Thank you for posting this! I just spent a very enjoyable hour there and I’m sad others won’t be able to do the same in future.
They appear to work with many institutions in a consultancy capacity so I hope that this will still continue in future even though the museum itself has to close.
I fully agree with the value of breaking down complex projects into smaller chunks tasks but I’m not sure it needs a chatGPT wrapper.
Doing it yourself using an app like https://tatask.com will be much more beneficial. You need to know how and why different parts of a project fit together to gain mastery of it. I think that’s lost if AI makes those connections for you.
I built Tatask.com for this! I want to have easy visibility over everything but quickly drill down into specifics so it uses a tree structure for tasks.
You can break down any project into smaller and smaller sections to whatever degree you like and it makes it super easy to visualise everything and make progress.
Wow, that's incredible to hear, what a major turnaround! As someone who has close people suffering from alcoholism, I can understand how tough it can be to encourage change.
It is cool that you're planning on telling the story in churches despite not being religious yourself. I think that's a great place to reach people and I really hope that your message gets across to lots of people in need.
You've definitely made a good impact this year, huge respect.
Like every programmer before me, I created a to-do list app of course! However, as a programmer, I prefer trees to lists so I made a to-do tree app. I have been using it religiously every day since to manage all aspects of my life in a way that I couldn't previously with tools like Wunderlist (RIP) or didn't have the time to make work in this way like Notion.
Shockingly there aren't many other options out there for tree-based to-dos so when I posted it to my personal Twitter some people really liked it and started paying for it which turned my weekend project into more of a full-time side project.
As of today, I've been working on it for almost a year on and off and in fact yesterday I submitted my first iOS app to the app store for approval (a quick rejection but easily solvable!).
I think everyone should build their own to-do list app not least because it encourages you to actually use a to-do list app but also because I've learned so many interesting lessons from it along the way. Through this project, I've learned Svelte, iOS development with SwiftUI, lots of things about PWAs, and much more that is not easy to convey about engineering solutions.
I don't feel like I need a tree-based to do app for my personal stuff, but I just plain don't understand how people are okay with the feature->story->task list on Azure Devops. This clearly needs to be a task tree/graph!
What I feel all those apps are missing though is dependencies. like "I can't do task E until I do C and D and those other trees". Technically Task Warrior does that, but then it shows them as a flat list... My dream app would be one that combines dependency tracking and tree-based tasks.
I don’t need it for most personal things like shopping lists etc. but when I do it’s invaluable. I also don’t understand how people work like that!
Dependencies is an interesting idea that i’ve thought about a little bit. From my own experience i’ve found that a tree naturally models this quite well as every task depends on its subtasks, but i can see for more complex workflows that wouldn't work perfectly.
Cool! I had been meaning to try my hand at a to-do app ever since I read "Getting Things Done" a few years ago, and I finally spent a couple weekends on it this month. The tree structure is 100% the way to go, and it's surprisingly uncommon as you note. It's been a fun & educational project so far. It's only SQLite file & some Python functions, no polish whatsoever. Probably will never get to the level of what you have, so hat's off!
I've been testing it out recently and it's been quite successful but I am about to change that to a soft paywall. I'm thinking 7 days with an occasional nagging paywall and then you get an extra 30 days free if you add credit card details.
Ah, I didn't see this "Skip and try free for 7 days only".
Ahh the classic SaaS founder marketing :), putting forward product experience negatives and hiding the product positives. I was kind of annoyed because there was promise of "Try it free" on homepage and then it required me to input my credit card.
I wouldn't buy even the next revolutionary ChatGPT without trying it a first so I just closed it and commented here. And as a general rule I don't give anyone my credit card unless I plan to buy it, that's just such a dark pattern. I am a Marketer, not a Product guy, but still, big nope on this. If my intent is to try, don't push me into buying with underhanded tactics (aka, let's hope the guy forgets he's in trial and gets charged at least for a month before he remembers to cancel it). This just doesn't match the stage in the journey at all.
Basically I was checking it out on laptop and I didn't see the option to continue without inputting credit card, either because it was in the bottom or because of the nearly invisible color.
Yea, I just wouldn't do this at all. Remove credit card requirement completely, you're in a highly mature market with a todo list app. There's nothing special about another to-do app, in mature enviroment, you should encourage users to try your app fast. If it was me, id remove the homepage video and embed a demo of the live app there. Then you can keep asking for credit card.
Or like you said, start without the extra step of credit card altogether, then give option to add it for another 30 days, although, i am not sure if this isnt overcomplicated for no reason. Might as well just give 14 days without credit card and then ask for payment.
Personally I think best case is what todoist does, free "crippled" version with max 5 projects, and you need to pay for unlimited. You can use it free, but its annyoing, there are also more limits, and you basically get going with the tool and only get to face the question of payment when youre starting to depend on it, at that point youre like whatever, i need to solve something here so, buy. In your case you could have 2-3 root items for free, and want more? pay.
That was not your mistake, I only added it after reading your initial comment!
Thanks for the detailed response, I understand what you mean by not wanting to give your credit card info out. I used to not have that requirement and then was encouraged to do so by someone I respect in business. The logic was that it is a very saturated market and people are prone to trying lots of options without paying them much attention whereas if you've given over your CC details you're more likely to use the trial period fully and therefore get benefits from the app.
I might switch to freemium at some point soon and see how that works for people. Given it's a side project I'm not sure why I'm so concerned about maximising revenue as that's not really the goal!
Thanks for the advice, I hope that you end up using Tatask from here on out. Also if you have an iPhone, the app is in review currently and should be released very soon.
I'm less likely to commit to using something if I'm going to have to decide to pay for it sooner. I would try offering a month or two free and see how many people commit to using it and over what timeframe. You probably want people to be invested in the app, such that it becomes worth it for them to pay because it would be cogitatively expensive to switch. A week is definitely not enough time to build that kind of habit.
7 days is already significantly limiting, the "nagging paywall" would drive me away from the app entirely. The extra free time from adding card info isn't terrible. I imagine you'd need to play with the numbers, e.g., is 7 days even enough time to evaluate the added complexity over a traditional to-do app? Maybe it could be 14.
Tatask is an infinitely nestable task management system designed to help break down complex projects into simple, actionable steps.
Task lists don't convey enough information but task trees help with hierarchy and compartmentalisation.
It's still an early stages project as it's only on the web at the moment, but I'm building a native iOS app now and there are many more improvements to come.
It works well as a progressive web app and on mobile browser but it's not truly native yet so I'm building native versions to give the best UX possible. Given that Task management is all about UX it's an important step to take even if Tatask is mostly designed to be used on a laptop.
This article encompasses lots of the reasons why I dislike traditional todo apps as well.
Unlike the author I did end up creating my own solution which solves a lot of the problems suggested by using a tree structure instead of a list structure. I have found it works better for my productivity than any other app as it encourages breaking tasks down into smaller chunks which are then easy to complete and build momentum as OP suggests.
I also did this. I decided after a few false starts that I was simply never going to commit to use a todo system that someone else made, so I wrote my own.
The tree-of-tasks idea is great and exactly what I did.
I probably won’t ever release it since I’m under no delusions that I’m creating something novel, but I love seeing how others approach the problem and taking ideas to incorporate into my system.
I made it integrate with my PS1 variable so that it's useful from the terminal; my terminal prompt includes the current task, the same way it includes the git branch.
(There's a GUI I'm working on too, at the moment).
Got hugged to death? 404 now.
Edit: lol, did you implement a referral block from HN at the JS level...? That seems silly, you've already sent the data...
The innovation is modelling projects as a tree that can be broken down into smaller chunks. You can nest as deeply as you like and therefore break down even the most complex ideas into actionable steps.
That's what I used to do too. It works great but I wrapped it up in an app for myself so that I could include scheduling, favouriting to plan my day and some other UX enhancements over a .txt file.
Lots of people on the Svelte subreddit were interested in how I implemented reactive list filtering using dynamic data after I posted a video demo. I wrote a tutorial on it and thought some HN readers may find it interesting too.
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