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!