Being a sucker for a new frontier I purchased an iPhone last night, or maybe I should say that my bank purchased an iPhone and in exchange I gave the bank another piece of my soul. And I did this knowing full well that the iPhone would make my life into a living hell.
Aside from playing pocket media, what is it I want from my iPhone? I want quick and easy access to my to-do lists. And so does everyone else, Web 2.0 task list managers sprout like mushrooms in the arboreal forest.
The problem is that iPhone doesn’t even support Apple’s iCal task list. If you want your iCal to-dos you’ll find them, in highly funkified read-only format inside the iPhone Mail application. I can’t see any way to sort this mess of to-dos into usable contexts.
Of course there are a gazillion ways to manage task lists using Safari on the iPhone…Remember the Milk (which sounds like a shopping aid but is very powerful task manager), Nozbe (which sounds, and looks, like it was branded under the influence of a bad tequila hangover, but has some very nice organization). Toodledo lets you import tasks from iCal, but if you’re using iCal to manage contexts this just sounds like a lot of work.
Then there are the desktop apps. Everyone loves iGTD but I can’t get it to play nicely with iCal and .Mac under Leopard. And the iGTD iPhone implementation is a fairly crude read-only affair. FileMaker’s Bento serves up Getting Things Done in a tasty fashion–the Project View lets you combine next actions, events and contacts in one view, and it plays very, very nicely with iCal and Address Book. Viewing tasks by context is slightly cumbersome, forcing you to use the FileMaker Find function. And Bento doesn’t sync at all to other computers or your iPhone. The last best hope of GTD on the Mac, Omnifocus, slyly promises to sync with “any device that supports iCal to-do lists.” Meaning not iPhone.
Is it too much to ask for an All-One-God-Faith perfect to-do list manager that syncs with my iPhone?