Friday Morning Contemplation

Created on 2011-03-25 15:13:39 by owen.

Categorised under: work, Server, hosting, to-do, breakfast, Friday, Habari, campsite, D&D, and coffee

Riley's making a Peanut Butter and Jelly sandwich, singing "peanut butter jelly time, peanut butter jelly time" as he spreads. I've got The Cure's "Friday I'm in Love" stuck in my head. Abby's affixing suction cupped controller nubs to the face of her iPod Touch to play Lego Harry Potter while ignoring her Cheerios.

I made my coffee this morning. This itself brings many thoughts to mind. Amazon is discontinuing their "subscribe and save" program for the 24-count boxes of K-cups we use to make coffee. They're instead offering to ship 50-count boxes, but I have to respond to their email in 11 days or I won't be able to switch my subscription. On top of that, we've changed the formula for the coffee after it's brewed: Instead of the flavored creamer we were using, I'm adding sugar-free hazelnut Monin, half-and-half, and a pack of Truvia. The box of wooden stirrers I bought is working out well to reduce the churn of spoons through the dishwasher.

My hunt for a good to-do list continues in earnest. I've not been thankful enough about people's suggestions, but I'm still trying them all. I've got 14 apps on my iPhone to track to-dos and they all have some simple failing. Too complicated, lacking a critical feature, ridiculous "imitation leather" styles, no cloud sync... I'm being picky, but I have to because after I choose, is there a way to migrate between any of these apps? No.

I've got D&D this weekend. I have the plot outlined, but I need to flesh out the parts that we'll be playing before game night. In last month's episode, players fled the Canith mine in Eberron's Mournland via flying ship, but the ship was so heavily laden with spoils that it was vulnerable to ground-based war forged reavers. They shot the ship from below with basilisk-mounted ballistas, and nearly caused it to capsize. Homunculi boarded the ship stealthily and tried to escape with a mysterious artifact recovered from the mine. Players returned to a surprisingly bustling marketplace with two missing brothers, and clues as to the direction of an errant sister. An overabundance of goods is expected to be exchanged in the market for gold and better equipment.

I transferred all of my sites to a new server last night. Slicehost has served me well, but the server I've had there for four years is showing its age. I started out with Debian Etch, and recently tried to upgrade to a newer version to get PHP5.3, among other things. While the upgrade was superficially successful, the server had started experiencing issues that required me to restart it very frequently all day yesterday. Since I can't be bothered to babysit the server all the time, it seemed like it was time to do a proper transplant. So I installed Ubuntu Maverick on a new Rackspace Cloud server and migrated everything over in one fell swoop. It was surprisingly not as painful as I expected it to be. But I'm sure there are issues lurking that I'll have to deal with in the next couple days.

This reminds me of Habari. If I've moved all of my servers off of Slicehost, Habari DNS needs to be migrated, too. And that'll coincide nicely with Habari's 0.7 release, which should be at RC3 as of this morning. I'd really like to get this out the door, since it's been much too long in coming. I suspect that 0.8 will be out very quickly after the 0.7 release, at least in relative terms (which could make, what, 8 months quick?). 0.7 has a lot of crazy giant leap improvements over 0.6. I've seen a handful of great sites being built on HEAD, and I'm enthusiastic to see what people do with the new platform.

Work progresses workfully. That's primarily what I need the to-do app for, to keep things straight. Makes me want to work on Stonepath. Makes me want to write TinyTask. Instead, I'll just write a barcamp scheduling app, since as far as I can tell, there aren't any that people have written for deployment, and that can probably be done in a couple of days.

Also this weekend is Girl Scout ice skating night, a probable trip to the tax office, and hopefully a meal or two out of the house with the family. Being cooped up indoors all week takes it's toll.

Now my coffee is over and the kids need to get on the bus.

To Do Task List App

Created on 2010-10-24 16:25:53 by owen.

Categorised under: iPhone, to-do, todo, and app

I've been downloading practically every app on the iPhone I can find that does to-do lists. My discovery: They all suck.

There exist fundamentally two different kinds of to-do apps, falling on either side of the GTD line. In one camp, the strict GTD mentality, with apps that all look fundamentally identical and are tedious to use effectively. In the other, apps that stress (either on purpose or by ineptitude) simplicity at the expense of useful features.

Probably the most important thing that all of the apps miss is that I'd really rather spend more time crossing things off my list than adding them to begin with. The ones with useful features seem stifled by the iPhone standard UI controls and a clumsy entry process.

I'm thinking of a list of features that would be ideal for my perfect to-do list app, pulling specific features that I liked from some of the apps.

I really like Quickie. It makes it super-easy to add many items to a list at once. It's missing a ton of other features, though. It needs the ability to move items between lists, schedule due dates for items, and take notes for each item. Ideally, scheduled to-do items would be shown on the calendar - really the whole thing should be stored in iCal, moving the current to-do list to the current day, day-to-day.

The major problem I have with the existing apps is that when you add a new item, you are required to enter all the other item details right then. I have no problem with additional item details, but insisting that you add them immediately ruins the flow of adding many items that don't need additional details.

I really like Helvetical. It's method of setting times for events is very simple after you figure it out. Setting due dates like this would avoid having a separate page for item details.

Teuxdeux's app is good at letting you move things from day to day. This method could be used to easily move things from list to list. Teuxdeux also syncs with their site, which is nice, but using some more universal service for storage, like DAV and/or iCal with a web interface, would be better. Accessing to-dos from the desktop without the iPhone is essential, but it shouldn't be inextricably tied to some other service, like Teuxdeux or Toodledo.

Finally, I guess people have a use for the "context" feature. If thee was one feature that I'd remove from all of these apps, it's that one. Too complicated to use, clutters the UI, doesn't do enough for you to make it worth entering...

I should mock up a UI for a to-do list app that would work well for me. I suspect that I'm not alone in my dislike of the current overabundance of lousy options.