To Do: Get a To Do List
Of all the useful applications I’ve installed on my iPhone, one would think I would have a to do list by now. Its absence was, after all, one of my few complaints about the iPhone when I first got it, and I did expect that to be one of my first purchases. However, those that I have read about thus far require their own desktop application to sync with—often at additional cost.
Since I upgraded my office machine to Leopard, I’ve been using Apple’s to do lists in Mail. They are not an ideal solution. For whatever reason, Apple just didn’t give the feature the polish and attention to detail that they usually show their software. My biggest issue with it is that, even though to dos are categorized by calendar (as defined in iCal), and calendars are color coded, and to dos in iCal are displayed with the checkboxes in calendar colors, in Mail, all of the checkboxes are orange. Yes, they have specifically made the checkboxes orange—the same orange, mind you, that is a default color choice for calendars, which I happen to use for my work-related calendars. It’s as if the developer tasked with the to dos in Mail got the code done that would color the checkboxes, but ran out of time before he could hook up the logic that would change the color based on the calendar.
And yet, I put up with this egregious oversight. There are some things that I really like about the to dos in Mail. For one, they automatically sync between my computers through MobileMe. Because they are associated with calendars, I’m able to publish a “Honey-do” list that my wife subscribes to in her iCal. I’m subscribed to a calendar in the Basecamp project that IxDA Pittsburgh uses for planning and organizational purposes, and the to do items from Basecamp show up in Mail with the rest of my to do items. Finally, the ability to turn an email into a to do item is extremely useful.
Of course, the one missing link is that Apple never implemented a to do application on the iPhone that would seamlessly fit into this scheme. It’s so obvious, I can’t imagine why they haven’t. And as far as I know, no other iPhone apps sync to dos with Mail and iCal.
