15-Minute Reviews :: Daily To-Do List v2.20

Good day everyone and welcome to another 15-Minute Review! Today’s application is Daily To-Do List version 2.20 by Dextronet – A task manager with what’s on your plate today.

Software Description

As Giveaway of the Day states:

“Daily To-Do List allows you to organize your tasks day by day. Each to-do list is ordered, just drag & drop your tasks around to organize them. Easily edit rich text notes for each of your tasks in the notes panel.

Supports reminders and recurrent tasks that are automatically inserted into your to do lists. You can print & export to HTML just the days you want to.”

Quick Pros

• Categorize your tasks to help organize your day-to-day actions – Color-coded as well
• ‘Prioritize’ offers you ‘lights’ next to the name of a task to show priority
• Printing and export to HTML functionality useful but looks and layout is flawed
• Ability to set up recurring tasks handy
• Reminder functionality handy, but falls short
• Ability to add RTF-formatted notes to each task handy to track extra details

Quick Cons

• Can only get unfinished tasks from the day before, nothing before that
• Drag-and-drop support only for organizing within the day; Can’t drag to another day
• Sorting functionality lacking un usability
• Dated interface doesn’t flow the greatest; No auto-resize of table
• Some features just don’t seem to flow well (See below)

Expansion

Such a hard market to be within, you have to try to be unique in some means. Many task managing applications offer a wide range of features to try to be ‘the big brother’ over another. Some try to offer a unique way to manage tasks. With this application, it attempts to be unique by offering you the ability to stay focused on today’s tasks only and forces you to wade for other days, which isn’t a bad idea for some. You can only have the day your view’s tasks up and nothing else. This may help with those who may be ‘tempted’ to work on ‘more fun’ projects that are upcoming rather than the tasks at hand.

To help you with organizing your tasks, you have both categories and priorities to aid you in your organization. With categories, you can add and remove categories, as well as color-code them for easier visual cues in the to-do list. Priorities have a 5-step slider from lowest to highest, and result in a ‘light’ to the left of the task name. Both are useful for organizing tasks. A few issues though with how these work; Categories in the drop-down box when adding new to-dos are in alphabetical order, which may be less than optimal for organizing. There is no way to manually redo the categories (And specifically the ‘first’ category which is the default drop-down option. I found myself changing the categories to start with numbers to order them in a manner that was more productive to me. As well, with the ‘priority’ portion, while it is nice to have the little ‘light’ next to the name of the task, it isn’t really useful as since you can’t automatically sort your tasks based on priority.

Printing and export to HTML is always a handy feature to have. It includes the RTF notes you have made as well, which is handy if you are using this as a client job tracking and want to put in address information. However, it would have been nice if it would have retained colors that are on the to-do list for visual cues. The layout looks flawed in places; divider lines missing and overlapping as well as no way to adjust column width manually. Also, there is no way to print out just one category either; One category may be helpful for someone who has a few service calls that day and wants a list of them, and not every single job they have that day.

Recurring tasks is a nice feature to have in the application. The ability to have a task inserted under specific terms is nice, but there is a few flaws with it. The control over when tasks are inserted is weak (No bi-weekly/bi-monthly/first named day of the month, etc.) which would mean the usability is less. Also, there is no way to pre-fill the RTF notes into the recurring tasks; Yes, you can add them after, but that may defeat the purpose of a recurring task.

There is some flaws in this application which does decrease productivity and usability. This application almost requires daily use; The method that the application ‘rolls over’ unfinished tasks is by moving the previous day’s tasks into today. This is fine and dandy, except at a Monday through Friday job where your computer is off for 2 days and your tasks from Friday don’t roll over until today. Yes, you can go back and move the tasks around, but you have to go into a menu for that. There is no drag and drop support between days, only to reorganize the order of the tasks for the day you are on. Sorting functionality is essentially non-existent. You can sort by alphabetical A-Z order for the task name and category name and that is it. Can’t go Z-A, can’t sort by priority, reminder time (Which isn’t displayed at all on the window.) or otherwise.

The interface does feel dated, with the lack of features such as sorting, the need to have to manually resize the task table just to get it to fit the window at the start, the need to restart the application just to change the font size, day navigation method and the basic RTF support. This may be part of the whole picture of why the ‘little’ things here and there, such as the rollover method, all the ‘recurring’ tasks not just in place for future days already and so on.

As mentioned throughout already, this applications features and functionality just doesn’t flow well. There was a lot I found awkward to use, difficult to implement, or just lacking in general. Just to touch on a few others; The reminder ‘sound’ is the system ‘bonk’ sound repeated a few times and no way to change it. The reminder time is not displayed on the to-do list as a ‘deadline’ or a separate box for a ‘deadline time’ (Which for a ‘daily’ task list would in my opinion be a need;) Navigation between days is awkward as is moving tasks between days; The tasks are date-specific and there is a lot of little issues that arise because of this such as rolling over past 1 day (As noted above) and recurring tasks (above again.)

One last note that I must add that I didn’t add to the Pros and Cons area is the ‘advertisement’ for Swift To-Do List right in application. I’m not sure how I feel about this. With this application’s shortcomings in some areas, ‘advertising’ in a paid-for application for another ‘better’ task manager that there is no apparent ‘upgrade’ pricing to move to that application. I could see some people getting upset at this. ‘Why did we buy this application when they had something better for only a bit more? Why should we spend another $34.95?’

Final Verdict

The concept of having a ‘daily’ to-do list to keep you on task for the day without the distractions of future days is handy, but this application’s implementation isn’t well developed or thought out (or possibly too many resources put into Swift To-Do List, as advertised right in the application.) While some may find this handy application, there are better alternatives out there which work better. For free, you can give it a try and see if it might work okay for you; You might find yourself being disappointed with time however. As for $24.95, I could not warrant spending this much on an application which feels unfinished and poorly implemented, especially seeing they advertise their more expensive application. Unfortunately, this application is unpolished and does not encourage me to ‘try’ out Swift To-Do either.

Posted by BladedThoth on Wednesday, May 16, 2007