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.
I'm coming up on year four of using a plain todo.txt file and a simple bash script to manage my daily tasks in it, and I still love the CLI simplicity. But this year I'm juggling several different projects, and needed an easy way to see my todo list separated into sub-lists by project. Happily, the Todo.txt CLI is now extensible, which means several handy add-ons can make it do all sorts of things not included in the core script. One of my favorites is the projectview add-on.
Projectview lists your todo.txt by project (which you notate with the +ProjectName format in each task). Here's what a regular listing of some of my current todo's looks like, and then what projectview outputs.
Three years ago today I released my first shell script (that was more than a dozen lines). The script, todo.sh, made adding items to a todo.txt file and marking them "done" a quick, command-line operation. Back then I was blustering on about how the command line was making a comeback, while Unix beards rolled their eyes and Windows users wondered what the heck I was talking about. (Some Mac nerds got it, though.)
Today the Todo.txt Command Line Interface (CLI) is still a crazy-active project, with over 500 people on the mailing list, a three-month-old GitHub code repository with 15 forks, regression tests, documentation, add-ons, and offshoots (like an iPhone app under development, a Windows GUI, and IM bots).
Given a long lack of commitment from the original author, the activity around the project was unlikely. Since I was so busy at Lifehacker, I'd dropped off the project mailing list for about two years between launch and this past January. But even without a proper code repository or organizer, coders kept improving the script and posting their patches. Since todo.sh was one of the things I wanted to get back to once I freed up my time, this past February I got back on the mailing list and got back to work. To make collaboration easier, we set up the GitHub project, and from there things sped ahead.
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:
I'm Gina Trapani: creator of ThinkUp and Todo.txt apps, host of This Week in Google, founding and former editor of Lifehacker. This is my personal blog.
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"You must write, and read, as if your life depended on it." —Adrienne Rich (1929-2012)
