Tag Archives: Productivity

Review: Wunderlist

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For the last month or so I have been using Wunderlist as my to-do app of choice and I wanted to pen a quick review on it.

Before I start, I know you are going to start groaning about *another* to-do app, I get it, there are a load of them, shut up, I don’t care.

That is a lie, I do care a bit, if you are 100% happy with the to-do app you use or you don’t have a need for one then then of course this review probably isn’t for you and I would leave now.

I would take a second though to make sure that you don’t need some type of list system in your life, because it is very liberating being able to set it and forget it, but that is for another blog post, onto my review:

Wunderlist Review

Wunderlist is a cross platform to-do list app in the truest sense of the term in that not only does it have an app for all the major desktop operating systems and devices but it also has a web app that you can log into from any machine that has an internet connection. As a result I will be reviewing the app based on my experiences with the Android version, the OS X version and the web version, but first let me give you my overall thoughts on the product.

I think Wunderlist is a gorgeous application, it has an incredibly nice feel to it and manages to contain powerful functionality without cluttering the interface. Of course at its core it simply lets us store and categorise to-do items, but there are some other worthwhile features that really make this stick out;

  • It syncs automatically to an online service.
  • You can set alarms that will use whatever system the operating system uses for alarms.
  • You can create groups of to-do items and share these with other people. 
  • It retains items you have completed in a non-annoying way.
  • You can add notes, attachments and sub-tasks to to-do items.

All of the above are massively handy although I must confess I haven’t really played about with sharing items with people.

The only thing I would love to see is a really easy way to import an email into Wunderlist with the subject as the task and the content as the notes for the task, currently I don’t think there is a way to do that.

The only other negative I would say is that this is a free service, normally this is a good thing but I want this app to be available for as long as possible and I am unsure how this can be sustained unless they have a paying userbase, Wunderlist if you are reading this I would happily pay for use of your application!

Now I want to take some time to talk about the different ways I have worked with Wunderlist;

Wunderlist Android App

More often than not companies rush out an Android app so that they can appease a small but growing amount of users, and normally it will be some hacked together clone of the iPhone app, not with Wunderlist, this app has certainly been created with Android in mind, or at least appears to be.

They are one of the surprisingly small amount of apps that have embraced Android widgets, which for a to-do app is crucial in my opinion and I get a lot of use from just having the widget sit on things I need to get done today or this week.

They have also made it incredibly easy to add a task in this app, once you click on the shortcut you are in an area where you can quickly type something, hit enter to save it and close out of the app. I just timed myself at less than 4 seconds to open the app and log something in, which is perfect for on the go set it and forget it style tasks.

One absolutely killer feature is that you can send a text message to Wunderlist, again this is just super handy for setting something and then not having to think about it all day.

Wunderlist OS X App

Just like the Android app feels like it has been considered for Android, the OS X app feels like it has been considered with OS X in mind, it has a very Apple feel to it and works incredibly smoothly.

One great feature about the OS X App is that it has embraced a growing trend for responsive applications, that is to say that if you have the app sitting only taking up a quarter of your screens width then you will just see a list of items and nothing else, if you have it a bit bigger you will see the items and the groups you have created, even larger and you will see a couple of extra options. Things like this just make it abundantly clear how much thought and effort has went into this app.

I used Alfred to make a global hotkey to be able to access my to-do items immediately with a quick keystroke, this is not a feature of Wunderlist but I would recommend everyone do it.

Wunderlist Web App

Finally I want to mention the Wunderlist web app, which as I am now using a Chromebook at least part of the time (read my initial thoughts here) will be something I will be using more and more and to be honest even when I was using my Mac most of the time I had considered ditching the native application in favour of the web app as it functions as far as I can tell nearly identically to the native OS X app.

Again, responsive, gorgeous and built to the strengths of the web.

I maybe have a few concerns about how tabbing functions, I don’t feel it is intuitive and I would imagine there would be some accessibility concerns about how it currently works but apart from that it is brilliant.

Round Up

So as you have read, I really like this app, and it is free for an account and all the native applications are free so the only thing you would be wasting by giving it a go would be your time and I honestly don’t think you will. Check it out!

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Entering your email at the inbox is a bad idea

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The inbox of your email client is by its very nature a collection of unvetted and potentially unsolicited emails, at the very best it is a todo item waiting to happen.

Going through your inbox is obviously important, even if you have rules in place to move certain mail into certain folders, you still need to process your inbox for new mail, but should you have to process your inbox each time you enter your email? Of course you shouldn’t.

If I go into GMail because I want to dig out an old email or respond to something specifically I do not need to see my inbox, it is a time sink and an extra stress and ultimately a waste of time.

Unfortunately out of the box pretty much every mail client I have ever used starts at the inbox, luckily there is a hack for GMail that you can use to not have your inbox as the entry point to your email.

It comes via Merlin Mann who talked about it on the Mac Power Users podcast.

  1. Create a label in GMail called null
  2. Create a bookmark to the location of the null label with the keyword of mail

Now if you type mail into your address bar you should be taken to an empty gmail, perfect for doing quick searches or jumping into another folder without having to process anything.

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How I use MindNode to help craft blog posts

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I wanted to write a quick post about how I plan out my blog posts, which I will admit is a little meta – but with so many people writing their thoughts on things in a blog format I thought it would be interesting to start up a conversation on how different people do it.

I use a brain storming tool called MindNode to plan out my posts. It lets you quickly get down what you are thinking into small nodes, which you can attach sub nodes to.

The best way to explain this is of a screenshot, and I figured the best way to do this would be to screenshot the MindNode I made for this post!

As you can see I can quickly map out what I think an article might end up containing, this is a really quick way to decide if there are enough talking points to continue writing the full article or not, most of the time I have found you can easily get 20-50 words out of an individual node.

You might also have noticed that each child node is to the left of its parent node, this is by design. After I have created the MindNode I use it as a todo list, this makes everything really easy to track as I can just move the completed nodes to the right, like so.

If you have paid attention to the images you will know what I am going to talk about next!

I like using MindNode because:

  • It makes you focus the points of your blog post – this can help you to avoid waffle or repeating yourself.
  • It can exhaust the points you wish to explore – if you just start writing the article you could find yourself getting to the conclusion by skipping a few steps.
  • It is quick to do – It is almost as quick as jotting them down your ideas on a notebook, only your notebook can’t be synced with Dropbox!

Once I have moved everything over to the right hand side I know I am pretty much done with the article.

If you write content in a blog format I would love to know what you do to prepare it and what tools you use, please leave a comment here or on Hacker News, or on Reddit.

And for completeness, here is my final MindNode!

Thanks for reading!

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I just made an affiliate program.

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It is amazing what a few hours of concentrated work can do for you.

Months ago me and my buddy who work together on TFT were talking about the idea of an affiliate program for our users – to try and encourage them to promote the site amongst friends and family, and to maybe entice some of the bigger websites to send some traffic our way.

At the time I thought it would be a neat little project, but once I started listing the edge cases I noticed that this would be a bit of a slog to get right.

A combination of work and family issues stopped me from looking or even thinking about the affiliate program until recently, when my friend brought it up again.

This time instead of thinking about all the edge cases and worrying about replicating what some of the bigger affiliate systems do I brought it right back to basics.

I asked myself two questions.

  1. What is an affiliate system at its most basic form.
  2. What is the least amount of effort I can put in (both long and short term) in order to achieve this.

After spending maybe an hour mulling these questions over I had come up with a solution that would work.

5 hours later I had written, tested, debugged and deployed a solution that will work and will only need minor time investment to scale should we need to.

It won’t win any awards for being the most complete affiliate program in the world, but it will allow my users to make some money from the site and ultimately put more money into my pocket.

Normally I would love to go into the technical details of what I done, but how I have had to work it is such an edge case that I couldn’t possibly see it being useful to anyone. The short version is that it speaks to a couple of WordPress plugins and PayPal and to be honest will never win me a programmer of the year award.

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