Here ‘s a philosophy I can get behind: Google wants the Tasks experience to be about as fast as paper. No big loading times and a very transparent interface that only shows you as much information as you need. I like this idea, especially since it ‘s what I think keeps most GTD interfaces from really being usable.
My most recent favourite app was ToDo 2.0 (which replaced the native RTM app on my iPhone), but even that feels a bit too slow to use on-the-go. ToDo features a great quick-add feature and its menus are all relatively fast, but the syncing can take upwards of 10-15 seconds every time. I really don ‘t have that many tasks (under 30-40) and you ‘d figure that on wi-fi the whole process should only take a couple of seconds.
Anyway, the search for a better GTD interface has brought me to Google Tasks. There ‘s no native client, there ‘s no offline support (yet), but its iPhone-optimized website is pretty damn fast!
The thing I really like — and this echoes Patrick ‘s sentiments, I think “ is how simple gTasks is. Tasks are organized into lists. You just tap on the ‘add ‘ button, type the task name out, and then press enter. The interface is well suited to multiple task entry, since the keyboard stays up until you tap ‘done ‘. If you want more details for a task, all you need to do is select one and then tap on the arrow that appears beside it. This will take you to a simple options menu with a pop-up calendar for selecting a due date and a text box for notes.
Completing a task is as simple as tapping the checkbox beside the task name, and clearing completed tasks is as simple as pressing one button at the bottom of the screen.
I ‘m sure Google is still working on the whole interface and feature set, but there are a few items I ‘d really love sooner rather than later:
- alarms/notifications like in GCal
- maybe a default due date?
- offline support
The last one is the biggest one of all for me. Just like the early days of the iPhone, you can only use the Tasks web applet if you have an active connection of some sort. I ‘ve checked the Google forums and there ‘s definitely a demand for this, so it should just be a matter of time. The problem is that we might need more than just offline Safari support. We might need a native Google app.
Here ‘s my reasoning: the way that Safari web apps are loaded is just like any other website, as far as I can tell. Web apps load up in tabs. This means that, despite the offline support, if you have a couple of tabs open then you ‘re going to have to re-load Tasks every time you open Safari. It also means that even if Tasks is loaded, Safari might still have to switch to Tasks from another tab, which takes a little bit more time. Tasks loads pretty quickly, but it ‘s about as quickly as apps like RTM and ToDo 2.0. It ‘s definitely not as fast as paper.
This would all be just fine and dandy if the iPhone featured some multi-tasking, but it ‘s possible that this issue could be circumvented with the addition of extra RAM in the next iPhone. If the iPhone had more memory, it might be able to keep more tabs loaded at one time, and tasks might get a lot closer to the lightning fast loading time that I want.
Here ‘s hoping 🙂
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