Tuesday, January 31, 2006 - Posts

Remember the Milk

A website that I use every day is rememberthemilk.com.  This is an online task list with an excellent user interface and general usability.  It’s all done using AJAX, which means that much of the processing is done on the client with background updates back to the server.  This allows it to be very fast and allows a very intuitive interface.

You can set up as many lists as you like and the new tagging facility allows tasks to belong to more than one list.  Smart lists allow you to save searches as lists and these will be dynamically updated.  You can assign tags, due dates, repeating patterns, time estimates and multiple notes against each tag so you have a lot of flexibility in how you use it.

I’m finding that more and more of my life is scheduled in RTM and I can publish lists so that other people can see what I’m doing.  All this despite the fact that I have a corporate Outlook/Outlook Web Access facility that theoretically should provide all of this functionality.  RTM just does it better and easier and I would definitely recommend it.  The only caveat is the absence of any sort of  obvious business plan for the site.  There has obviously been a lot of work put in to it and it appears very professional.  How long it can continue without making money is not obvious.  The publishers of the web site say that it will continue to be free and that they are not going away.  But then they would say that; I would rather see some evidence of a plan to keep it around.  Especially as I now appear to be addicted.