Toodledo consistently seems to work on the website (though I still can’t stand the plain-Jane UI) and adds features.   The feature set is much better than RTM and they have a date picker for due dates!   Seriously, this is the one major thing that pissed me off about RTM even though it might seem like a nitpick.  Their date picker is fantastic as it interprets strings like ‘next Tuesday’ in the due date field and translates them into dates.  However as great as that feature is sometimes a person just wants to choose a date from a calendar and that feature doesn’t exist in RTM.   There is a calendar icon that makes it look like it can be done but it can’t.

Toodledo also syncs wonderfully with Todo from Appigo (iPad or iPhone) which I just discovered yesterday with the release of the iPad version.  It is a fantastic todo list application with a beautiful user interface.   Todo actually syncs with RTM as well but you have to pay the $25 yearly “pro” fee to get the sync functionality which Toodledo provides for free.   I paid $14.95 for a yearly “pro” fee for Toodledo.  Hmmm….$25 for a stagnant application or $14.95 for an updated one.    Tough choice.

A $25 yearly fee certainly is viable if you provide a service for that fee but keeping the website stagnant and ignoring customer requests certainly isn’t what I’d call viable.  So it’s been fun RTM but you lost me.  ?Sorry.

While reading the page can be turned by swiping a finger across the screen which results, at least if it’s turned on, a page curl effect. Underneath the page can be seen the text of the new page. Visually it is pleasing to be sure but I am still trying to grasp the point of such a thing on a device that most certainly doesn’t have real pages.

The use of metaphor in user in user interfaces for software is nothing new obviously. All major OS interfaces use the desktop metaphor with “folders”, “files”, etc. I just find it odd that programmers are wasting time creating a page turn effect for something that isn’t paper. Yes, you can drag your finger across the page but it’s much faster to just tap the side of the screen corresponding to move to the next (or previous) page. In my opinion it’s s misplaced metaphor. Fun? Yes. Appropriate? No.

Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

So what do you suggest they put there John?  It’s a well-known icon regardless of platform 8-year olds not withstanding.  I suspect the 8-year olds probably haven’t used a manila folder either yet the open manila folder is a standard icon for opening files.

Buying a new kind of product sight unseen is foolish. Especially given how mysterious Apple has been on what the iPad can do and what restrictions on capabilities and media access it will place on users and content providers.

Really?  Has Apple been mysterious?  I was pretty clear on what the iPad can do and what it can’t do based on the presentation from Steve Jobs when he introduced the device.   It’s based on iPhone OS  and has, currently, the same limitations as iPhone OS.   There are changes to account for the new screen and there are new applications but it’s a Wifi and/or 3G larger iPod Touch.   What is so mysterious about it?   And what restrictions and media access is Galen Gruman referring to that we don’t already know about?

I really wish people would just get over the fact that Apple makes good products.   If you don’t like them don’t buy them but stop faulting others for buying them.

a MONSTROSITY!

Why would they make a user interface this awful?  They even point out “Keep in mind that Pimlical is highly configurable, so things like fonts, colors and the screen configurations can be changed by preference settings and appear quite different from these samples.”

You can’t polish a turd guys.  This is an awful design.  I’m not even sure where to start with this one so I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to take a look.

Wow…nothing generates conversation in the tech industry like Adobe Flash. In just the past couple of days I’ve read articles about how HTML5 might be a ‘Flash killer’ along with articles on the release of Flash on the major mobile platforms, aside from iPhone. Along with those articles comes a lot commentary ranging from the people complaining about the lack of Flash on the iPhone to those with a strangely visceral hate for Flash who think that the lack of Flash on the iPhone is a bonus of the platform.

HTML 5 as Flash Killer

With all due respect to John Gruber over at Daring Fireball Adobe doesn’t view HTML 5 as a threat to Flash not because of anything to do with Internet Explorer but because of the history of HTML and CSS themselves. HTML 5 has a lot of great features and sounds like a real winner paired with CSS3 but modern browsers still can’t get the older standards right. There are still many workarounds required to get things rendering the same way on different browsers. Granted the situation is better than it used to be but these things simply aren’t an issue on a Flash-based user interface. While the browsers continue to play catch-up in the compatibility space Adobe will keep adding compelling features to Flash. I just don’t see HTML 5 being a serious challenger to Flash anytime soon.

Flash on Mobile Devices

I’d love Flash to be available on the iPhone. I really don’t get the reaction people have to Flash in general but when people go as far as saying that no Flash on the iPhone is a feature….please. Get a grip already. The iPhone experience would be that much richer with Flash available on the phone. HTML 5/CSS3 support on mobile Safari could be 100% compliant but until people start adopting those features on a mass scale it won’t be an alternative to having Flash available on the phone (see above).

I’m just not getting the dust-up over this stuff. Flash is a tool like anything else. Wider support of both HTML 5/CSS3 and Flash makes the web better, not worse. To those who would rather not have Flash exist at all: I think the web is a richer place with You Tube, Pandora, etc. than without them and they exist because of the ubiquitous nature of Flash. You seriously don’t? Because they wouldn’t exist right now if it weren’t for Flash.

At the same time the Mac client is really awful.   The latest update has some new icons, etc. but they haven’t improved the editor functionality.  There is no ability to create lists as in the Windows client.  Given that the Mac development environment, which comes with the OS, has the source code to the TextEdit application I’m not sure why the Evernote folks can’t duplicate that functionality in their client.

To make things worse the Web client now has more editor functionality than the Mac client.   Guys, if you’re not going to at least have parity between the clients why are you bothering with the Mac client at all?

Update:  OK.  So apparently the Mac client does support lists….just not directly.  I found out that creating a note with a list in the web client results in the list being maintained in the Mac client.  When you add more items to the list numbers/bullets (I assume…I didn’t try bullets but numbers do work) increment automatically (and decrement if you remove items).   There just is no way to create these directly in the Mac client as of yet.  Very weird.

Update 2:  Ok.  According to this forum posting the Evernote folks are going to address this in the next Mac client release.  Great to read this as it might mean not having to run Windows in VMWare Fusion to get the better desktop client.

Almost everyone has used one of these systems by now. Many companies are using them these days and the trend seems to be moving away from number-based (“please hit 1 if you require immediate medical attention”) to voice-recognition-based (“please say yes if you require immediate medical attention”) phone menu navigation systems. The question is why?

There is nothing inherently better about these systems and I’d argue that in fact they are worse. In most cases hitting a number on the keypad would be quicker. In all cases it is certainly not as disruptive as navigating a voice-based menu system. I suppose there is one situation in which a voice-based system could be better and that would be a menu that gets very deep with options.

With a voice-based system it would probably be easier to skip levels of the menu depending on what the person is saying. Something like “pay my bill” could certainly save time if the keypad-based option required inputting more than 2 numbers to navigate down in to the menu system. In my experience with these systems though I am not seeing this savings.

Most of the systems have voice input that is closely tied to menus that would be equivalent to the keypad-based systems. I just don’t see the savings in time and see a lot more aggravation. I have had, on more than one occassion, had to repeat myself multiple times to be understood. Higher levels of background noise really mess with the voice recognition. In some instances I have even been transferred to a human because the voice recognition can’t understand what I’m saying.

Keep the keypad-based systems guys. They are the less annoying option.

First of all, I selected 1pm to 3pm on a Thursday and entered the term “Kayak Thursday” (no quotes). The calendar application then entered an event for me for the Thursday after the Thursday I had selected.

Then I tried entering “Kayak-Thursday” (again no quotes) and it then scheduled the event for the Thursday prior to the Thursday I had selected.

Putting the title in quotes makes it work the way I want.

I’m not sure this is a feature I really like. When I select a specific day put the event on that day. Don’t try to guess what I want. The behavior with the “-Thursday” was even more odd even though it sort of makes sense. Well, it makes sense now. It certainly didn’t make sense then.

I can understand these things for the quick event feature but not given the context I was in while entering events.