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Todoist now lets you organize tasks on kanban boards
In addition to Todoist’s default list view, you can now also view your task in a board view that’s reminiscent of Trello’s kanban boards. There, your tasks will be organized by your project sections, with icons on each task to show who it’s assigned to, when it’s due, and more. And if your tasks aren’t organized into project sections, they’ll be grouped into one column on the left, with an option to add sections on the right and then organize your tasks from there.
It’s a nice mix between the simple to-do list that Todoist has long offered and the more detailed organized workflows kanban boards enable.
https://todoist.com/kanban-board
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Kanban boards are popular. Todoist adding the functionality and the recent announcement of Google tables create new competitors to Trello / Asana.
This emphasises to me the need for something like open data types or protocols (that term might have a specific meaning that is diff or unrelated to mine).
Examples I know of are email and http and ftp (remember that in dreamweaver in 2003?). In other words, there are stds for the structure of an email regardless f the email app. To, from, subject, body, sent time and date are std for email. Emails can have a read status etc.
Tasks should be able to have a similar std. task, notes / comments / attachment, assigned to, completion status etc.
With standards could come a mark up language. So instead of an app
being a set of features related to a category of software (email, task management, banking, messaging) you have the underlying data that has a standardised structure and syntax and a language for marking up the data.
The UI becomes less an app and more an OS level way to CRUD data of specific types, i.e. tasks. Interactions are via an assistant (show me today’s tasks, show me the status of all tasks) whether you use your voice, some buttons, a menu or a CLI (assistant like commands that are typed vs spoken).
Building your own software is still possible, but it’s more like connecting and configuring (because automation is also standardised, bit like Zapier, Parabola).
The competition is between OSs or bundle providers (e.g. Zoho, Google) rather than app developers.
Music is kind of this although spotify is an independent app not an OS level app. Only because Google or Samsung hasn’t bought it yet.
Anyways, perhaps that is how the commoditisation of features will end: data and features incl automation are all standard and it’s about the UI layer that OSs put on top.
Doesn’t work well for creation app like drawing etc. probably more for data driven apps like tasks, events...
Interesting. Essentially, this would mean making new IANA media types for things like tasks, similar to the existing ones for calendar invites, CSV formatting, and more. That would then enable, say, sharing tasks across platforms without needing an integration tool like Zapier to translate the data.
You could almost imagine something like this working best in the database builder space, where a standard for Airtable-style databases could allow for data portability between it and Microsoft Lists, Google Tables, Notion, and more. Yet the vendors benefit enough from lock-in that it’s hard to imagine it happening. Everyone’s gotten content with unique APIs per service, and CSV exports.
Yeah may not be value creating for vendors. HTML and email are two examples of this working well as industry standards or protocols (as mentioned).
Vendors would need to shift from locking customers into their eco system because their data was trapped, to enabling people to build or at least configure. So yes exactly, Google Apps needs to build in native automation and configuration.
Apple iOS 14 widgets r sort of a step in this direction. My data is still my data but how I view it is somewhat configurable.
Yup it's almost something that needs to be in place from the beginning of a new software category being invented to actually take root. Or, it needs a few major vendors to partner and push together a new standard—that seems unlikely to happen.
Good point on widgets. Those, web APIs, Siri and other voice assistant integrations, and more increasingly unlock data from apps, in some ways at least. You just still can't quite close the loop and pull that data into other software without integration tools, though.
Although this is a “me too” feature for task management apps, for me the best thing about this feature is I can indicate the status of a task by changing columns but then I can still mark it as done either when it reaches the final column or once we do a review of tasks in that column. Archiving in Trello always feels weird. Having a box to tick for me “feels” like I’m crossing it off a list.
Great point: I never really found a great way to mark tasks as done in Trello other than to have a “Done” column and drag tasks into it. Archiving feels too final when you might want to go back and reference a completed task.
There really is something nice about checking off a task to complete it!
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Yeah, it's a wild week—every competitor's product is getting turned into yet another feature.