My Todo.txt project turned five years old last month—happy birthday, shell script which runs my life—and development is still going strong. The Android app is selling great, iOS app development is moving along, and now Ben Hughes has released a simple Windows client replete with keyboard shortcuts, no Cygwin required. Nice job, Ben! Download the todotxt.net Windows installer here to give it a go.
My new Android app Todo.txt Touch is now available in the Android Market. Search for "Todo.txt" in the Market, or scan the QR code below on your Android device to get it. The latest release 14 includes a gaggle of bugfixes, a couple of new features, and our gorgeous new project icon that looks great on any screen resolution courtesy of John Rowley.
You saw the full screenshot tour last week. The biggest feature addition in this release is standard Android-style task search: tap your device's search button to try that out. The prettiest bugfix is our new login splash screen, shown here, which appears when you initially launch the app or log out of Dropbox.
Todo.txt Touch will always be free to download on the web, but it costs $2.00 USD in the Android Market. Your two bucks buys you two things:
1. The convenience of auto-updates to the app via the Market;
2. Good karma and the satisfaction of knowing you've supported the whole Todo.txt project.
Don't underestimate #1. That convenience will be worth it, I promise. There are tons of interesting ideas and features we hope to build into this app, and updates will come frequently. You don't want to have to do it manually.
My first Android app, Todo.txt Touch, manages your todo.txt file stored at Dropbox—and it's now available for beta-testing. Before it hits the Android Market, there are some issues to be ironed out, but in the meantime, you can download an early apk to give it a try on your Android handset.
Todo.txt Touch is a companion app to Todo.txt CLI, a command line task manager that adds, updates, prioritizes and completes items on your todo.txt list in the terminal. It supports task priority, projects, contexts, and an archive of completed items. Once you store your todo.txt file at Dropbox, you can update it at your desk in the terminal, on your Android device using this app, or using any text editor anywhere and all the changes sync to your devices automatically. Eventually we hope to support other cloud sources, like perhaps Simplenote.
Here are some screenshots of Todo.txt Touch in its current state in action. Click any image to enlarge it.
Yesterday's post generated some interest in an Android application that manages a todo.txt file, and I've got an itch to try my hand at a mobile app. So, I've just created a skeleton Java-based Android app called Todo.txt Touch. The source code is located on GitHub, and it literally does nothing right now, except list some faux tasks from an XML file.
Goal is to get the app to read a todo.txt from Dropbox (and eventually, other configurable cloud sources), sort and list tasks by context or project (like @phone, or @grocerystore) in tabs, mark items as done and move them to the done.txt file, and sync todo.txt and done.txt back to Dropbox in the background. Right now this is just an experimental, educational undertaking; I'm not yet committed to seeing this through to completion. There are already a gazillion decent task managers for Android, and I've got a full-time job, so I'm not sure Todo.txt Touch will be a long-term thing. But, it would be awesome to do a little collaborative work and learn a bit about Android development with a very basic app that does a very simple thing right now. Interested in joining in? Fork the project and talk to us on the Todo.txt CLI mailing list.
On May 12, 2006, I hacked together my first bash script that was more than a dozen lines and published it on Lifehacker. todo.sh manipulated a todo.txt file at the command line using grep, tail, head, sort, and cat: all the shell-based text tools that I knew and loved. Back then, in Lifehacker's heyday, I was obsessed with the simplicity and portability of text files, mostly because Danny O'Brien featured them front and center in his original life hacks talk.
Since then, Todo.txt CLI has grown into a legitimate open source project with dozens of contributors, hundreds of people on the mailing list, regression tests, custom add-ons, and a Python fork. This script has literally run my life since 2006, but using it hasn't been its greatest value--the collaborative development experience has.
Mac user Grant Lucas is putting the Todo.txt CLI and GeekTool to great use on his Mac, pictured above. (Click to enlarge, or check out the annotated Flickr page.) GeekTool affixes the output from command line scripts (and more) to your Mac desktop, so when everything is minimized, it's still visible. Starting at the top left corner and going clockwise, you can see he's got the weather, his project status overview, today's tasks, a calendar, iTunes, and system information up, which automatically updates in the background. Just so happens this setup is very similar to my own. Lucas explains how he wound up with this good-looking display:
Not only am I the kind of hopeless nerd who spends a lot of time in the terminal, I'm also the kind who, in the face of countless elegant pieces of task management software, decides to write my own.
Today I released the newest version of my three-year-old todo.txt command line interface--a 600-line bash script that lets me add to, check off, and slice and dice my todo.txt file without a full-on editor.
To download it and try it out, or just see a screencast of it in action, check out my full writeup at Lifehacker this morning: Todo.txt CLI Manages Your Tasks from the Command Line.
I'm Gina Trapani: creator of ThinkUp and Todo.txt apps, co-host of This Week in Google, founding and former editor of Lifehacker. This is my personal blog.
Logo by annedien hoen
You are what you write.
