that works on the iPhone and iPad you have many, many excellent options that include Things, Due, OmniFocus and a multitude of others. Well now you can add Voodo to that extensive list of compelling GTD apps. Voodo had previously been available as an iPhone app but earlier this week it made it to the iPad as well and I was able to give it a go whilst it was being approved last month.

Jump the break for a review of Voodo for iPad and win one of five copies of the iPhone companion app!

(more…)

You know we love OmniFocus here at MacStories, and we just can’t get enough of the possibilities offered by OmniGroup’s powerful GTD software. I understand, however, that GTD is not for everyone. Some people are looking forward to having a simple system on their mobile devices and computers, an app to enter tasks in a list and that’s it. Sounds like a solid and affordable plan, right? With only one major problem,though: sync.

People looking for such a simple system would also like to be able to effortlessly sync their tasks in the cloud. As far as I know, there’s no good and simple app that lets you enter tasks on the iPhone, have them backed up online, and find them again in another simple and minimal app on the desktop. If there’s one, please let me know in the comments.

Still, Dropkick is here to solve this problem: it’s a minimal and elegant application that lets you a) enter tasks and b) sync them to all your devices. That’s really it. (more…)

I love OmniFocus, but many of you guys probably don’t need its complex feature set and just would like to have a simple todo list app for iPhone. You know, something like a digital piece of paper where you can jot down tasks, mark them as complete and delete them.

That’s it, no contexts, projects, teammates or tags to choose from. Personally I wouldn’t go anywhere with such a system and I know there are thousands of apps similar to the one I’m going to write about available in the App Store — yet TaskForce is minimal and polished enough to deserve a mention.

TaskForce for iPhone is a simple and beautiful app that does just that: it allows you to create a list with tasks and delete them once you’ve completed them. (more…)

OmniFocus for iPad is out, but I’m sure many of you iPad owners out there don’t need all the features of OmniGroup’s huge software to get things done. Maybe you just need to remember what to do every single day, you don’t need contexts, tags, OTA sync and *insert another must-have GTD feature here*.

Your only concern is that you always forget what to do. If so, take a look at Random Accident’s first iPad app, Today’s List.

(more…)