N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Hi Everyone

I got a N900 recently and is loving it. The only complain I have is the phone's built in ToDo List is buried deep in menus and for a supposedly "work" phone, this is a very important feature to get right. What would make things considerably easier is if there is a widget to directly show ToDo List on the desktop, or a shortcut to launch it on desktop so you don't have to fish it out.

Do anyone know if either is possible?

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

There are software in the application manager that can do that for you.
Try GPE todo list, there are many more

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Holy cow, GPE looks awesome, I want to try it right away, thanks a lot community development efforts!

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

None, I have found, of practical value. This remains a serious shortcoming in the N900, at least for business use.

While this is, of course, a highly subjective topic, I find that the following requirements is a bare minimum for a todo-manager:

• Hierarchical items
• Title and summary content fields
• Status, priority, category and progress meta fields
• Due, start and stop date fields
• Functional widget
• Font size adjust control
• Filtering and sorting mechanisms

I've, yet again, done some tests on several available applications. GPE ... has problems. The widget doesn't work properly - the adjustments it offers doesn't "take" - and can't be resized. The application itself lack icons - some of them are broken - and there's no hierarchy.

To-Do-O ... well, it's a pain. When starting a list appears, then a black window almost the size of the screen overlay the list. All I can do is exit the program. Sadly the overlay REMAINS :mad:

(Yes, I AM aware of the dangers of extras-testing et al)

Pebble-Do has no widget, defaults to adding tasks, and lacks most of my list above.

MultiList works well, except for the UI which appears non-adapted to Maemo :( It also lacks large chunks of the above, specifically a widget. One of the better of the bunch but not practical due to the lack of an actual item editor (editing multi-line notes in a one-line field is not practical!)

EasyList - a very good LIST manager. But it doesn't really handle todos, as there is no categories, no priorities, no ... you get the drift. Excellent app tho.

PlansPlant - advanced task/project manager, and very flexible. Completion, description, title, etc; but no priority, no widget, and, as is a common failing with applications on Maemo: no possible way of adjusting the FONT size.

And that, in turn, means it can show *7* items before that terrible kinetic scrolling shows up.

The Palm TX can show 14 in portrait mode with Agendus Pro. Seven is not nearly enough to get an oversight over current tasks. GPE can show 8. Marginally better.

(And, of course, PlansPlant's dialogue boxes are in Russian ... some of them. Not all.)

There are several other TODO apps out there; Kontakt I've not managed to install yet. None, so far, cover my requirements. I might have to dig out an editor and a c++ compiler!

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

TinaHolmboe, I just stumbled upon this thread after making another fruitless tour today of the to do apps available for the N900. I'm still using Bonsai running on Garnet, but I would give up a lot of features to be able to use something natively.

My requirements are similar to yours, except that I'm not quite certain what you mean by "functional widget."

I would need the ability either to drag and drop items in order to reorder and indent -or- simple buttons to accomplish the same task. That is to say, I don't want to open a task in order to indent/outdent the task, etc.

Sadly, there are a bunch of task list app.'s out there; however, they all have relatively the same features, and none that I have used rise to the level of task manager. I'll take a look and see if there's anything close in open source for the desktop.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

This topic has come up before and I'll repeat myself. If you need a serious todo list / information manager, everything you want can be found by running emacs with org-mode.

It does everything on your list but the widget - I've thought about some ways to do this..I just don't need it personally.

It also allows tables (spreadsheets) within outlines and works very nicely with bbdb (contact manager). Due dates, repeating tasks, agenda's, priorities, todo states - all of that is easy out of the box.

I run my buisness with org-mode. Today, on a jobsite, my client requested budgets on several upcoming projects we discussed for their 2011 forecasting. I sat down with my damn phone and used several of the same spreadsheets I use on my desktop to pull 4 projects together, pasted it into an email (long live plain text!) and delivered what he needed in 30 minutes.

For my business and personal accounting, I use ledger - more plain text. My journal entries and reports are all on the phone - just like the laptop.

When I used windows, I heard about orgmode several times, checked it out, then rolled my eyes when I saw some of the jibberish required to get it running. I wanted to double click on an .exe and be done with it. A year ago, I dug in with some tutorials and never looked back. It's rather involved to setup well, but worth the pain x100.

If you look into it, don't hesitate to ask for help, I'd be more than happy to go into my setup in detail.

So, IMHO, if you call the n900's weakness the lack of a clicky todo list manager, you may be right. For me, it's ability to run emacs so well is the reason I would never consider another phone (until a successor comes along...)

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

I think Task Coach might be the answer:

http://www.taskcoach.org/

It's fairly powerful and seems to provide most of the important features. It runs on python and there is a version for iPhone, so someone has done the job of re-working interfaces to run it on a handheld.

I'd be more than happy to help out with porting this to Maemo.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Adding to the available applications is Kontact:
http://www.opensource-usability-labs...g-for-testers/

I mean to try this myself soonish. Definitely beta type stuff.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

sry but what do you guys mean with a todo list?

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

don't be a jerk!

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Thanks for the scoop and links, Zoner. I've given it a good look, but I'm looking for something that uses the touch screen. I'm not very fast with the keyboard, so it wouldn't be very good for me anyway.

I'd still like to see Task Coach ported. I've looked at the docs for porting, but hildonizing an application is something that would prolly take me a long, long time.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

And how about using Portabase? You can create todo lists fitting to your needs. Creating fields like prio, category, due date, title, note etc. is easy as 123. Then you can create various views and voilà, tailor made todo app is here.

Yes, I admit, it has no widget and no alarms. But the flexibility it gives you balances these drawbacks a bit.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Well, it would need a widget - to start with - so that a quick overview of the tasks could be presented on a desktop. The e-mail widget that comes with Maemo is a good example; another is the Calendar Home Widget.

The widget would need to be functional - i.e. not a static fill-the-entire-screen thing like the GPE Todo widget; it would need to be resizeable, and of course have fonts that could be adjusted (down, preferably).

Your taste may vary, of course :)

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Portabase is an excellent application - except two major drawbacks: the scrolling is all over the place (literally. When - and I've got a todo list implemented this way - you have a large number of items, scrolling vertically means the display will also flicker horizontally at the slightest change in your trajectory - unless you make damned sure you have only N columns resized to their smallest width. It can be worked around, however.

The main problem is that blasted font again. I can't fit more than 5 items at a time in fullscreen landscape mode. Yes, I can turn the font down, but then ALL the UI gets a small font, not only the items.

But yes. Save these drawbacks Portabase works nicely.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

You should change the title to:

N900's one major shortcoming: Nokia has no ToDo List.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Can't say I care WHO makes it, but if anyone has the time and inclination I suggest taking inspiration from the excellent Palm AgendusPro application.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

thismessageistencharacterslong

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Tried it. Find it unusable for even the simplest of tasks. It runs very, very slow. It does install though!

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Tried the kdepim as well. It's not CPU intensive as it much as it breaks the memory boundary causing much swapiness and everything becomes bogged down...

This device would really have been a completely different beast with twice the ram :/

EDIT: It's actually pretty nice, so it's a shame...
Gonna try again after a reboot and see if it improves...

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

I tried the KDE PIM apps. as well. They hung up on me. I didn't try a reboot, so let me know if that helps at all. I'm not optimistic about a KDE based solution because KDE app.'s have a tendency to be a bit bloated. I know and love many KDE app.'s, but I'm not sure if they're suited for handhelds.

I dunno if anyone caught my thread in the Applications forum, but I'm asking folks to vote to request the Task Coach team to port it for Maemo:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=65233

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Excellent. Now compare it to AgendusPro, and you'll quickly notice a difference.

If emacs cover your needs, great. Despite being a long-term emacs user, a todo-list it isn't. Not for me.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Now, when I was a palm user, I thought Agendus sucked. Mostly eye candy stuff and the upgrade policy was for fools.

"For example, in Version 13, we’ve included the ability to add icons to Contacts."

Wow, good luck finding an application with that kind of horsepower, I'll leave you alone now.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

That's just unbearable, that Nokia have not been willing/able to provide basic polished business applications for N900 :-/ I just can't get it, this isn't something special like "social networking". Even the old Palm OS has better application. OK, they could do with a facelift, but they the the job better. Just install Garnet VM and try it yourself.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

And here is where we differ in opinion. The 'eye candy' you speak of has, many times, benefits in terms of productivity. Such as the icons for contacts.

We were, however, talking of the task manager.


Thank you. Much appreciated.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

My fingers aren't very fast with the N900 keyboard, nor are they terrifically accurate, so a text based solution doesn't really work for me.

As for Palm task manager apps., nothing in Maemo begins to compare to Bonsai, nor does anything even rise to the level of ListPro. I continue to use Bonsai to manage my tasks, but it's a pain to need an emulator simply for task management. (Datebk6 is also miles better than anything for calendaring in Maemo; however, I was willing to give up on it in order to enable reliable reminders.) I do understand that Palm is a very mature platform, and I don't expect the same level of application maturity from Maemo.

The only big obstacle to having Task Coach on Maemo is its lack of a wxPython port. I complain about little in these forums, but it would have been nice if Nokia had provided a wxPython port, especially given that the closed iPhone platform has a port.

Many kudos to jackburton who has done a fair amount of work toward creating a wxPython port:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=30782

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Oh, I wouldn't say I'm doing a port of wxPython. No way. That is beyond my skills. What I have done, however, is create my own Debian lenny image and compile the latest and greatest wxPython packages in there. I then borrowed scripts from Easy-Debian and was able to install the deb version of taskcoach inside my own chroot.

I just discovered Presence VNC, which makes running full chroot desktops much easier than all the easy-debian scripts. It solves the problems of keyboard mappings and what-not.

Basically, I chroot into Lenny. Then I run vncserver on DISPLAY :2. I can then use presence VNC to run my desktop. No hassles. I'll try to post a video if anybody is interested. If so, then maybe I'll go back and refine and document the steps better.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

Here is a screenshot. Presence VNC is really good.

http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4085/...21676518_z.jpg

And here is the link if the static image is not available:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandersnaxe/5191790889/

Here is a portrait shot.
http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4087/...78dc732e_z.jpg

http://www.flickr.com/photos/brandersnaxe/5191835869/

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

@jackburton: Thanks for the updates. There's another thread here if you haven't seen it:

http://talk.maemo.org/showthread.php?t=65233

There's thought of making a QT port for Task Coach (instead of porting wxPython to Maemo). This would make a Maemo port easier and make Task Coach available for other platforms.

I'm not sure if the threads need merging.

Re: N900's one major shortcoming: ToDo List
 

hey zoner would you mind sharing anything special you did to n900 to run org-mode? are you using emacs from maemo or from easy-debian? ive not got around to have a good working emacs setup but am willing to give it a try, something that you might like is anything.el its the kind of thing that matches well with a phone i think.