I’ve tried a lot of different todo list apps: web apps, desktop apps, and iphone apps. I’ve never found one that met all my needs, but recently I’ve been using checkvist, which I’m sticking with for the moment. It’s got a clean simple interface which lets you focus on the list rather than the app, but has more functionality under the hood than you might expect.
One of the things which has prompted me to stop using various todo list apps has been support for repeating tasks. Either an app doesn’t support it, or its support for repeating tasks isn’t what I want. For example, in many todo apps repeating tasks are just a special type of task, and as you as you mark it as complete, it just reappears on the list with a later due date.
I want to work towards clearing my todo list, so having all repeating tasks always present bugs me. When a repeating task is complete I don’t want it on my list until some point in the future.
Checkvist doesn’t support repeating tasks yet, so I’ve implemented my own repeating tasks for Checkvist, as a separate web app called TaskGen. It’s based around the concept of a task generator. Each generator has a number of fields:
- The generation date which is the date when the task should next be generated.
- The period is the number of days between consecutive generation dates.
- The due date is set to the generation date plus the due date offset, which is a number of days.
- The list specifies which Checkvist list the task should be added to.
There’s not much to the Taskgen app. The default view is a list of your generators:
Creating a generator is done with a simple form. Taskgen knows about your checkvist lists, so you just get a dropdown for selecting the list:
I’ve implemented this to make Checkvist closer to the app I’d like. But what I’d really like is for task generators to be built into Checkvist, so I can retire my app.
Thanks, Neil, for your efforts and for the blog post. Your approach with “generation date” really makes sense and if/when we’ll be implementing the repeating due tasks we’ll definitely consider it. Probably, the difference between actual due date and and the generation date could be a constant setting for all repeatable tasks (say, 3-4 days).
Thanks again!
Sorry if I missed this, but is this taskgen app public? looks cool!
No, it’s not public, at the moment. I created it for myself, so I could experiment with how I wanted repeating tasks to work. Now I’m hoping that they’ll be embedded in Checkvist, rather than having to release my hack
Do you have any plans to make it public? Would be cool to try it out!
Why not make it open source so we can implement it? At least tell us what api’s you used and what language/platform you implemented it in.
Sounds great.
I’ve created a Perl interface to the Checkvist API, and the task generator is a set of Perl modules as well. I’ll release the former to CPAN first, and then tidy up the task generator and release that.