I’ve finally discovered a TODO list manager worthy of a long post in this blog – Hiveminder. So here it goes.
Hiveminder is developed by Best Practical. Those are, if you’ve forgot, the same guys who made the world better by creating an RT family of software (most notably – RT request tracker). In short, they know how to write code and they are very familiar with the problems and needs of working (office, corporate, persnal) environments.
Hiveminder is a free service, and is promised to be free. They are planning to payed accounts that will have some additional functionality, but even what they are offering now is way too good.
Things I liked:
- Web interface. It looks a bit clunky at the beginning, but I got used to it pretty quick.
- Modern bells and whistles. There are RSS feeds. There are email reminders. There are email dynamic email addresses to link to your lists, so that you could email tasks to yourself (or others). Tasks can be tagged. There’s printer support.
- Sharing. It is possible to have your own task lists. It is possible to share lists, with different access levels for different people. It is possible to assign tasks to other people.
- Dependencies. Not only your tasks can be hierarchical, but there also can be dependencies like do task A before task B.
- Task management. There is this way of going through all of your tasks in one go, updating all of them, while having a limited number of options – mark as done, change the due date, add a comment, etc – so that you won’t get distracted too much. And there’s also a way to hide future tasks from current view.
- Feedback. There is a handy form to send feedback to developers. Very easy.
Things I didn’t like:
- Web interface. It’s functional and easy to use, but the looks of it need more polish.
- Speed. Maybe it’s just the time of the day, but the interactions with the website seem a bit slow.
- New tasks vs. existing tasks. Probably this feature is still in development, but for now I don’t like that I can’t add existing tasks into dependencies – I have to create new ones. That, or I haven’t figured out how to do it.
Overall, the service looks quite promising. Not only it provides a whole lot of functionality for personal TODO list management, but it can be used as a productivity-boosting tool in companies and departments for project management and tasks workflow.
Go on to the tour.