http://www.moo.do

I've been using this and testing it for a few hours and it's pretty impressive. I've used workflowy more than a little, checkvist some, trello some. I still far prefer desktop apps (*) for their speed and power but workflowy was tempting me and now moo.do is even more so. (*: OneNote, Excel, Word, ..., Noteliner, Treesheets sometimes)

Moo.do is on the web, chrome, iOS, and android. (I've already put in my feedback requesting a truly offline (with sync) Windows desktop app but I'm not holding my breath).

It is multi-user / has sharing.

It is fast and responsive. It has instant search/filter like workflowy and checkvist. It has outlining with folding and focus/hoist. Also the usual tab/shift-tab to indent and alt/shift/up-down to move stuff. I tested down to 30 levels. It has @dates with reminders and an "agenda" view. It has #tags. It has (Google) contacts (+Joe). It has priorities and star/highlight. You can complete items, they turn grey. You can archive stuff.

They say they want to keep a text-based paradigm, so no bold/italic, no markdown rendering, no custom CSS like checkvist.

Drawbacks: at present it requires Google Drive to store its data. :-(

Amazing: it updates in realtime for all users. You can open multiple views at once. Each can have its own focus/hoist and independent search. I'm really digging fullscreen in the Chrome app with 4 views: overall, search, hoisted, and agenda. I have about 500 items in here right now and it's pretty quick. I've never seen this multi-view done so well in an online app. I find this kind of thing extremely useful in Excel and Word so I'm super impressed that they've pulled this off.

See their website for a 85-second video worth watching, a live no-sign-in demo pre-populated with a few lists, and on their blog are detailed examples of scrum/kanban and project collaboration.

How is it for writing? I don't think it would work for me because it lacks styles or really any formatting at all. I suppose someone could write in markdown and then render it elsewhere but that seems counter-productive to me.

Looks like an interesting service. The name is a little unfortunate. One of our enterprising Vermont dairy farmers packages composted cow manure and calls it Moo Do.

Thanks for the notice.

Steve Z.

yosemite wrote:

http://www.moo.do
but workflowy was tempting me and now moo.do is even more so.

Thanks for this, interesting development... I'm a big WorkFlowy fan, so I'm not sure what I see there at Moo.do currently is enough for me to switch over, but a bit of competition must be a good thing and hopefully it spurs on the WorkFlowy guys to come up with some new features as well. Moo.do surely make it easy to switch, with all their import tools... But they ask for quite a lot of access permissions to the Google account, which is a bit disconcerting. All WorkFlowy asks for is just any old email address to sign up with...

My impression so far is that WorkFlowy is more geared towards keyboard fanatics, while Moo.do seems to be more touch/mouse focused.

I'm a big fan of Workflowy and I took a look at this with some excitement, but unfortunately it doesn't appear to offer much that Workflowy doesn't already. The Google Drive backup is a nice touch, but the interface isn't as simple and intuitive as Workflowy's. Also, WF is hinting in their Twitter feed about potential new features coming soon, so I think I'll see what they have to offer.

zoe wrote:

Also, WF is
hinting in their Twitter feed about potential new features coming soon,
so I think I'll see what they have to offer.

These are the features apparently they're working on (from their FAQ):

Dates & reminders
Image attachments
Advanced tagging options
Collaboration improvements
API

Good points. Indeed the feature sets of workflowy, moodo, checkvist are similar. I've been using moodo some more and comparing it to the others. Here's my findings...

Major differences:

* moodo requires Google Drive (I for one don't like this)

* moodo can integrate your Google contacts if you're in that ecosystem

* file attachments - checkvist has this, the others don't

* folding markers (plus-minus/triangles) - To it's detriment, moodo has none! It boldfaces items that have subitems. Therefore there's no single-click way to open/close. It's a double-click or keyboard action.

* speed - workflowy is fastest, checkvist is slowest. The speed and reliability of moo.do are open questions since it's so new. One of workflowy's strengths is its speed - it is generally pretty fast. Not quite as fast as desktop apps but noticeably faster than most online apps.

* search - all are similar but workflowy seems best and fastest in my opinion

* tag autocomplete - workflowy and checkvist do, moodo doesn't

* dates - checkvist and moodo have automagic dates. moodo has an agenda view (items with dates listed sequentially). workflowy doesn't have anything here but it does seem like it's a high priority for them and it may debut soon (?).

* multiple views - moodo's is easy and integrated. I'm not familiar with workflowy and checkvist capabilities here, can you open multiple windows/browsers and have separate trees and searches? For moodo, see http://www.moo.do/blog/project-management/ under the "Multiple Panes" heading, you can even try it out right there

* sharing - moodo's realtime updates are fast and smooth; again I'm not familiar with workflowy.

* mobile - moodo and workflowy mobile apps are decent. checkvist's is sluggish (my perception) and has been in development for a long time.

* offline access - moodo and workflowy can do this, checkvist can't

* formatting and colors - checkvist has the most options, even including custom CSS for paid accounts, workflowy has bold and italic, moodo has none but does have colored sidebars for priorities and grey for done.

-------

If workflowy adds dates and attachments and can do the multiple view thing then it would have everything that the others have that it lacks, plus the advantage of being faster and smoother, plus a lot of people like the clean interface

Great comparison, thanks for doing this! Some comments:

yosemite wrote:

* folding markers (plus-minus/triangles) - To it's detriment, moodo has
none!

Yes, that bothered me too. And also the lack of bullet-points (call me old-fashioned :)

* dates - checkvist and moodo have automagic dates. moodo has an agenda
view (items with dates listed sequentially). workflowy doesn't have
anything here but it does seem like it's a high priority for them and it
may debut soon (?).

You can sort of use a workaround and add a special character in front of a date (e.g. ^16/10/2014) and then search for ^ and it lists all the items with a date, but it's obviously not as easy or nice as Moo.do's.

* multiple views - moodo's is easy and integrated. I'm not familiar with
workflowy and checkvist capabilities here, can you open multiple
windows/browsers and have separate trees and searches?

I don't think it's possible in the offline Chrome app, but you can do it in multiple open browser windows or by splitting a browser window with an add-on like *Split Screen* in Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/split-screen/eachfleknamlcepmplpdghagngjfjkin

* formatting and colors - checkvist has the most options, even including
custom CSS for paid accounts, workflowy has bold and italic, moodo has
none but does have colored sidebars for priorities and grey for done.

There is a workaround for changing your CSS for WF by installing the Stylish add-on for your browser, and then choosing a WorkFlowy theme from here:
https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/workflowy

I like this one:
https://userstyles.org/styles/97956/better-dark-workflowy-v1-2

Sadly, it seems to have the same drawback I have with Workflowy - everything is in one big file. I prefer where I can save different outlines for each project as I often use these outlines as notes for my participants.

Garland Coulson wrote:

Sadly, it seems to have the same drawback I have with Workflowy -
everything is in one big file. I prefer where I can save different
outlines for each project as I often use these outlines as notes for my
participants.

Garland, apologies if I've already said this, but you could certainly use WF that way. You can just treat a particular item (bullet point) as the client folder, and then everything that goes under that directory is an isolated project. Then you can share that outline with your client by hovering your mouse over the top level bullet point (representing the client folder) and selecting a) "Share" (and email the URL of that sub-directory to your client to access a view-only or editable version) or b) "Export" (to copy and paste the outline as formatted or unformatted list into an email and send it as text).

The beauty of Workflowy is that it leaves it completely up to the user whether a bullet-point item represents a list item, a folder, a category, a context (work, home etc.) or anything else. So you can just structure your top level hierarchy as you would a file directory, considering them folders, and then putting more folders or items into them. It's the same idea as in Scrivener any folder can be turned into a document or a document back into a folder.

Garland Coulson wrote:

Sadly, it seems to have the same drawback I have with Workflowy -
everything is in one big file.

In the light of what I just said, "everything is in one big file" is just a question of how you look at it. You could also say "Workflowy is made up of thousands of little files", as every single bullet-point can be considered (exported, shared, viewed) as an individual file.

WF is "one big file" only if you choose to organise the entire contents of WF under a single top level item, and then share or export everything under that item. However, even that type of organisation has its unique benefits. It means you can export the entire contents of your WF database as a single plain text or OPML file, which is great for doing manual backups fast (if you're not a PRO customer).

The beauty of Workflowy is that it leaves it completely up to the user
whether a bullet-point item represents a list item, a folder, a
category, a context (work, home etc.) or anything else.

Yes, echoing this. My favorite thing about watching the evolution of WF is the fact that it's more of a platform than an app. I have seen many users' blogs and each person seems to use it differently. Users are not stuffed into a single love-it-or-leave-it mode of working.

What I wish for is the visual richness of something like Trello, where cards/nodes can have attachments, Markdown descriptions, checklists, etc. Trello's top-level organization (individual "boards," infinite horizontal scrolling to the right) is cumbersome, though. Springpad was my favorite day-to-day software for this stuff, and sadly nothing has come about with its variety of content types.

Just been checking out moo.do. It's a very professional piece of work.

It does do little triangle 'fold' indicators, in fact, but you have to pass your mouse over a parent item to see them. The iOS apps are clearer in this respect.

What I'm very impressed by is the way you can open multiple windows onto your single document. Of course you can, in theory, do that in Workflowy, but not as conveniently, and in moo.do's case the multiple windows all update simultaneously (although of course you'd normally be using secondary windows to 'focus' [= hoist] a particular item).

The agenda is very tidy. I think this is a very nice addition, and actually superior to Workflowy, because it acts as a concentrator for all items with specific dates/times/priorities.

I'm impressed! I'd be even more impressed if there was a desktop app, and if the iPad version had more than just a single window (it's basically an enlarged version of the iPhone app); but it's very early days.

At first, I thought the agenda was rather limited. But in fact, if you start playing around with items in the agenda, you soon find they're very flexible. For example: if you create an item with a date/priority, so it appears in the agenda, then create a sublist of items under that item, the item appears emboldened in the agenda. If you click on the folding triangle, the list view window focuses on the parent item and opens the subitems alongside the agenda. So you can make notes in subitems etc.

I wonder how that works in iOS. Oh dear, really haven't got time to get all intrigued by this, but I'm going to have to look...

Hey everyone, I'm one of the co-founders of Moo.do. We saw this thread when we first launched and got some great ideas from you.

We now have folding markers so you can collapse items easily. We find it distracting to see folding icons and bullets on every item when we want to focus on just the text, so we have the folding icon show only on hover. But we understand that some people want to always see the bullets, so we will put that in as an option.

We just launched recurring dates, so you can use dates like "@every friday 4pm" or even "@every other monday from 11/24 at 2:00".

Also, we've tried to make our usage of Google Drive clearer on the landing page, but it's actually much safer than signing up with an email address. Moo.do only has access to the files it creates on Google Drive, not any of your other files. And everything runs client-side, so nothing is ever sent to our servers. So, we aren't even able to see what you're writing, like other companies that use a normal email signup do. All we know about you is your email address.

We're currently working on improving the speed of Moo.do. I'm pretty sure Moo.do is already much faster than Workflowy, but we're making it even better.

MadAboutDana: We're planning to have multiple views in the iPad app in the future. And we have a Chrome app that you can use on the desktop.

Thanks everyone for checking it out. And please let me know if you have more feedback so we can continue to make Moo.do better for you.

Thank you for posting here. And thank you for developing such an intriguing and useful product.

I tried Moo.do yesterday for quite a while, both on my iPad 2 and my Nexus 7. There are many things to like. As you might expect from the folks here, I'm an outlining fan, so dove right into that. On both platforms, it worked well, and I didn't need bullets to make sense of it.

I liked the ease of adding dates and contacts. I liked the agenda view. The controls for prioritizing and cleaning things up came clear pretty quickly. I like the ease of searching.

As a standalone tool across multiple platforms, this is very good - an elegant UI, good functions, and kind of fun to play with. I could easily see adopting it as a dashboard for llife.

But I have a couple of questions and observations.

First, and excuse me if I just missed this, but how (on the platforms I mentioned), do I copy or export text? For instance, the outliner worked so well I quickly put together a draft of something I'd like to flesh out in a word processor. But I couldn't find a way to select, copy and paste. Nor, come to think of it, was I able to paste a URL next to a to do item. A lot of the folks here move data across several apps.

Second, the Google sign in made me think I would see some of the dates on my Google calendar. I suspect that Google integration adds a whole other layer of complexity to your work, but that would certainly increase its value, too. (I do like the ability to quickly pop into an email, though.)

Too, I've noticed that leaving the program to do something else then coming back forces Moo.do (on the Android version, anyhow) to reload - a bit of an annoyance.

Finally, what's your business plan with this. How will you make money?

At any rate, the software is interesting enough to keep me at it for several hours. Well done!

Hi jaslar, I'm glad you're liking Moo.do!

We currently have an exporter on the desktop app, but not yet on mobile. We are working on fixing copy/paste on mobile and we're looking into setting up sharing between apps.

We are planning a Google Calendar integration, among integrations with many other services. That will be part of the core of our business model. We will have a monthly subscription for advanced features such as integrations with other services, among other premium features.

Reloading whenever you go back to Moo.do is certainly annoying. We're working on background refresh for the iOS app now, so it will stay updated and pull in remote changes in the background. We will look at improving that on Android next. We also have a big performance boost coming, so even if it does reload, it'll be much faster :).

Thanks a lot for all the feedback. And feel free to email us, send feedback through the app, or talk to us on Twitter @MooDoApp if you'd like.

Jay Meistrich wrote:

Hi jaslar, I'm glad you're liking Moo.do!

And again, thanks for posting here. The Outliner folks, as youv'e seen, are keenly interested in this kind of software, and I've yet to find a more knowledgeable source of both discovery and analysis. We're also grateful to have the opportunity to influence the direction of such applications.

We currently have an exporter on the desktop app, but not yet on mobile.

Perfectly reasonable to begin with. But I'm finding that I do a lot of work on the road with my iPad - the ability to just grab and email would be handy. I'm not sure I need lots of export options.

We are working on fixing copy/paste on mobile and we're looking into
setting up sharing between apps.

Thank you. That would do it.

We are planning a Google Calendar integration, among integrations with
many other services. That will be part of the core of our business
model. We will have a monthly subscription for advanced features such as
integrations with other services, among other premium features.

Also logical.

Reloading whenever you go back to Moo.do is certainly annoying. We're
working on background refresh for the iOS app now, so it will stay
updated and pull in remote changes in the background. We will look at
improving that on Android next. We also have a big performance boost
coming, so even if it does reload, it'll be much faster :).

More good news.

Some software is just fun to use, hitting that balance between just enough functions to be genuinely useful, but with a UI that doens't have too steep a learning curve. Moo.do sits pretty close to the sweet spot.

Jay Meistrich wrote:

Thanks everyone for checking it out. And please let me know if you have
more feedback so we can continue to make Moo.do better for you.

Hi Jay, it's always great to meet innovative developers eager for feedback. Moo.do is an interesting take at a universal problem and I for one will be testing it extensively within the context of my collaborative projects.

There is one aspect in which I am interested in more than the features: the viability of your business model. Can you provide some more info on this?

See this thread for some important and hopefully thought-provoking background:
http://www.outlinersoftware.com/topics/viewt/5164/0/the-cloud-shooting-itself-on-the-foot-dispatchiocc-and-docom

A relevant quote of my own from the tread: “As awkward as this may seem, I am reluctant to trust our work on a free tool. So, can you provide some more info on how you plan to make money to support your valuable service?”

Dr Andus wrote:

There is a workaround for changing your CSS for WF by installing the
Stylish add-on for your browser, and then choosing a WorkFlowy theme
from here:
https://userstyles.org/styles/browse/workflowy

Some of the Stylish WorkFlowy add-ons even allow you to display the inline notes as expanded for the whole outline (WorkFlowy only shows the first line of a note normally), turning it into a proper single-pane outliner with inline notes.

See e.g.

https://userstyles.org/styles/64623/workflowy-expanded-notes

Or if you prefer a dark theme, try

https://userstyles.org/styles/93325/workflowy-another-dark-theme

which works well in combination with

https://userstyles.org/styles/100418/wide-black-workflowy

yosemite wrote:
>I'm not familiar
>with
>workflowy and checkvist capabilities here, can you open multiple
>windows/browsers and have separate trees and searches?

Dr Andus wrote:
I don't think it's possible in the offline Chrome app, but you can do it
in multiple open browser windows or by splitting a browser window with
an add-on like *Split Screen* in Chrome:
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/split-screen/eachfleknamlcepmplpdghagngjfjkin

Just came across the Tile Tabs add-on for Firefox (actually "Split Screen" add-on has stopped working in Chrome for some reason), which works great for creating multiple docked windows for WorkFlowy (for me two suffice though). I'm very impressed with one, it's highly customisable:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/tile-tabs/

P.S. On my Win7 PC is switched back from Chrome to Firefox as I found that the multitude of Chrome processes needed to run the various Chrome tabs have been using too much RAM and affecting my PC's performance. It appears to be a lot quicker to have Google Drive tabs (Sheets mainly, and Google Calendar) running in Firefox than in Chrome for some strange reason...

I had a similar experience on Mac and moved back to Safari from Chrome, after experimenting with the nice (but not quite nice enough) Opera.

But I've now moved back to Chrome, because the latest 64-bit version is much lighter on resources, and actually much more stable and less resource-intensive than the latest versions of Safari. It's the (range and depth of) extensions that make it so desirable.

And now there's another service similar to these called quire.io heavily geared to task management and not as much freeform outlining. Well, apparently it's been around a year or so but it's new to me. I've tried it a few times and it's got potential, but in comparison to workflowy there's some major annoyances. For example, it can't seem to find tags from its universal search box at the top. And with its filter bar, you can't filter for two tags (A and B). These kinds of things are rock-bottom basic for me, but others may find it interesting.

Meanwhile moo.do continues to develop and it's pretty nice. Especially for those in the Google ecosystem.

Checkvist also has made numerous major improvements in the last year. Kir has posted here about some of them, such as markdown and multiple-item selection. Both of work pretty well in my testing. But for me checkvist is still too slow and hit-or-miss. Every time I see a new feature added, I test it again, and sometimes it's pretty quick, but sometimes it's just slow or spontaneously reloads, taking several seconds. I don't know, I'm sure it works great for some, and it does have an awesome feature set, so I recommend you check it out if you haven't already.

I continue to use and rely on workflowy. I recently started using it in conjunction with TileTabs (Firefox) and it is tremendous. Thank you to Dr Andus for the tip here:

http://www.outlinersoftware.com/messages/viewm/22346

With TileTabs and some custom css I got from userstyles, I have four or more tiles in Firefox, each showing different views of my workflowy outline. One is the full thing for navigation perspective, one is a search on #now or #today, one is whatever I'm working on at the moment, and the last one or more are for quick drill downs to various areas I want to look at temporarily.

The key thing here is that workflowy can have all these views be independent - each can be zoomed in on any branch of the outline, and each can have its own search terms in effect. Moo.do can do this too, but checkvist doesn't seem to be able to.

And now there's another

omniflow.io

I have just started testing it, it seems fast and very similar to workflowy (which is good!). Doesn't have clickable #tags and @tags but they're working on it.

Some discussion on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/productivity/comments/38twac/omniflow_let_your_ideas_flow/

And a roadmap with voting: https://trello.com/b/z0HxDPNo/omniflow-roadmap

Thanks, Yosemite. I signed up and played with it. I'm still CRIMPing around for a light single-pane outliner for writing.The key difference between this and Workflowy is that it uses files: a document pane on the left. As a writer, that works just fine for me. It could be a great addition to the toolchest.

I like Omniflow's simple and intuitive commands, implementation of hoist, search, and spellcheck. It lacks word count (don't they realize that with word count, software reviewers will say "now HERE'S somebody who solves a problem?"), and export options are limited to one includes-all-files zip folder. I couldn't get import to work at all. But it's possible to select all and paste text - which includes modest markup (no footnotes). The files, of course, sit on someone else's server, or at least I think they do.

Promising, though.

Update: the export and import options for Omniflow are really backup options: one creates a zip file of your work, and the other restores it. But I sent them some detailed feedback and got immediate and thoughtful response.

I do have to say how much I appreciate the good work of good programmers. This past month I spent about $50 on programs I don't even really use much these days, but I truly do value the work they represent.