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Disappointing "updates" - Asana & Todoist
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Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 22, 2015 at 04:39 PM
I’d entirely agree with that. If a bunch of users have highlighted shortcomings, it’s clearly in the developer’s interests to improve them.
And I have a similarly suspicious view of natural language. Todoist’s latest incarnation does, then doesn’t, handle it, which is irritating. But at least it now has a simple drop-down box/calendar thingy that makes it easy to set dates and times without recourse to natural language.
Although no other task management app has achieved the elegant ease of use of TickTick. I only have two criticisms of the latter: that you can’t enter notes in rich text (sometimes essential to highlight specific issues), and that the iOS versions make no distinction between the main title of a task and the notes you enter about it (at least the desktop/online versions separate the two by a faint line). But otherwise, TickTick remains an exemplary task management app, with a huge pane for notes (something many other apps could learn from: lots of notes is actually more useful than lots of subtasks).
However, Todoist is quite cool, and I won’t pretend I’m not mildly impressed.
Cheers,
Bill
Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 22, 2015 at 04:43 PM
It’s worth mentioning to those who don’t know that Todoist does support some fairly rudimentary rich-text formatting, using markup code (not sure where it comes from, but it works okay both in task names and in comments. Oh, and a simple kludge allows you to turn a subtask into a note, too: simply prefix the task name with an asterisk, and the checkbox is removed).
The basic markup is: two exclamation marks on either side of word/phrase to be emboldened (or simply use Ctrl+B); two underlines on either side of word/phrase to be italicised (or use Ctrl+I).
And that, apart from a shortcode for setting priorities, is all of it!
Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 22, 2015 at 04:46 PM
Oops, no it’s not, you can also enter a URL and then put a name after it in brackets, e.g.:
http://www.google.com (Google)
and all you’ll see in the text is the name, not the URL (the name acts as the link). That’s quite cool, too. Full instructions at:
https://todoist.com/Help/TextFormatting?lang=
Posted by Ken
Sep 22, 2015 at 06:43 PM
Two follow-up items, Bill. first, does TickTick support subtasks? And second, turning a task into a note with an asterisk in Todoist is listed as a helpful hint in their official blog, but there was also some discussion about this not being officially supported, so I am not sure of its status at present.
—Ken
Posted by MadaboutDana
Sep 23, 2015 at 09:19 AM
Hi Ken,
- Well, sort of. That is to say, a note in TickTick can be one of two things: a great big note field for anything you care to write, OR a checklist of subtasks
Now, that may sound limited (and it is, a bit) BUT TickTick also allows you to enter comments, ostensibly to share with others: in practice, this is a useful secondary note-taking facility, so if you go for the checklist of subtasks, you can always enter notes as comments.
Now, I prefer checklists of subtasks myself (the Wunderlist approach), because then you don’t confuse yourself with multiple deadlines for a linear project (of course that’s not a good approach for parallel projects, so bear that in mind; in such cases, OmniFocus is your friend).
But generally, I don’t use subtasks, I use notes. I then enter the next thing to do at the top (rather than at the bottom), and since TickTick notes can contain a LOT of text, that works really well for me. Since TickTick has a good search function, and supports extras such as comments, attached files and so on, it’s actually very flexible for managing big projects. In fact, I use the comments function as a kind of project timesheet, too. As I said earlier, the main downer is the lack of support for rich text, but I suspect that’ll come along sooner or later - the TickTick team clearly take an incremental approach, and it’s hugely improved over the last couple of years.
- Todoist notes: well, officially supported or not, I can confirm the asterisk for notes does indeed work, because I’ve got quite a few notes set up like that. What I would say is that it’s not suitable for LONG notes: the response time slows to a crawl, for some reason. So if I’m using that system to take notes (and sometimes it’s more convenient to do so than using comments, because in iOS you can see subnotes immediately, whereas you have to call up comments), I tend to restrict them to short single paragraphs. You can, of course, create as many notes as you like. Personally, I tend to use them as visual reminders of specific details I must not forget over the course of the project!
In Todoist, tasks, notes and comments can all be formatted.
Cheers!
Bill