

Ask HN: Essential features in a to-do app? - bgilham

The team at Task Ave. (taskave.com) just recently launched our location-aware, task management app for the iPhone. We've had some great success (mostly in Canada, where we were featured by Apple) so far. But now we're working on v1.1 and we want to know:<p>Which features do you consider essential in a good to-do app? Anything you'd particularly want, considering our focus on location?
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jolan
It's hard to make suggestions because it's not clear what features the app has
now other than adding todo items and tying them to a location.

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bgilham
Fair enough. I could have included some of that in my description.

Right now things are pretty simple: Create a location (either by searching
name/address/type, or tapping/holding on the map), add tasks to that location.
When you are nearby, the app will remind you to complete those tasks.

The features are (intentionally) basic: change radius around locations for
alerts, turn alerts on/off.

We are adding time/date features, along with importing addresses/to-dos soon.
But we really want to explore as many avenues for feedback as we can.

People seem to really love the app once they try it, so we're walking the fine
line of wanting to give them the tools they need without making the app clunky
and hard to use.

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jolan
> time/date features

This, definitely. I put my tasks in iCal right now and sync to my iPhone for
alerts. It's a bit clunkier than I'd like.

You might also want to add tags (i.e. home/work/fitness) in addition to
locations. I work from home and typically have all of my todos within a 5 mile
radius so the location angle isn't very useful to me.

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bgilham
Tags are a great idea -- we've heard that from a few people now.

Thanks, jolan!

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bgilham
Clickable links:

\- Our site: <http://taskave.com> \- iTunes: <http://itunes.com/app/taskave/>

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9oliYQjP
A couple of ideas off the top of my head...

Location Groups:

-I might shop at 3 different grocery stores. Let me group them together and nickname them, so that when I arrive at any one of the locations, I am reminded of a task.

Traveling Salesman Tasks:

-Track my path taking habits. Bring up traffic data and the next time I'm headed on a path toward a location that's in my history, show me how bad traffic is along my path.

I have a ton more ideas but I suggest you stay simple like Dropbox.
Personally, I think taskave is a niche tool in my GTD workflow. That's okay
though. It fits those tasks that don't necessarily fit into a particular
project or context (in the GTD sense of those words). I always bundle those
under "miscellaneous" or "errands" and it gets old very fast. Keep it simple.
You don't have to keep on adding features. Even the ones I mentioned above
might be pushing it.

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bgilham
Thanks for your thoughts. We'd like to keep it simple, too.

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kongqiu
Priority tasks; integration into Highrise/Salesforce/etc.

