Alex Little

When was back in the UK I made a lot of use of RememberTheMilk (RTM), after a bit of a play around with a number of ‘to do’ applications. Now, without good internet access I’m unable to make much use of RTM. I know it’s meant to have an offline mode (using Google Gears), but I’ve never managed to have that working reliably.

Since being in Ethiopia, I was back to using a notebook and pen for keeping track of things I needed to do – which, obviously worked anywhere, anytime, but isn’t great at reminding you which things need to be done in the future.

I started having a look at the programs available in Ubuntu and found Tomboy notes (http://www.gnome.org/projects/tomboy/). There are other to do applications but none appeared to allow synchronisation (the most useful feature in my opinion) between different computers. Although Tomboy is not really a to do list application I have been able to use it as such. I have a number of notebooks, one of which is called ‘todo’ (unsurprisingly), then I add notes (tasks), the title preceded with the date the task needs to be done, in the format YYYY-MM-DD (so they keep in proper date order). This has proved to work well over the last couple of months and I’ve had no problems at all.

Have just spotted this posting about the Remember The Milk GMail extension for FireFox, so you can manage your RTM tasks directly from GMail. Looks pretty good (saves having 2 browser windows open), but seems its something else I’ll need to wait for, as you need the most recent version of GMail, which hasn’t yet been rolled out to my account (should note that now I do have the offlline version of Google Docs!). Only thing I’m not too sure about is how it will look on the small screen of my Asus Eee – might just be too much to squeeze onto one page – but will give it  go anyway….

I usually use a task/todo list to remind of what needs doing when and up until now I’ve just been using the task list in Outlook, which has been kinda fine, the only irritating thing is that in the Outlook Web Access version you can’t view/edit/sort by the categories that you might have put tasks in.

So I’ve been having a quick look at the numerous other options for online to do/task list to find if any of them are suitable for me. The main ones I looked at were Ta da and Remember the Milk (RTM). Ta da is very very simple, but for me, too simple, I need to be able to put due dates, reminders, notes and also have recurring tasks, so that one wasn’t for me. Instead I’ve gone for using RTM, which seems (so far) to do everything that I need. I did find to start with that it was fiddly to move from a highlighted task over to edit the properties (due date, tags, recurrence etc) without inadvertently having the cursor move over another task and highlight the properties for that task instead – however, using the keyboard shortcuts made it far easier to use than with the mouse.

To really make best use of RTM, e.g. getting task reminders by email or IM, changing the default task lists you need to get into your account settings. Another bonus for me was the fact that it makes use of Google Gears, so I’m still able to use RTM even when I’m not online.