[bioemerl]

I'm biased.

I'm making a tool that's kind of like this one. Please keep that in mind, because I'm about to give a whole bunch of criticism here.

First things first, the UX and UI is really neat and there's lots of really good design and thought put into how fast the app is and how well it is handling a whole bunch of users. I was sitting in there with everyone in hacker news creating tasks and it was keeping up amazingly.

But my first impression using this is that it's going to need a lot more work on the depth of the features rather than the breath. It looks sleek and it's got lots of options on a task, but when you click through one of the options they are very bare bones. There is a depth of interaction that is missing.

One example, I click on the time to task option, and it gives me an option for repetition, but repetition comes in the form of day month or year. What happens if I want something to repeat every Tuesday, or every second month on the 5th? You just can't do it. You can repeat tasks, but because it's not powerful enough it's a system that's not going to be useful in a lot of cases. Taking my trash out happens every Tuesday. If I were to want to abandon my current system to use this app I would no longer be able to do that.

Another thing that struck me was the percentage/progress option. When I click the progress box I got a drop down list with increments of 10 which i could pick from. That was way less than I was expecting from a feature like that.

I have two criticisms here. The first is that I expected a progress system to be something of a system. Imagine having progress that is tied to the number of check boxes I've checked off, something that's not another manual thing that I have to click and keep track of.

But if it's going to just be a number entry, why is it only a number entry for progress? This could have been part of a bigger more powerful system that I can use to fit my needs. I'm not thinking "oh hey look I can keep it percentage", I'm more thinking "oh hey look I can't keep track of the amount of money I spent this week". Something as plain as a drop down with a bunch of numbers should never be a dedicated feature.

Percentage option doesn't hurt, but when you add little features like that instead of bigger systems, you're going to find that you get lots of people wanting to add new little features to fit their use cases. This will especially be true when the app is open source and everyone has the ability to go in and add that on their own.

Final criticism. There's a little bit of a disconnect in how you add a lot of stuff to a task. Take relations as an example. I click add relation, and nothing happens. I sit confused for a while, until I notice that the related tasks has already appeared in the main task window and now I need to click the plus in order to start creating a relationship.

All of those options in the right side bar which open items in the left sidebar could be in the left side bar from the start. When I click that button that starts the addition of relations to a task the app should start a process where I am now creating a relation, not popping up a new section. This way you have a direct connection between where I clicked to add a new thing, and the process for adding that new thing.

Everything I say here can be easily fixed, so it's not at all the end of the world. Don't take this as me saying the app is bad, but there are a lot of flaws here that make me hesitant to throw away what I've worked on.

[kolaente]

(Creator of Vikunja here)

Thanks for the in-depth comment!

> But my first impression using this is that it's going to need a lot more work on the depth of the features rather than the breath.

> but when you add little features like that instead of bigger systems, you're going to find that you get lots of people wanting to add new little features to fit their use cases.

Oh definitely. My method until this point was to build a bunch of stuff to a) have what I personally need and b) see what other people need. In this year the focus will be on going deeper on things that work and are actively used. The task detail UX is something like that which needs some work and something I'm not satisfied with. But I can wholly agree with what you said about lots of people wanting to add new little features.

> Imagine having progress that is tied to the number of check boxes I've checked off, something that's not another manual thing that I have to click and keep track of.

The progress option is indeed not great and is likely going away in the future. There is a little circle indicator on a task with the number of total vs done items on a task checklist, similar to how github does it. Is that what you meant?

> Taking my trash out happens every Tuesday. If I were to want to abandon my current system to use this app I would no longer be able to do that.

You can actually do that. It's just not as straight forward as you might think (and that's a problem): you'll need to create a task with a due date of next Tuesday and a repeating schedule of every week / every 7 days.

There has been a bit of debate recently about the repeating option lately with a few good points made so it's highly likely there will be changes to this in the future.

Out of curiosity, what are you building?

[rounakdatta]

Regular user of Vikunja, it brings a lot of value to my life!

> It's just not as straight forward as you might think (and that's a problem): you'll need to create a task with a due date of next Tuesday and a repeating schedule of every week / every 7 days.

This is my complaint as well, if I have a task scheduled every Sunday and I'm ticking off this week's, I want that to disappear for a while until next week arrives. Currently it just doesn't go away.

Other suggestion points: - Due time - There should by default be a reminder at the due time. I find myself setting a due date and then separately setting a reminder for it. Possibly a small checkbox with default-opt-in like `- [x] Remind?`

- Other reminder options - Email reminders are awesome, webhook reminders would also have been great. I had a WIP PR for that, but the design makes it slightly hard to have webhooks for absolutely everything (like created, updated etc events)

- Reminder UX - Reminders are there, but how can I know in advance which reminders are soon to go off? What if there was a small indication beside the task item like `Reminds in 3 hours`?

- Archive option - Oof, we definitely need this. Not all task items are executed successfully. If we mark Done / Delete a dropped/discarded task item, that's definitely lossy.

- Gantt chart - I find this not at all usable. I wish this had the Google Calendar like UX.

- Labels - In the Labels section, clicking a label should list down all the task items associated with it (O(1)). Otherwise, I find myself going to individual lists and applying filters (O(n)).

- Full text search - Since my life is on Vikunja, I'm waiting for this day when full-text search just works. I know there's an open discussion on the implementation of it.

- Templates - Templates would be nice to have. I use Vikunja to notify me (say) when a bond would mature - productivity would go ++ in these cases.

- Analytics - It'd be pretty cool to have a day-wise summary. It should tell me the task items I created today, items I moved to done etc. These stats/recap can give better insights into what's not being prioritized.

It's an OSS project, and I'd love to contribute to have these improvements in the product.

[kolaente]

Thanks for the suggestions!

Default reminders and templates are planned at some point. I also like the idea to be able to view which tasks will remind you in the future.

I think there's an item the backlog for analytics and the archival of individual tasks.

Full text search is hard, especially if it should work with different languages and across different supported database systems.

Would love to discuss the rest further! Especially if you're interested in contributing.

[bioemerl]

It's cool to hear from you and see you're planning on working on a lot of this.

> There is a little circle indicator on a task with the number of total vs done items on a task checklist, similar to how github does it. Is that what you meant?

Yes and no - yes in the sense that that's basically what I'm talking about, but no in the sense that when I saw that button I was looking more for "a system of progress" - a way to configure what counts as progress, maybe? A progress bar of some sort, with different ranges. Something which acts more of a customizable tool than a single input field.

Maybe something that lets you define weights to what counts as progress, or a number of days of work you expect things to take, or something of that form? This isn't so much me saying X feature is a good idea, but to describe what the mismatch was for me between expectation and result.

> you'll need to create a task with a due date of next Tuesday and a repeating schedule of every week / every 7 days.

Oof. I should have guessed that as a possibility. That's one of those fun workarounds you only get to know when you designed the system or get really invested in it and have to work around the flaws.

I used Crontab (and making it so that you can't open a template twice) to handle scheduling - putting a UI over it - it's been pretty darn good, but crontab also has some serious flaws in it - mostly around things like repeating tasks once every X > 5 days. For hourly/monthly/day-of-month and day-of-week, it works very well though.

> Out of curiosity, what are you building?

It's hard to describe or show because it's a personal project with no presence online. I'll focus on the differences from Vikunja. My system:

Focuses on repeating tasks first - it basically assumes everything inside of it will be a repeating task. I made the *mistake* of making "repeating templates" the first class citizen, so you don't create goals, you create templates and then use those templates to open up a "todo item".

Focuses on much "smaller grain" tasks - things that you might do multiple times a day. Lets say, getting up every 3 hours while you're at work.

It's more "building habit" focused than it is project focused. Scenarios for its use might be ensuring that you water your plants every day, and having the app force you to upload pictures of the plant in order to say "I'm done" - then you can go back into your history and see your plant grow over time. You might set up a task that will force you to sit quietly for 10 minutes every day. You might set up a list of exercises in one of the templates and the app will pull 2 random exercises every time that task cycles open.

Is mobile first, which is super important for day to day data entry. There are no left/right bar systems because I assume you're going to use it on your phone and it's designed to be responsive. It works on the desktop, but it's not designed for the desktop.

It's built around one-user. It wasn't built considering multi-user situations, although I want to be able to have that work as well - another mistake I've made creating it, because I'm going to have to redesign half the stupid thing to handle multi user scenarios and how to do permissions. Families and businesses will find this important, so it's a really really essential feature I just didn't bother with because I don't use it.

[kolaente]

> This isn't so much me saying X feature is a good idea, but to describe what the mismatch was for me between expectation and result.

Gotcha. Thanks for the input!

> I used Crontab (and making it so that you can't open a template twice) to handle scheduling - putting a UI over it - it's been pretty darn good, but crontab also has some serious flaws in it - mostly around things like repeating tasks once every X > 5 days. For hourly/monthly/day-of-month and day-of-week, it works very well though.

Crontab sounds nice but I probably can't give that to someone who has never used it. Still like the idea to use it to handle repeating intervals though.

Your tool sounds nice. Like the sweetspot between "here's a thing I need to do regularly" and the usual habit trackers.

[bioemerl]

> Crontab sounds nice but I probably can't give that to someone who has never used it.

Oh, no no, it's used in the background and the interface is nothing like it. Let me send you a screenshot of what the editor looks like. Feel free to steal it.

https://snipboard.io/Vsk60N.jpg

https://snipboard.io/c7wrKe.jpg

All this guy does is modify a crontab string in the background.

[jeremycarter]

What's your product? I'd love to test it.

[bioemerl]

Not public sadly, if it ever is I'll come back to you in a year or two when there's something to show.

[jeremycarter]

That would be great. I just really liked reading your feedback!